[QUOTE=chowder]
>>slight hijack<<How could men of the same country treat POWs as they did, I refer specifically to the terrible conditions at Andersonville
[/QUOTE]
The north had its share of POW atrocities as well. The camp at Elmira, NY, which was nowhere near the number of prisoners as Andersonville, saw about 25 deaths per day from starvation cite- and it wasn’t the worst of the Union camps. Add to this that the Union did have the food and medicine to give prisoners while the south really didn’t.
In any case, the conditions of the hell-on-Earth prisons were attributible to several factors, important among them the racism (even by 19th century standards) of Jefferson Davis and his cronies and heartless/amoral but ingenious strategy on the Union part. Early in the war, p.o.w. exchanges were relatively common- we’ll give you one general, twelve officers, one hundred enlisted and five hundred of your privates for the same number of ours- and though the South stopped cooperating for a while after the Trent Affair ultimately they resumed when those men were released.
Then, Jefferson Davis went ballistic when he heard the north was recruiting black troops and he gave direct orders that any black man caught in a Union uniform was to be not captured but killed on the spot. Several of his officers carried out this order (including N.B. Forrest, who imho is overly villified for his role in the early days of the KKK [he actually resigned when they became mainly terrorists against blacks] but the fact he’s not so vilified for this or his slave trading before the war atones somewhat), incensing Lincoln and other Union officials so much that they ordered a general cease on prisoner exchanges. (There were exceptions, but usually it was high ranking officers for high ranking officers, and even that not to the level of before the war.) Suddenly both sides were simply overrun with the number of prisoners they had to provide for, tens-of-thousands where there had been hundreds.
The South by 1864 flat out did not have enough food to feed its men, let alone the tens of thousands of Union prisoners. Andersonville, which was intended for 5,000 prisoners initially with eventual plans to contain 10,000, was overrun before it was even completed as it became a sewer for Union p.o.w.s as Sherman and others penetrated the Deep South, until ultimately it had as many as 20,000 at one time in a facility not even really finished to deal with a quarter that number. (Ultimately almost 50,000 men came through, a quarter of whom died there and probably that many more having their lives shortened due to the time they spent there.) All of these men were kept in the open- no bars, no chains- and had to be confined by a the guards who they outnumbered by a ridiculous margin (and prison camp guards weren’t usually drawn from the elite ranks- a lot of older, younger [as in teenaged] and wounded served) which meant that these thousands of starving dying men who didn’t have a helluva lot to lose from storming the guards were kept in line by sheer brutality (the “dead line” being the most notorious). It was hell, but there is reason for serious debate as to whether Heinrich Wirz deserved the gallows when much of the sickness and the starvation and the violence was ultimately beyond his control, and certainly he was not the worst on either side in terms of inhumanity. (In fact he was capable of surprising humanity: his reaction when one of the “men” gave birth, for example, or allowing the prisoners to try and hang the gangs who preyed on them from within- some former p.o.w.s actually sent affidavits asking for clemency for him when he was on trial, but they were dismissed.)
Anyway, this isn’t to say there weren’t acts of inexcusable barbarism committed by guards on both sides, but much of it was evil at least conceived by necessity. And of course Andersonville, Elmira, and the other camps that were literally shitholes and disease gardens were as nothing compared to prison camps in the Philippines, India, and many other countries.
As for the strategic benefits, Grant and others recognized that the South had a far more exhaustible supply of men than the North did. In addition to the fact there were millions more northerners/midwesterners than there were southerners, the North was being flooded with immigrants from Ireland and other European nations, many of whom were literally recruited within a minute of getting off the boat. The South, which was blockaded to immigrants and much smaller populationwise, began to feel its lost men a lot quicker and a lot harder than the north did, and not exchanging prisoners was one way of strangling the South into submission as each man in a prison camp was one less in the field. (This was terrible news if you were a private from New Hampshire in a cattle car bound for southwest Georgia, but divorced from emotion and morality it was a good idea.)
If you ever get a chance to visit Andersonville, incidentally, do so. The field itself is just… a field in the middle of a thin pine forest, nothing but a few meager reconstructions to suggest the atrocity, but there’s a great museum dedicated to American P.O.W.s from all wars from Colonial times to modern Iraq. It’s impossible to see all the exhibits but the ones you will remember are some of the absolutely ingenious ways men (and sometimes women) stayed alive in these places.
