Andersonville versus Pt. Lookout and Hellmira

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When POW camps during the war are talked about "Andersonville" is without a doubt the first on the list and most infamous due to it being on the losers side, remembering that the winner gets to write the books. However let us remember several important points, the Union could well afford to keep its POWs fed and clothed, if not properly, at least to a standard that one might treat a stray dog or cat in need. The South, on the other hand was starving, as was well known, and could not properly feed its own let alone the POW's it was forced to keep after Grant and Lincoln desided to stop all exchanges in 1863. A price you pay for starting the war says those who are in the winners camp. Starving you out is just another way to end the war. And in the very next breath we are damned for the deaths of those POW's who were kept by us.


Well here are the figures for the three most infamous:

http://www.civilwarhome.com/elmira.htm

Of the 12,122 soldiers imprisoned at Elmira, 2,963 died of sickness, exposure and associated causes. The camp was officially closed on July 5, 1865. All that remains today of Elmira Prison is a well kept Cemetery along the banks of the Chemung River.

http://www.civilwarhome.com/andersonville.htm

During the summer months, more than 100 prisoners died every day. Others fell victim to thieves and marauders among their fellow captives. The desperate situation led a Confederate medical commission to recommend relocating those prisoners who were not too ill to move, and in September 1864, as William T. Sherman's advancing army approached, most of Andersonville's able-bodied inmates were sent to other camps.
        Remaining in operation until the end of the war, Andersonville held more captured Union soldiers than any other Confederate camp, a total of more than 45,000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Sumter

In all, 12,913 of the approximately 45,000 Union prisoners died there because of starvation, malnutrition, diarrhea, and disease.

http://www.plpow.com/index.htm

Point Lookout was a genocidal, ethnic cleansing, concentration camp filled with federal atrocities that housed over 52,000 Southerners, with a death count of over 14,000.

[subdjoe]

And when you show people these figures and reports, they think you are making it up. The myth of the benevolent Federal government is too well entrenched. 

This, from the DOPL page: 

On July 19, 1866, Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War for the Federal government, published a report about prisoners held during the war. Figures in Stanton's report belie the cruelty often associated with Confederate prison camps. From the first to the last, Confederate armies captured and held in prisons 270,000 men. The Federal armies held 220,000 men. Of the Federal prisoners in Confederate hands, 22,576 died. Conversely 26,576 Rebels died in "Yankee captivity" -- six times the number of Confederate dead at the battle of Gettysburg, and twice that for the Southern dead of Antietam, Chickamauga, Chancellorsville, Seven Days, Shiloh and Second Manassas combined.

The Confederates, with 50,000 more prisoners, had 4,000 fewer inmate deaths.

The Federals had a policy of neglect to kill off CS prisoners.  Plain an simple.  There can be no other reason for prisoners in their hands to die of cold and/or starvation.

Ft. DE prisoners wrote.....of the cuisine of Ft. DE, there is not much to be said in praise. Two meals are served to us daily. Occasionally a mixture designated by our persecutors as soup and containing an ample sufficiency of maggots is doled out to us in pots.

Dinner was the big meal of the two. It consisted of precisely the same quantity of meat and bread with the addition of half a tin cup of slop which no man had the right to dignify with the name of soup. To the best of our judgment the ingredients were rotten water, rice hulls, white worms half an inch long, grit, nails, and hair, with now and then a grain of corn.

"Recollections: A True Story About (57th VA) Families During the CW" by Terry Wright

That Point Lookout site has some wonderful resources.

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Stanton would be the perfect person to write that report. Hell, if he was willing to throw his fellow Northerners in the stockade he would have no quams of starving 30,000 southern troops to the death.

I will also state I will always believe he was behind Lincoln's death. He only had love for himself.

[subdjoe]

You ever wonder why this kind of thing isn't in the history books?  Every 5th grader knows about the horrors of Andersonville.  But Pt. Lookout, Elmira, Douglas, and the other hellholes run by Lincoln don't even rate a footnote.

[Oldshooter]

Good post G.W. You have shed new light on a subject that has long since needed further scrutiny!

[Dee]

Well this type of people are at it again I see.

[Dee]

Chicago, Illinois. Camp Douglas the "accidental prison" often referred to as the "NORTH'S ANDERSONVILLE, and "80 Acres of Hell", between 1862 and 1865, 6,000+ Confederate POWs dead, and 1500+, UNACCOUNTED FOR.
Even the Chicago population tried to help these poor prisoners. It was a hell on earth at Camp Douglas, that not even Andersonville could out do, if one only looks at the ratios. In 1864 alone, 1162 prisoners died. In all, almost one third of all the prisoners died, of either scurvy, or small pox.

[SouthernByGrace]

"Well this type of people are at it again I see."

Ha Ha Ha Ha ,    Dee, you ain't right... LOL     

Yeah, our Type of people are just funny that way...

SBG

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Amen Brothers! God bless us one and all. Sooner or later this squeaky wheel is gonna get some grease!!

[subdjoe]

Can you imagine the uproar if a high school kid wrote a term paper on the treatment of POWs by the Federals? 

Amen Brothers! God bless us one and all. Sooner or later this squeaky wheel is gonna get some grease!!

[Oldshooter]

This brings to mind the argument about treatment of citizens by the military should it come to that. You who survive the battle will herded into a "camp" and treated much the same as the POW's in the Union prisons were.

Its part of the demonizing of the enemy thing. I'm sure the rebels of the time were demonized by the north, as "rebels" will be when we decide to take our country back.