It’s been a little long in the coming, but I wanted to thank everyone for responding and leaving me with some helpful comments and questions. To start, I want to respond directly to Lois and Hugh, as they both had related questions.
Dear Dan,
I enjoyed this post and only had a quick comment that I found myself wondering how exactly one converts a Civil War-era hotel into a temporary jail or prison that can hold more than a handful of people, let alone seventy. It sounds like a setting for a scene from a Tarantino movie. No doubt much of the enforcement work against alleged and actual disloyalty on the home front was improvised. Fascinating stuff!
Best wishes,
Dave Prior
Hi Dan,
Fascinating topic -- albeit perhaps a challenging one, in terms of finding the plethora examples you want to study. It seems the key is in the question you raise: "what did the arresting party (whether it be on the federal, state, or local level) believe it was accomplishing?"
In this post, Daniel Farrell, a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Cincinnati, reflects on alternative ways to think about Civil War era arrests and imprisonment.
Lots of interesting threads embedded in that first post, many of which I've thought a bit about.
