Posted on 10/28/2010 4:14:35 PM PDT by BigReb555
Do young people know the truth about Henry Wirz?
Probably because by the time Sherman began his campaign to the sea, Andersonville had been emptied and the survivors sent to Camp Millen and Camp Lawton. Some were late shifted back to Andersonville once Sherman was in Savannah. Link
* When Andersonville Chief Surgeon R. Randolph Stevenson was found to have embezzled $100,000 (in 1864 money!!!!) from Andersonville, Wirz wasn’t horrified at the thousands of deaths this embezzlement caused; rather, he regarded Stevenson as a great man.
* Wirz placed the grease depot and hospital upstream from the camp’s only water source, despite being warned that would poison the prisoners.
* When the local newspaper reported that conditions were just fine at the camp, why didn’t Wirz correct them?
* Worst war crime in U.S. history planned Convinced that a Union raid on Andersonville is imminent, Brigadier General and Post Commander John H. Winder orders the artillery to open a cannonade of canister shot into the stockade if Federal troops attack the compound.
* Not enough resources for improvements? With 2,650 guards assigned to the prison?
Death toll at Andersonville: 14,000, in roughly one year of full operation.
Death toll at Douglas (”Andersonville of the Union”): 4,454 (official). Maybe up to 6,000, in four years of full operation. Most due to blizzards.
Andersonville: Camp filled with feces, in some places several feet deep. No clean water. No sewage disposal. No laundry. No cleaning.
Douglas: Latrines with plumbing, bath and laundry facilities.
Andersonville: Hospital built inside prison, over water source, contaminating water.
Douglas: Prisoners released to outside doctors for medical care, despite refusals of many doctors to return prisoners.
Oh yes, and why DID the North refuse prison exchanges? Not only the fear that the Confederate soldiers would return to combat (being as most of them were quite healthy enough to), but also because the Confederacy refused to include blacks in the exchanges. When blacks were included, the exchanges did commence.
I have found the comments here absolutely fascinating. The major point has been completely missed.
The WBTS was one of the greatest civil wars of all time. Civil wars are especially effective, for fairly obvious reasons, at generating atrocities, followed by revenge atrocities and by massive retaliation at the end by the winners against the losers. This pattern is nearly universal in civil wars that last more than a short time.
It is estimated the Civil Wars in the UK caused a drop in population varying from 10% in England to 15% in Scotland to over 25% in Ireland.
The long series of religious wars in France had similar effects.
Somewhere between 20M and 50M people died in the Taiping Rebellion about the same time as our war.
The Spanish Civil War in the 30s had somewhere around 250,000 civilians dying in the war, often massacred, and another 100,000 to 150,000 executed by the victors.
The Russian and Chinese civil wars had proportional or greater death tolls.
And some American southerners have the nerve to complain about the horrendous oppression involved when one southerner was executed after losing the war?
It is arguable that Wirz was executed unfairly, although the story is by no means perfectly clear. As NS and others have pointed out, there should have been at least several dozen responsible officers hanged after the war for how they treated prisoners, in both North and South.
In the book the author attributes the blacks treatment due to the respect that the Confederates had for them because they were fighting for their freedom. This issue was directly addressed in the book. Since the book was published in 1865 it is a primary reference and considered untainted by later writers placing their prejudices into history. The blacks were given more details outside of the prison that allowed them to forage and obtain food and some clothing. He also stated that Southern women would come to the prison and hand out food to the prisoners. Overall the book was damning toward Henry Wirz.
If the rebel forces respected black Union soldiers for their fight for freedom then why did they habitually murder them rather than let them surrender? Why did confederate law state that any black soldier captured would be returned to slavery and his white officers tried and executed for supporting slave insurrection?
Since the book was published in 1865 it is a primary reference and considered untainted by later writers placing their prejudices into history.
Sounds more like revisionist fantasy to me.
Look it up...Since it doesn’t fit your agenda you ignore it. You are the one that is revising a Yankee soldiers observations.
You mean Life and Death in Rebel Prisons by Robert H. Kellogg (published by L. Stebbins, Hartford, 1865)?
Did he (or his informants) say black POWs at Andersonville were better taken care of by Southerners than White prisoners, or that slaves were better treated than Andersonville prisoners?
Or neither of those things?
A facimile of the book is available at Google Books.
It's hard to read a whole book online, but if you want to give a page number we can all check it out.
I ignore it because it's nonsense.
At Andersonville, A number of the 54th Mass. regiment, and some others, were already of our number, and they were universally treated better than we white soldiers. They were taken outside every day to perform some labor,and allowed double rations, and also the privilege of buying things outside and bringing them into the prison at evening and selling them to such as had any money, for a good round price in "greenbacks".
Black freedmen at Andersonville fared better than whites according to the men with which they were imprisoned. The 7th Tennessee Cavalry, USA, which was captured at Union City, Tennessee, suffered the highest loss of men per capita of all of the regiments interred at Andersonville. Tennessee Unionists were frowned upon and were dealt some of the harshest treatment.
Thanks for the link - it’s been slow progress but fascinating reading. I’m still looking for the “revisionism” ;-)
Thanks to the exercise and extra rations, they had a higher survival rate than White prisoners. Perhaps they were more used to the climate and conditions as well.
It's not clear that working on construction projects was intended as a kindness to African-American prisoners or that the captors accorded them "the privilege" of buying things outside to sell in the camp, though they might have done so on their own.
White officers of Black detachments received worse treatment at Andersonville than their counterparts from White regiments. According to Bob O'Connor's The U.S. Colored Troops at Andersonville Prison they were not allowed the privileges of officers and were denied medical attention.
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