Hesseltine's thesis, briefly, is that the hatred of the adversaries for each other during the Civil War produced what he calls a "war psychosis". This psychosis led the North to believe atrocity tales about Southern prisons, and thus to cut rations and supplies to the Southern prisoners in their grasp. (Southerners also, according to Hesseltine, believed exaggerated stories of maltreatment of their own men.) Psychosis also led to the publication of a number of memoirs, especially of Andersonville, which report atrocities and ill treatment but are not accurate. That's the theory, and it's an interesting one, but Hesseltine fails to support it. He's on fairly good ground with the first part of his proposal: we know that the North practiced retaliatory measures on Confederate prisoners, and we know why. The second part is very shaky. Hesseltine never takes any single memoir or report and shows what parts of it are inaccurate, inspired by "psychosis". Has he actually done a close reading of the sources, or has he simply imposed his theory upon them? It's hard to say. To me, primary sources, in particular memoirs by people writing about their own experiences, are "sacred". The burden is very much on the historian to show that they are inaccurate, and Hesseltine does not do this here. He may very well be right in implying that some of them, particularly Union memoirs of Andersonville, contain untruths, but his word alone, without analytical proof, fails to convince the reader. Furthermore, in his bibliography of memoirs he appends some rather disturbing comments such as "Illiterate," "Illiterate and badly spelt". Denigrating the reliability of a Civil War document because of irregular spelling seems to me like questionable historiographical method. Lastly, Hesseltine uses this term "war psychosis" frequently, but he never really defines it. At no time does he apply the principles of psychology to his study, despite the title of the book. How are beliefs about the evils of a wartime enemy "psychotic"? Hesseltine has brought up some interesting questions here, but he has not answered them.