May 9, 2008

May 9, 2008

Across the highway from the town of Andersonville, GA is the National Historic Site. During the Civil War, the Confederacy built a prison camp here, Camp Sumter. We start at the visitor center expecting to learn about Andersonville. We do but the visitor center is mainly the home of the National POW Museum and it is quite extensive. One could easily spend all day in the museum listening to POW experiences from every one of our past wars. At best, conditions were tolerable, but for most they were excruciatingly bad, seemingly worse than being shot at on the front line. It is a heart-breaking museum to go thru.

Afterwards, we take a ranger walk and a driving tour around the prison site. Andersonville was the largest of all Civil War prisons holding at one point 33,000 POW’s. Unfortunately it turned out to be the most notorious too. The prison consisted of a high wooden stockade circling an enormous field with a tiny stream running thru the center. Inside it was a free-for-all, with the men having to fend for themselves. The lucky few were able to make crude shelters from scrounged fabric or wood. Most lived exposed to the elements. Food and clean water were scarce and disease was rampant. During its short tenure, the camp averaged 1000 deaths a month. After the war, the stockade commander was hanged for war crimes. He had the bad luck to be on the losing side, because Union prison camps were no picnic either and had almost as bad a mortality rate (including the one located in my hometown of Alton, IL). Next door to the prison camp is a National Cemetery containing the graves of all the Union soldiers that died here. It is a sea of white headstones.

We spend the night at a private RV park in Tifton, GA.