Stars and Bars - Is it acceptable?

[Gawain of Orkeny]

Where exactly did Lincoln keep his death camps?

Oh please where would you like to start? Its really funny how you guys who get on Bush about Gitmo defend Linclon.

Eyewitnesses Bring War's Cruelty to Light
By Bill Ward, Salisbury Post
June 2004

Usually in discussions of the Civil War and prisoners of that war, the first images to surface are those of the infamous Camp Sumter, Ga., better known as Andersonville. Historians also might recall Confederate prisons at Florence, S.C., or Salisbury. It must be hard for students to understand that Andersonville was not the only prison camp and that the Union Army maintained several prisoner-of-war camps, as well.

Until recent years, history has not been open to the brutal deprivation suffered by Confederate prisoners in Yankee camps. It's a story begging to be told about the 11 Civil War POW camps spread across the far reaches of the North. Places like Point Lookout, Md.; Johnson's Island, northern Ohio; Camp Douglas, Chicago; and Elmira, N.Y., whose nightmarish conditions earned it the name "Hellmira."

In "So Far From Dixie: Confederates in Yankee Prisons," Phillip Burnham paints a macabre scene of a mixture of events from the Civil War, or more accurately, The War Between the States. He stirs together a mess of humanity in the boiling cauldrons of Southern battlefields and Northern prison camps. His sources of eyewitness information remain alive through documents left by five men who experienced firsthand the horrors of being Northern POWs.

Oddly enough, one of those five prisoners was a Union soldier, Frank Wilkeson. A Union Army volunteer, only 16 years old at the time, Wilkeson saw the worst kinds of criminals released from Northern jails and transported south under guard for conscription into the Union Army.

Berry Benson focused all his energy on escaping from the New York hellhole, sometimes called Andersonville on ice. Constantly digging tunnels with other prisoners, Benson felt a dire urgency to gain his freedom, after having been transferred from other camps to Elmira.

Anthony Keiley of Petersburg, Va., the better educated of the prisoners, was a glib-tongue lawyer-politician who talked prison officials into giving him a job that he enjoyed, logging prisoners into Elmira. Then he had to start logging them out, up to 20 or 30 dead in a day. After the war, and always the politician, Keiley became mayor of Richmond.

In one of his prison observations, Keiley wrote: "The Northern people, and I speak from long acquaintance with them, care much less for Negroes than we. ... It is the free states that have made the most odiously discriminating laws against the Negroes as have characterized Chicago and New York." He referred to the New York City draft riots, a reminder that many of the white men who stood guard over him had serious doubts themselves about the fighting ability and intelligence of the black men who had joined the Union army by the thousands.

Then there was John King, a skilled craftsman who refused to build coffins for his fellow prisoners. And Marcus Toney refused to take the Union oath of loyalty to gain his freedom, nor would he take it until many years after the war's end.

Shocking images of gaunt figures with hollow eyes and protruding bones that were released from the Georgia prison at Andersonville have filled our history books. But little thought has been given to the fate of Southern prisoners held in the north. If lessons in morality are to be taught, it's that the South was starving due to the pillaging and destruction wrought by the marauding hordes of William T. Sherman in Georgia and Phillip Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley. With scarcely any food to feed Southern armies and civilians, almost nothing was available for prisoners.

In locales such as Elmira, food and medicine was plentiful to the Union Army. Still, Confederate prisoners were subjected to starvation and death by diseases for which medicine was purposely withheld. A unique method of thinning out the prison population was to place inmates with smallpox in barracks or tents with "well" prisoners. Malnourishment, exposure to extreme heat in the summer, extreme cold in the winter, and water contaminated with sewage helped take its toll.

At Camp Douglas, in particular, prisoners wore lightweight clothes, even during the biting Chicago winters, to reduce escape attempts. Many Confederate prisoners froze to death.

Some of the Union prisons also became sources of entertainment. Enterprising businessmen built tall wooden towers near the prison fences. They charged civilians up to 10 cents a head to climb up and watch the prisoners in the stockades, on display like animals in a zoo.

The bathroom facilities often were no more than latrines -- trenches out in the open. Everything was sport for the spectators. This kind of unseemly entertainment was available for Northerners at Camp Douglas and Elmira.

But perhaps one of the most villainous individuals at the prison was a Union Army doctor, Major Eugene Francis Sanger, the hospital chief and a "brute" in Keiley's estimation. By some accounts, Sanger failed to provide even minimum attention to those under his care, and some of his activities rivaled those of Josef Mengele during a later war.

As Keiley wrote, Sanger's "systematic inhumanity to the sick" was apparently a response to the rumors of alleged Andersonville atrocities. "I do not doubt that many of those who died at Elmira perished from actual starvation," reflected Keiley with bitter irony, who believed himself to be "in a country where food was cheap and abundant." Union Army medical officers at Elmira and at Camp Douglas would likely have been brought up on war crimes charges had the South won the war.

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.

And what was the Norths excuse. The south was losing and poor and still did a better job of it.

