My great-great-grandfather Patrick Coleman was one of them. He was an immigrant from Ireland during the Great Potato Famine in the 1840s. He enlisted in the NY 2nd Heavy Artillery Regiment at the start of the war. He spent most of the war defending the forts around Washington DC, aside from a brief foray at the start of the Second Battle of Bull Run. In mid-1864 he was called up to join Grant’s Overland Campaign against Richmond. He participated in some of the worst battles of the war at Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor before being captured in a rout before Petersburg on June 22, 1864.
He was sent to Andersonville, where he lasted less than four months. He died of scurvy on August 9, 1864, leaving a widow with two small children.
Thank goodness for the Geneva Conventions, which were no doubt influenced by this sort of experience. Without them, my father might not have come home from Germany and points east, and I wouldn’t be here.
I live in the next town over. Technically, Andersonville is a town, but it may have one gas station out there, where i live is the closest “town” to Andersonville. There were a bunch of Motorcycles in town today and I had been seeing signs for a few days that said support the ride home.
photo of that sign facebook entry for this little town about the ride home. it doesn’t really say much.
It remains one of my favorite movies. I rewatch it every so often and later looked up info on it and read a lot about it. Such a harsh place and horrible circumstances to live in and through.
I’ve seen the movie, which seemed pretty authentic to me.
I would also recommend MacKinley Kantor’s novel Andersonville, which mixes fact with fictional passages. Although largely forgotten today, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956.
Where and when was he captured?
Actually, that should be October 9. The camp was largely evacuated after the fall of Atlanta on September 2 to foil a rescue attempt by Sherman’s army, but only those able-bodied enough to walk out under their own power were able to leave. They were told they were being exchanged but instead were sent to other prison camps. No rescue mission was ever sent for those who remained in the camp.
The camp became so crowded largely because the Union had stopped POW exchanges in an effort to grind the South down by attrition. Another one of my ancestors, Martin Buck, a German tailor, was captured near the start of the war and spent six months in a different POW camp. He was released in an exchange, but got a medical discharge because he contracted tuberculosis in captivity. He was an invalid the rest of his life.
My great-great-grandfather was held at Andersonville but he managed to live through it. He told his granddaughter, my maternal grandmother, that ever since he had stomach problems off and on, from poor food and sanitation, and from being kicked around. Also, he would not tolerate a crumb of food ever to be wasted in his presence.
Colibri Not sure where he was captured. I would have to go back to the homestead and do some digging to find that out.
There were actually 3 older brothers that went off to the Civil war. One died at Cold Harbor, one was captured and went to Andersonville and never came home, and the other came home but was not the same per the family stories.
Cold Harbor was one of the worst battles of the war. Grant chose to hurl his army several times at entrenched Confederate lines, but accomplished nothing. The death toll on the Union side in the first hour was horrific. It was one of the few times Grant admitted he had made a mistake.
Actually, it would be the first National POW/MIA Recognition Day since the camp was liberated in May 1865.
And clearly, none of the generals in Korea had read Grant. The losses taking, losing and retaking the same few square miles of hills (various numbered Hills, Pork Chop Hill, etc.) were horrific and the battles were essentially useless.
My namesake uncle came back from one of these protracted battles to find himself one of three or four survivors from a 100-man barracks.
While I’m sure the attrition effect was real, it wasn’t the reason for the end of POW exchanges. The Federal government ended the exchanges when the Confederate government refused to treat captured black troops the same as other POWs. Cite.Cite.In other words, the South benefited more from POW exchange but put pro-slavery ideology ahead of practicality. :smack: Arguably, the attrition effect explains why exchanges didn’t resume when the South relented, but that’s not why they ended.
The Confederate government, in defense of its policies, said truthfully that it was issuing the same rations to American POW’s that it was issuing to Confederate troops.
But that was a false equivalence. Soldiers out in the field didn’t live off just their rations; they had opportunities to seek out supplemental food. The POW’s were confined; their rations were the only food they had.
The stark reality was that the Confederates couldn’t realistically do any better. Their logistic system was collapsing and they couldn’t produce more rations for their troops or the POW’s. But they didn’t want to admit this publicly because it would be seen as a sign that they were losing the war. So they claimed that the ration system was a matter of policy not necessity.
The American government wasn’t aware of how disrupted southern agriculture had become and they accepted that what the Confederate government was saying was true. So it appeared to the American government that the Confederate government was starving POW’s by choice rather than because of an inability to feed them. As a result, the American government said it would respond in kind and cut the level of the rations it was feeding to Confederate POW’s down to the same amount the Confederates were feeding to American POW’s; they said they would raise their rations back up if the Confederates agreed to do the same.
