How many Confederates managed to fall within the Federals control but weren’t, inexplicably, killed? It wouldn’t seem that the Federals were in a particularly forgiving mood.
Nevermind.
Mods feel free to kill this.
Maybe a dozen.
They did reach the wall in one single place.
All were captured or killed.
Don’t know the exact number.
Very wrong. According to Wiki:
What do you mean, weren’t inexplicably killed? I hope this post thread is not intended to support something ridiculous like an internet meme about imaginary USCW massacres.
In the field both sides usually treated captured enemy humanely, with the important though numerically small exception of Black soldiers who fell into CSA hands. POW prison camp conditions on both sides were poor, but that is outside the scope of OP.
I assumed he meant that it was inexplicable that they survived the charge.
From watching Ken Burns’ Civil War and similar documentaries, I got the distinct impression that the attitude of the Union troops facing Pickett’s Charge was not anger but “poor magnificent bastards, it’s a damn shame we have to cut them down.”
The remarks about “falling under Federal control” and the Federal troops being in a “forgiving mood” suggests rather strongly that he’s implying that prisoners would have been summarily executed, rather than that virtually all Confederates who participated in the charge who were casualties would have been killed outright.
As the information I posted indicates, the majority of Confederates captured from Pickett’s forces were injured. In general, neither side in the US Civil War killed prisoners even if injured. Prisoners were routinely exchanged until late in the war. (I had two ancestors who were Union POWs in Confederate camps.)
Aside from the very real problem of missing and incomplete Confederate records, there’s also the problem that (as I remember it) most Confederate battle reports did not list men “captured,” but used the catchall term “missing.” “Missing” included deserters, captured, those who fell where no one saw, and perhaps those atomized by direct cannon hits. I’ve not seen it explicitly stated, but I get the impression that this was a manifestation of the general Confederate emphasis on honor and the assumption that Southern soldiers were better; there was no need to dwell on “captures” and surrender in general, and the “missing” men could all be safely assumed to have been honorably blown apart by cannonballs.
I believe it was that same program, however, that mentioned that as Pickett’s Charge formed up and set out, a deep chant arose from the Union lines on Cemetery Ridge: “Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!” Over a year before, 15 successive charges by the Army of the Potomac had failed to take the immensely strong Confederate position at Fredericksburg; it was the most lopsided Union defeat of the war. Now the federals could see their enemies forced to charge across open ground into massed troops and guns in a strong position, and they knew they were about to get their revenge.
Some participants did record feeling admiration for the bravery and professionalism of the charging Confederates. But there’s that chant, too. So while I still believe Union troops behaved correctly toward their prisoners at Gettysburg, I believe there was plenty of vengeful anger during the shooting stage.
Good thing they were not perceived as black.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/the-plight-of-the-black-p-o-w/
But hold on… they don’t just have to be black. Neither side in the Civil War killed prisoners? They let captured soldiers die like dogs. Read up on Andersonville. Forty five thousand POWs taken to that camp, thirteen thousand died. Andersonville National Historic Site (U.S. National Park Service)
Your ancestors were very lucky but that does not allow you to forget history. Thousands upon thousands of soldiers wound up murdered rather than exchanged.
I first heard of Andersonville when Kelly Clarkson did Who Do You Think You Are - an ancestry show.
All you’ll ever need to know can be had by putting that word in Google images - it was a concentration camp.
A somewhat more mundane and likely explanation is simply that Confederate record keeping wasn’t very good and struggled to keep up with desertions. Desertion in the Confederate army was very common, even early on when things were going okay.
I said “in general.” It has already been mentioned that black Union prisoners were an exception and were summarily executed.
:dubious: My ancestors were not “very lucky,” nor have I forgotten history. I know about Andersonville all too well, having read most available references on it. My great-great grandfather, Patrick Coleman of the 2nd NY Heavy Artillery, was captured at Petersburg. He died in Andersonville a few months later of scurvy, leaving a widow and two small children, one of them my great-grandfather. He’s buried in a mass grave there.
But I don’t consider him to have been “murdered.” A large number of prisoners of war on both sides died of maltreatment, but they were not summarily executed on the battlefield as the OP implies.
My other ancestor was captured very early in the war and sent to a POW camp where he contracted tuberculosis during the winter. Since they were still doing prisoner exchanges he was swapped after six months. But he got a medical discharge because his lungs had been destroyed, and he was an invalid the rest of his life.
The South had Andersonville, and the north had Camp Douglas. It wasn’t quite as bad as Andersonville, but Camp Douglas still had a high death rate. Estimates vary between about 4,000 and 6,000 dead. Andersonville got a lot more press simply because the North won the war, the victors generally get to write the history books. Captain Henry Wirz, who commanded Andersonville, was executed for treating the prisoners so poorly. The defeated Confederacy were in no position to demand the same treatment for the commanders of Camp Douglas.
While cruelty is to blame for much of what happened, a large part of the blame also goes to simple logistics. Neither the Union nor the Confederacy were set up to handle the huge numbers of POWs that they ended up with. A lot of the poor conditions in the prison camps were due to overcrowding, and the prisoners were starved not because the guards were cruel and wanted to starve them, but simply because there wasn’t enough food available to feed them all.
By the way, Mrs. Geek had an ancestor who survived Andersonville.
No it wasn’t. A concentration camp is where people are kept because of their ethnicity or ancestry who are not combatants. The first true concentration camps were created by the British during the Boer War. The Nazi POW camps weren’t concentration camps but the camps for Jews/Slavs/Roma, etc were. The American and Canadian camps for people of Japanese heritage were also concentration camps.
And Elmira (NY), among others.
Just to reconsider this, it occurs to me that virtually all of the captured must have been lying down. The battle reached it’s crescendo and then, died away. Union troops would have swept the battlefield and found, and captured many Confederates in various states of disrepair, wounded, scared, unconscious.
I had, mistakenly pictured their attempts to surrendermore like this.
I doubt that was physically possible anywhere near Picket’s Charge.
Note that not all the Union troops just stood their ground behind the defenses waiting for the charge to come to them. Some units, like the 8th Ohio and Stannard’s Vermont Brigade engaged in flanking movements during the charge, and some Confederate troops may simply have been cut off.
That’s the thing; I was picturing as an Eye Contact 'Okay, I give up!’ When in reality the fire would have been pouring in from that flanks. Those doing the shooting would have scarcely been able to translate one’s gestures, much less care.