Congress first appropriated funds for construction of Fort Delaware in 1849; it was completed ten years later. Personalities later famous such as Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and George B. McClellan were all associated with the construction of the fort in one way or another before the war. The fort was built of solid granite in a pentagon shape with walls thirty-two feet tall and up to thirty feet thick. The fort was built in the Delaware River on what was originally a mud shoal called Pea Patch Island. The fort accepted its first POWs in July 1861 with the arrival of eight Confederate soldiers who had been taken prisoner near Harper's Ferry.

Prisoners originally were kept inside the fort, but a booming population led to the building of barracks outside the walls. The new barracks were located in an enclosed pen encompassing about five acres. The pen was divided into two yards with the smaller pen nearest the fort being used for officers and the larger pen for enlisted men. Each of the yards contained up to ten rows of barracks under one continuous roof, called 'cowsheds' by the prisoners. The sheds were divided into rooms measuring about twenty-three feet wide by forty-two feet long by twelve feet high and had bunks in three tiers on either side of a central passage. The rooms were called 'divisions' and were numbered from one to forty. David McElwain was in Division 11. When the prison population was at its peak, the divisions could be pressed to hold 400 or more enlisted men in each shed with a lesser number assigned to the officers' sheds. The buildings themselves were mere shells constructed of rough pine board that offered little protection from heat, cold or vermin.

Private McElwain had the misfortune to arrive at Fort Delaware when the prison commandant was General Albin Francisco Schoepf, known as "General Terror" by the prisoners. While the previous commandants at least attempted to treat the POWs in a humane manner and improve the conditions at the camp, General Schoepf allowed his men complete freedom to brutalize the prisoners. Schoepf never personally abused any prisoners, but his unsavory crew of subordinates took great pleasure in tormenting them.

Captain George Ahl was probably the most hated guard at Fort Delaware, since his name rarely appears in Confederate memoirs without a disparaging remark next to it. The most creative name given to Ahl was the "autocratic Bashaw of Ten Tails, who is all-in-Ahl, and Ahl-fired mean at that!"

One memorably sadistic guard was a Union soldier from Vermont nicknamed "Old Hike" by the prisoners. He received this nickname by constantly yelling "Hike out! Hike out! You damned rebel sons of bitches," as he swaggered through the barracks armed with a club or whip while protected by two armed guards. "Old Hike," whose real name was Adam or Adams, first arrived at Fort Delaware as a disciplinary prisoner for cowardice at Bull Run. "Old Hike" would use weekly contraband inspections of the prisoners as an excuse to abuse the prisoners and to beat them. He also ran a con game that involved selling pocketknives through the sutler to unsuspecting new prisoners, which he would then confiscate to resell to the next batch of arrivals. Fortunately not all guards were as brutal as "Old Hike," especially those who had served honorably in combat.

Trigger-happy guards also were a danger to the prisoners. Poorly disciplined troops would fire on helpless prisoners without provocation. One incident involved the murder of a prisoner for not returning fast enough from the latrine area -- the prisoner was not able to run because of a crippling war injury. The guard was promoted to sergeant.

When David McElwain arrived, the prison held more than nine thousand inmates and was averaging eighty-four deaths a month. The high death rate was due primarily to inadequate rations, a contaminated water supply and overcrowding. A typical meal by the time Private McElwain arrived was perhaps best described by Randolph Shotwell of North Carolina. He said for breakfast they received: "About one square inch of boiled bacon, very slimy, and one slice of baker's bread, all of which could be packed into a pint tin cup and still have room for almost as much more or say a teacupful of the rotten rain water with its solid inches of tadpoles and wigglers which was our morning draught in lieu of tea or coffee... Dinner was the big meal of the two. It consisted of precisely the same quantity of bread and meat 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." With meals like these, many prisoners turned to catching and eating the rats that infested the island to supplement their diet with more protein.

With this diet, by February of 1864 at least one of every eight prisoners had scurvy. The prison officials had a fund of $17,000 available for the prisoners, but refused to use any of it for vegetables needed to prevent scurvy. The Federal authorizes also imprisoned charitable local civilians who attempted to raise money to buy vegetables for the POWs.

While in the prison hospital, Captain Robert E. Park of the 12th Alabama Regiment described in his diary what his comrades endured: "The poor fellows suffering from scurvy are a sad sight. Their legs and feet are so drawn as to compel them to walk on tiptoe, their heels being unable to touch the floor as they walk from their beds to huddle around the stove. How necessary a few vegetables are to these helpless sufferers. The `best government the world has ever seen' however is too poor or too mean to furnish them."

The location of the POW camp caused problems because it was situated on a low lying island surrounded by a dike that prevented proper drainage. The soil on the island had a tendency to turn into a quagmire when it was the slightest bit wet. The POWs were forced to add their waste products to this muddy mess because the authorities would not allow more than a few prisoners at a time to visit the latrines at night. This excrement eventually contaminated the stagnant canals inside the fort that were originally the only source of water for the prisoners. Besides the obvious health hazard created by these miserable conditions, the smell was horrendous.

Oh those poor terrorist in Gitmo .

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