So did the South but they starved them to death anyway. And prisoner exchanges were halted because the rebels refused to consider black Union - the ones they didn't murder first that is - to be soldiers.
Civil War POW camps were scandalous - for both sides. It’s an idiot move to try to toss stones on that issue.
yes we murdered all black prisoners....wonder any were left at all
why are you not on a Trayvon thread....none of yall are really....I looked
you can really screech there
dead black man
white killer....sorta
moss hanging from trees
a few southern accents left
let her rip black avenger....dont hold back on my account
how do you reconcile federal troops raping black slave women they were freeing
was that acceptable
poor blacks couldnt win for losing
why they loved yankees so much they waited half a century before they moved north to be with their liberators in any real numbers
and now most have moved back down South
guess yankees loved em too much
“So did the South but they starved them to death anyway.”
Rubbish. The South barely had enough to feed themselves.
The facts are that Lincoln wanted to burden the South with the Union prisoners and refused to swap for them and refused to send medicine or food for them.
The Confederate soldiers themselves were eating a concoction of cornmeal moistened and wrapped around the end of their rifles, then put in the fire to cook and harden. This, and a handful of parched peas. They were starving themselves. The Union boycott didn’t help matters. Southern civilians were in even worse straits, eating grits three times a day. They made regular grits in the morning, the fried the solidified grits in large pieces to eat as a type of “pie”, then the same for dinner, if they had any dinner. They stewed “greens” which in other times would have been considered weeds. Read the memoirs of Mary Chestnutt and other Southerners who lived through the war, they were first first hand witnesses-participants. As bad as the Confederate soldiers had it, the civilians fared even worse, because for one thing, the soldiers were considered to need the “best” such as it was, because they had to do the fighting. Second, because the soldiers-both Confederate and Union-comandeered what little food the civilians had. Most of the war ws fought on Southern soil, so Southern civilians fared the worse.
In other words, the Union prisoners weren’t being starved because of Southern cruelty, the Confederates simply didn’t have enough food to even feed themselves.
And I don’t blame the South for not wanting to trade prisoners for blacks who fought for the Union-there was a real fear that these blacks would not hesitate to put a knife in the backs of Confederate men, not excluding civilians.
Consider this-when Lee’s forces fought in Pennsylvania, he threatened to shoot any soldiers who looted crops there. Sherman, during his march through Georgia, didn’t scruple to burn the homes and crops of civilians the entire way to the sea, and allowed his soldiers to eat whatever little livestock they came across. What they couldn’t eat right then and there, they took with them. These days, that would be considered a war crime.