Did any of those confederate guards look like this when they died?
Posted on 12/22/2002 7:56:45 AM PST by GeneD
GETTYSBURG, Pa. (Reuters) - The U.S. National Park Service has embarked on an effort to change its interpretive materials at major Civil War battlefields to get rid of a Southern bias and emphasize the horrors of slavery.
Nowhere is the project more striking than at Gettysburg, site of the largest battle ever fought on American soil, where plans are going ahead to build a new visitors center and museum at a cost of $95 million that will completely change the way the conflict is presented to visitors.
"For the past 100 years, we've been presenting this battlefield as the high watermark of the Confederacy and focusing on the personal valor of the soldiers who fought here," said Gettysburg Park Superintendent John Latschar.
"We want to change the perception so that Gettysburg becomes known internationally as the place of a 'new rebirth of freedom,"' he said, quoting President Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" made on Nov. 19, 1863, five months after the battle.
"We want to get away from the traditional descriptions of who shot whom, where and into discussions of why they were shooting one another," Latschar said.
The project seems particularly relevant following the furor over Republican Sen. Trent Lott's recent remarks seeming to endorse racial segregation, which forced many Americans to revisit one of the uglier chapters of the nation's history.
When it opens in 2006, the new museum will offer visitors a narrative of the entire Civil War, putting the battle into its larger historical context. Latschar said he was inspired by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., which sets out to tell a story rather than to display historical artifacts behind glass cases.
"Our current museum is absolutely abysmal. It tells no story. It's a curator's museum with no rhyme or reason," Latschar said.
It is also failing to preserve the 700,000 items in its collection, including 350,000 maps, documents and photographs, many of which were rotting away or crumbling into dust until they were put into temporary storage.
FEW BLACKS VISIT
Around 1.8 million people visit Gettysburg every year. Latschar said a disproportionate number were men and the park attracts very few black visitors.
In 1998, he invited three prominent historians to examine the site. Their conclusion: that Gettysburg's interpretive programs had a "pervasive southern sympathy."
The same was true at most if not all of the 28 Civil War sites operated by the National Parks Service. A report to Congress delivered in March 2000 found that only nine did an adequate job of addressing slavery in their exhibits.
Another six, including Gettysburg, gave it a cursory mention. The rest did not mention it at all. Most parks are now trying to correct the situation.
Park rangers and licensed guides at Gettysburg and other sites have already changed their presentations in line with the new policy. Now, park authorities are taking a look at brochures, handouts and roadside signs.
According to Dwight Pitcaithley, chief historian of the National Park Service, the South had tremendous success in promoting its "lost cause" theory.
The theory rested on three propositions: that the war was fought over "states' rights" and not over slavery; that there was no dishonor in defeat since the Confederacy lost only because it was overwhelmed by the richer north; and that slavery was a benign institution and most slaves were content with their lot and faithful to their masters.
"Much of the public conversation today about the Civil War and its meaning for contemporary society is shaped by structured forgetting and wishful thinking" he said.
There was a lot of mortality in all the camps north and south; I'd be glad to see some support that the camp guards at Andersonville had the same rations as the POW's.
But consider this:
"On another part of the line of invasion the Federal Twentieth corps, opposed only by desultory skirmishing of small Confederate bands, had made a path of destruction through Madison and Eatonton. Geary's division destroyed the fine railroad bridge over the Oconee, and the mill and ferryboats near Buckhead. On the 19th he also destroyed about 500 bales of cotton and 50,000 bushels of corn, mostly on the plantation of Col. Lee Jordan. This corps entered Milledgeville on the 20th, and Davis' corps, accompanied by Sherman, arrived next day...Howard at this date reported that he had destroyed the Ocmulgee cotton mills, and had supplied his army from the country, which he found full of provisions and forage. "I regret to say that quite a number of private dwellings which the inhabitants have left have been destroyed by fire, but without official sanction; also many instances of the most inexcusable and wanton acts, such as the breaking open of trunks, taking of silver plate, etc. I have taken measures to prevent it, and I believe they will be effectual. The inhabitants are generally terrified and believe us a thousand times worse than we are." The wanton destruction went on, however, with rarely such efforts to restrain the soldiery from depredations."
