One hundred and sixty-one years ago Union prisoners began arriving at the Andersonville prison camp. A blot on American honor is the callous way in which many prisoners of war were treated during our Civil War, North and South. (For a Union prison camp that had a death rate of 25%, google Elmira prison camp, or as the Confederates imprisoned there referred to it, Helmira.) 45,000 Union soldiers would be held at Andersonville and 13,000 of them would die through starvation, bad water, no sanitation and disease. Accounts of what went on inside Andersonville beggar description. Jesus wept, sums up the reaction of any decent soul to this abomination.
Look what slavery does to man.
In studying my family history, I learned of a cousin of mine, who volunteered for the Union Army in Ohio, and ended up at Andersonville, where he died.
CrankyinAZ: Your cousin did not die in vain.
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Elmira was Hellmira, but was also substantially smaller than Andersonville. The dead of the latter exceeded the total population of the former. It can be debated that Elmira’s failures were because it was overwhelmed while Andersonville was designed to be an atrocity with an animal yard upstream from the creek that ran through its open yard. But, again, one mustn’t expect much from a society built on human chattel.
By the time Andersonville was put into operation the Confederates could barely feed their own troops. The Union had no such excuse, having plenty of everything. The break down of exchanging prisoners led to the swelling of prison populations. The break down was caused by the Confederates refusing to include Negro Union troops in the exchanges. Grant shed no tears about the break down in the exchange system, knowing that he could easily replace the Union POWs, and the Confederates could not replace their POWs.
Mary, I have sometimes reflected upon the mental, moral, and spiritual deformations that White Southerners would have had to put themselves through, and passed to their children, in order to embrace the “Peculiar Institution”. In many respects, they had to debase themselves worse than they debased their slaves, although their own damage was not outwardly visible.