Archaeologists comb newly-found Civil War POW camp

SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — When word reached Camp Lawton that the enemy army of Gen. William T. Sherman was approaching, the prison camp's Confederate officers rounded up their thousands of Union army POWs for a swift evacuation — leaving behind rings, buckles, coins and other keepsakes that would remain undisturbed for nearly 150 years.

Archaeologists are still discovering unusual, and sometimes stunningly personal, artifacts a year after state officials revealed that a graduate student had pinpointed the location of the massive but short-lived Civil War camp in southeast Georgia.

Discoveries made as recently as a few weeks ago were being displayed Thursday at the Statesboro campus of Georgia Southern University. They include a soldier's copper ring bearing the insignia of the Union army's 3rd Corps, which fought bloody battles at Gettysburg and Manassas, and a payment token stamped with the still-legible name of a grocery store in Michigan.

"These guys were rousted out in the middle of the night and loaded onto trains, so they didn't have time to load all this stuff up," said David Crass, an archaeologist who serves as director of Georgia's Historic Preservation Division. "Pretty much all they had got left behind. You don't see these sites often in archaeology."

Camp Lawton's obscurity helped it remain undisturbed all these years. Built about 50 miles south of Augusta, the Confederate camp imprisoned about 10,000 Union soldiers after it opened in October 1864 to replace the infamous Andersonville prison. But it lasted barely six weeks before Sherman's army arrived and burned it during his march from Atlanta to Savannah.

Barely a footnote in the war's history, Camp Lawton was a low priority among scholars. Its exact location was never verified. While known to be near Magnolia Springs State Park, archaeologists figured the camp was too short-lived to yield....

The Civil War POW prison that made all the papers was Andersonville. It was mentioned in John Ford's classic, Horse Soldiers, even though Andersonville hadn't been invented yet at the time of John Wayne's raid that did happen in real life.

Henry Wirtz was hung for his management of Andersonville. Outside of the fact that Wirtz should have been hung for arrogance, his hanging as a war criminal was probably a miscarraige of justice.

The stories I read about Libby Prison suggested more than one war criminal in that venue. That was a Confederate Prison.

I once read that Camp Douglas in Illinois could have served as a nice example of war criminality if the Good Guys had lost that war.

Civil War POW camps struck me as some pretty dreadful places. It seems like they were glossed over by the great authors such as Shelby Foote and Bruce Catton.

The following is an excerpt from DIARY OF A TAR HEEL CONFEDERATE SOLDIER. Its a very interesting read.

Location – Federal POW Camp

May 26 - Received two letters to-day, one from home and one from my brother Pincus, who went to Washington on his way to visit Morris and myself, as he has to get a pass from headquarters before he can see us. He was refused and returned home. Our daily labor as prisoners is that at 5 in the morning we have roll call; 6, breakfast, 500 at a time, as one lot gets through another takes its place, until four lots have eaten; we then stroll about the prison until 1 o’clock, when we eat dinner in the same style as breakfast, then loaf about again until sundown. Roll is called again, thus ending the day. We get for breakfast five crackers with worms in them; as a substitute for butter, a small piece of pork, and a tin cup full of coffee; dinner, four of the above crackers, a quarter of a pound mule meat and a cup of bean soup, and every fourth day an eight-ounce loaf of white bread. Nothing more this month.

June 8 - There is nothing new up to to-day, when I received a box of eatables, one or two shirts, and one pair of pants from home. The only way we can pass our time off is playing cards and chess. Six hundred prisoners came in to-day, with them a lady, who is an artillery sergeant. Being questioned by the provost marshal, she said she could straddle a horse, jump a fence and kill a Yankee as well as any rebel. As time in prison is very dull and always the same thing as the day preceding, I shall not mention each day, but only those days upon which something happened.

June 11 - Five hundred more prisoners came in to-day.

June 12 - To-day, as the negro guard was relieved, two of them commenced playing with their guns and bayonets, sticking at one another. Fortunately one of their guns, by accident, went off and made a hole in the other one’s body, which killed him instantly. The other one kicked at him several times, telling him to get up as the rebels were laughing at him, but in a very short time he found out that he had killed his comrade and that we were laughing sure enough.

July 4 - Four hundred prisoners left here for some other prison, as there were too many here.

July 29 - There are at present some 3,000 prisoners here. I like this place better than Point Lookout. We are fenced in by a high fence, in, I judge, a 200-acre lot. There is an observatory outside, and some Yankee is making money, as he charges ten cents for every one that wishes to see the rebels.

October - We have got the smallpox in prison, and from six to twelve are taken out dead daily. We can buy from prisoners rats, 25 cents each, killed and dressed. Quite a number of our boys have gone into the rat business. On the 11th of this month there were 800 sick prisoners sent South on parole.

November and December - Nothing, only bitter cold. We dance every night at some of our quarters. Some of the men put a white handkerchief around one of their arms, and these act as the ladies. We have a jolly good time.

Diary in Full

http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/leon/leon.html

But the elite planter class, the guys most responsible for the rebellion, fattened their waistlines and bank accounts while the poor soldiers doing the fighting for them starved.

From what I've read the elite planter class were very much in the lead of the fight. Certainly much more so than the equivalent class turned out in the North to fight for the Union.

And it is inaccurate to say that the planter class got rich during the war. Most lost pretty much everything except perhaps their land, which some of them were able to use to slowly rebuild their wealth.

With the exception of a few speculators and blockade runners, hardly anybody got rich off the war in the South. Unlike the North, where there was a true carnival of excess and corruption.

From what I've read the elite planter class were very much in the lead of the fight. Certainly much more so than the equivalent class turned out in the North to fight for the Union.

I disagree. The Confederate conscription law even exempted people who owned a certain number of slaves.

A lot of them were doing quite nicely until the rebellion failed. Instead of using their slave labor to feed the poor soldiers and their families, too many of them lived down to the Confederate code of greed and made a killing off high cotton prices.

A book I recommend is Bitterly Divided by David Williams which exposes the myth of the united Confederate home front.

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