[stainlessbanner]

for discussion

[cyborg]

[BrooklynGOP]

That's so 2 centuries ago.

[dayton law dude]

Civil War arguments are always entertaining here...I wonder who will win this time? Confederates or the Yanks?

[4CJ]

"Your officers, now in my hands, will be placed by me under your fire, as an act of retaliation," Union departmental commander Gen. John G. Foster wrote his Southern counterpart in an edict, and with that a sordid new standard was set in the conduct of war.

The b*****d.

[Alouette]

War is hell, dude.

[Fierce Allegiance]

We won You lost Get over it. </joking mode>

[Martin Tell]

And after the Battle of Selma (spring 1865), the yankees forced Confederate POWs to march over a mine field to "clear" it.

[Tax-chick]

I read the Bible, so I'm not surprised by anything people do to one another. I could throw up, but who would that help?

[Tallguy]

...horrible, but it cut both ways in that some practices that would get you shot as a spy (fighting "out of uniform" or in the other sides uniform) were regularly done by cavalry troopers on both sides. Eisenhower shot a bunch of Germans (Bulge 1944) for that one.

[Let's Roll]

"...pioneered by an American"?

Human shields were never used by anyone else in the history of warfare?

[mass55th]

The article fails to mention that Stanton ordered the transfer of Confederate officers to Morris Island because he had received word that there were 600 Union officers being held within the City of Charleston. The Union officers were in direct line of Federal artillery. It was a tit for tat move. "The standoff continued until a yellow fever epidemic forced Confederate Major General S. Jones to remove the prisoners from the city limits.  The federal command then transferred the surviving Confederate officers from the open stockade at Morris Island to Fort Pulaski."

[PeaRidge]

"When there is added to this the irregularities of the soldierly-such as taking poultry, pigs, milk, butter, preserves, potatoes, horses, and in fact everything they want.

"Entering and searching houses, and stealing in many cases; committing rapes on the negroes and such like things.

"These things are not exaggerated by me, and, though they do not characterize all the troops, several regiments have conducted in this way, and have also repeatedly fired on peaceable citizens-sometimes from trains as they passed-and no punishment, or none of any account, has been meted out to them."

'Extracts from letter of J. T. K. Hayward to J. W. Brooks, dated "Steamer Jennie Deans, August 14, 1861"', The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, the Official Records, Ser. 1, Vol. 3, p. 459.

[Lee Heggy]

Hell has special places for such as Foster.

[Pilsner]

There was great deal of hunger in prison camps on both sides during the Civil War, and undoubtely the Confederate camps were worse. But Federal prisoners in the South starved at a time when Confederate armies were melting away from hunger and the population of Richmond was rioting over food shortages. Confederate prisoners in the North starved while the United States was exporting record amounts of grain to Europe.

[upcountryhorseman]

Also, Union armies violated articles of war that were in effect at that time. Sherman's "march" through Georgia,
destroying every thing in sight, for example.

[Eva]

My great great grandfather's brother was imprisoned at Andersonville. He enlisted at the age of nineteen and was released from Andersonville, a twenty-three year old old man. The only part of him that still looked young were his feet, which were bare in the photograph that the army took of him after he made his way back from the Florida swamps where he was released.

[TenthAmendmentChampion]

Using hostages in war is as old as time.

[WhiskeyPapa]

The 600 officers (583, actually) were put in the stockade under fire
as retaliation for the Confederates putting Federal officers under fire in
downtown Charleston, in order (so it was thought) to discourage Union
artillerists from shelling the city.

[neutrino]

Reparations come to mind...