Georgia was full of provisions. You seem to be saying that the rebel government was too inept to supply its own soldiers with food.
There was in Georgia plenty of food for both guards and POW's at Andersonville. I am starting to think it was the deliberate policy of the rebel government to mistreat POW's, both black and white.
Walt
Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that if one branch is not in session that another branch can assume those powers. However the northern tyrant assumed them and began his little war. Know thy history and thy Constitution
Yeah, right. The south had the food, they just chose not to use it for matters unimportant to them, like feeding POWs.
Did any of those confederate guards look like this when they died?
Walt, we've posted back and forth about this before. If you invade a area during harvest time, you find, guess what? Food.
From the Feb 25, 1865 The Daily Picayune of New Orleans:
During a recent debate in the rebel Senate, the "food question" came up, when it transpired that thousands of soldiers' families had not tasted meat for the last six months, and were living on a short supply of bread alone. That the soldiers themselves had been without meat for a long time.
Nice of you to finally admit it, Walt.
Probably. I suspect these photos were of prisoners who had severe diarrhrea or dysentery and could not retain what food they had been given.
I've posted about these photographs before. How they happened to be taken was recounted after the war by Judge Ould, the Confederate Agent of Prisoner Exchange. Judge Ould noted that the Federals had specifically requested the very worst sick prisoners on two occasions.
"Accordingly, the hospitals were searched for the worst cases, and after they were delivered they were taken to Annapolis and there photographed as specimen prisoners. The photographs at Annapolis were terrible indeed; but the misery they portrayed was surpassed at Savannah."
Here Ould is talking about some Confederate soldiers that were exchanged by the North in return for thirteen thousand Federal soldiers Ould had given up without asking for Confederate prisoners in exchange. The North had sent thirty five hundred prisoners to Savannah. Five hundred of them died on the trip south. Ould called them a cargo of living death.
From what I can find out from other sources, the bulk of the Confederate prisoners sent south on this occasion were not at death's door.
The North used the Annapolis photographs of the very worst prisoners for PR, but didn't own up to their own barbaric treatment of some Confederate prisoners. More Confederates died in Yankee prisons that Federals in Confederate prisoners according to US Secretary of War Stanton after the war.
CSMC, by company, platoon and detachment, load buck & ball,BY REPEATING VOLLEY,
front ranks KNEEL,
READY,AIM, FIRE!
free dixie,sw
NEVER FORGET that at the 50th reunion of the UCV & GAR at Gettysburg, that the NPS tried to EXCLUDE the MANY BLACK CSA veterans that came to participate in the re-enactment of Pickett's Charge.
at the 1999 re-enactment, they tried to EXCLUDE CSA re-enactors, who in many cases were the grandsons & great grandsons of BLACK CSA vets.
to quote an old saying: the more things change, the more they remain the same.
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
The Supreme Court (in Bollman) and the Circuit Court (in Merryman) also said that only the legislature can suspend habeas corpus. Yet you could care less about either of these decisions when it comes to that issue. Why the double standard, Walt?
The ones who got sent to Point Lookout probably did.
But that's not what he said. We know what those Godless commie b*stard Yankees did to prisoners. Rustbucket is talking about selfless southron hero/martyrs who ate no better than the POWs did. Must have been hard to walk their post if they looked like the poor souls in the picture did. I suppose you have something similar showing Point Lookout rebs. You do, don't you?
Yeah. It's called a mass grave with something like 4,000 bodies of confederate prisoners in it.
Now you haven't been paying attention to stand waite, have you? HE claims over 15,000 murdered POWs, all either shot in the back of the head or drowned. In any case, 4000 is about between a third and a quarter of those killed at Andersonville.
That's probably a good estimate. I'm simply noting that the main mass grave that is designated as a cemetary there has an estimated 4,000 in it.
In any case, 4000 is about between a third and a quarter of those killed at Andersonville.
Perhaps, if that is the total. The numbers for Point Lookout are not completely known though.
Perhaps the best indicator is the POW casualty record for each side. More confederates are known to have died in yankee prisons than the total casualties among yankee POWs in the south. This number is especially telling considering that the south captured more POWs than the north.
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