Soldiers fear captivity. Regardless of international rules agreed to by participating nations, few universal laws govern the behavior of captors. Captivity denies civil rights

Rations being issued at Andersonville Prison, Georgia, in 1864.

to an individual by the physical constraint imposed by the captor and confirms the reality of failure in an assigned mission. Hostile and punitive captivity not only threatens a soldier's mental well-being during a conflict, but can cause deep institutional and personal distress among those who survive the experience.

By the nineteenth century, laws and policies regulating POW treatment among European and American armies leaned toward the Golden Rule: the mutual usefulness of providing humane treatment for the enemy's soldiers with the reasonable expectation of the same for one's own, tempered by military necessity.

During the War of 1812, an extraordinary number of American naval personnel, privateers...