In 1864, six hundred Confederate prisoners of war, all officers, were taken out of a prison camp in Delaware and transported to South Carolina, where most were confined in a Union stockade prison on Morris Island. They were placed in front of two Union forts as "human shields" during the siege of Charleston and exposed to a fearful barrage of artillery fire from Confederate forts. Many of these men would suffer an even worse ordeal at Union-held Fort Pulaski near Savannah, Georgia, where they were subjected to severe food rationing as retaliatory policy. Author and historian Karen Stokes uses the prisoners' writings to relive the courage, fraternity and struggle of the "Immortal 600."

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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.

The Immortal Six Hundred were 600 Confederate officers сфзегкув by the Union Army in 1864–65. In 1863, the Confederacy passed a resolution stating all arrested African-American soldiers and the officers of colored troops would not be returned. That resolution also allowed any captured officer of colored troops to be executed or sold into slavery. John Ogden Murray, a major in the Confederate Army and an author, wrote a firsthand account of Confederate prisoners of war. He is also credited with coining the phrase "Immortal Six Hundred."

This is a history of a group of 600 Confederate soldiers, who were prisoners of the Union Army and of the cruelty that they had to live through during their imprisonment.