The Yankee Plague: Escaped Union Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy is a Non-Fiction novel following several escaped Union prisoners in the last days of the Civil War. The various groups of prisoners are all well-developed characters, but serve more as tools for author Lorien Foote to describe the eroding control of the Confederate government and the vast number of slaves and deserters willing to help the prisoners for one reason or another.
Tropes:
- Angry Guard Dog: Dogs are presented as a major threat to the fleeing prisoners, either betraying their presence by barking or badly mauling them.
- Badass Preacher: Four prisoners are recaptured by a Southern reverend: three at gunpoint and one after a brutal fistfight.
- Enemy Mine: Countless Confederate deserters and their families help fleeing Union prisoners (and occasionally accompany them to Union lines). Not all of them are sympathetic to the Union's goals, but they recognize that the sooner the Confederacy falls, the sooner they can come out of hiding.
- Hero of Another Story: Many Defector from Decadence Confederate deserters and people who harbor deserters and/or escaped Union prisoners are clearly involved in lots of adventure and heroism that the book doesn't cover, much of which is lost to history due to how few of them left behind memoirs of their own.
- I Have Your Wife: In a very Anti-Hero moment, a pair of escapees force a slave to scout for them while they're holding his wife hostage.
- Little Miss Badass: One man who is helping harbor escaped Union POWs's has his twelve-year-old daughter cross a mountain, by herself and in the middle of the night, to tell the prisoners that their hiding place is compromised before Confederate troops can arrest them (or her, if they catch her delivering the message).
- Noble Bigot: The vast majority of the Union escapees consider themselves superior to African-Americans and take their help for granted (especially at first). However, most of them try not to needlessly endanger their hosts and they are deeply grateful for the help they've received by the end of their journeys. A few groups of Union soldiers (although none of the main characters) assist slaves in making their own escapes while journeying to Union lines.
- Road Block: A group of Southern citizens interdict a road to capture fleeing prisoners, but several slaves wait near the road ahead of them and stop and warn those prisoners.
- "Shaggy Dog" Story: One prisoner, Mattocks, is recaptured just two hours of hiking away from reaching freedom (after having traveled over 300 miles). He then finds out that if he'd stayed at the prison camp just two days longer, he would have been exchanged for a Confederate prisoner.
- Torture Is Ineffective: On several occasions the Confederate Home Guard tortures family members (including a fifteen-year-old boy) of deserters who are actively resisting the Confederacy. Many, if not all, of the torture methods fail to make the family members talk, and several of them provoke outrage from the loyal secessionist population.
- Two Lines, No Waiting: The plot alternates between four different groups of fleeing Union prisoners (with lots of others briefly mentioned) who never encounter each other.
- Underground Railroad: In an interesting (yet historically accurate) flip flop of the usual scenario, the slaves are the ones conducting the Underground Railroad: hiding, sheltering, and guiding escaped Union prisoners of war headed back to their own lines. Various white unionists, deserters and their families, and Good Samaritans also help in this informal network, out of either sympathy for the prisoners and/or their cause or out of a pragmatic desire to bring down the Confederate government faster.
