The Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond is a good place to start. They have lots of artifacts and photographs, very visual, but not slanted like you’d think.
The interpretive center in Corinth, MS dovetails nicely with a trip to Shiloh. Don’t miss the Peach Orchard at Shiloh, they’ve replanted it so you can get an idea of what the battlefield looked like that day.
I’ve never been, but my boss just went to the Lincoln Cottage a few weeks back, RAVED about it. I’ll definitely be checking it out as soon as I can.
I’d like to visit the museum at Andersonville. I had a great-great-grandfather who was incarcerated there. He lived, but he told his granddaughter(my maternal grandmother) that off and on, ever since, he had stomach problems, due to poor food and water, and beatings from guards.
IIRC a lot of the men from there had tapeworms for the rest of their life. Curiously though some actually stood up for Heinrich Wirz, the commandant, at his trial, though their testimonies were dismissed. From all I’ve read about him he comes across not as evil so much as a “just following orders” type who was in an awful situation (too many prisoners, not enough food) but neither intelligent or strongwilled enough to do much about it. While he couldn’t help the starvation rations for example he could definitely have helped the sewage situations and made an example of any abusive guards (the threat of throwing them in would probably straighten them out in a heartbeat).
I have read mixed accounts of whether the word deadline originated at Andersonville. Does anybody know the Straight Dope? (The deadline was a line marked off by sticks at Andersonville [and later at other prison camps] that ran parallel to the walls; if a prisoner crossed beyond it they could be in a blind spot of the guards, and for this reason they were shot dead on the spot if they crossed it for any reason, and it was rigidly enforced.)
The most jawdropping true story about Andersonville is that of the baby born there. Jane Scadden Hunt was with her husband, a Union captain who was arrested off the Carolina coast, and she disguised herself as a man to not be separated from him, and she actually conceived and gave birth to their son at Andersonville. The Confederates and the Yankees were both stunned senseless when they heard a baby crying one night. Wirz had her and the child released and housed in the tiny village, but it’s unknown what became of them.
One of the survivors was Boston Corbett, the man who killed J.W. Booth claiming orders from God. He was already nuts when he got there though (as evidenced by the fact he had no nuts- he’d castrated himself for sleeping with prostitutes).
I enjoyed myself at the Vicksburg battlefield; the best part was the Cairo museum. You approach it from on top of a ridge, coming down a hill. At the bottom is a big white tent-like canopy. The road curves around into a parking lot, and there you are, in front of the canopy and in front of what’s under it: the ironclad river gunboat Cairo, the biggest, most technologically advanced piece of war machinery on the planet in 1862, with its bow guns pointed right over your head. It’s very well preserved, and fascinating for a Civl War or steam buff.
Me too, for the same reasons (an uncle instead of a direct ancestor, though). William Henry Harrison Rogers, Co. A, 16th Conn. Got out, but died in the prison camp in Florence, SC. He’s also the reason I should have visited Antietam when I lived in DC; he ended up around Burnside’s Bridge, if I understand the history of the battle correctly. What always amazes me is that Antietam was Uncle Bill’s first taste of the conflict after mustering in - I can’t imagine being a complete greenhorn and getting thrust into that kind of situation straight off the bat.