This book chronicles the ordeal of six hundred Confederate officers who were confined by their Yankee captors in the stockade on Morris Island, South Carolina, directly under the fire of Confederate guns, and then were subsequently starved on rations of rotten corn and onion pickle at Fort Pulaski, Georgia and Hilton Head, South Carolina by order of U.S. Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton. The author, a Major in the Confederate Army, was one of the survivors of the group.