Winter weary visitors and stories of prisoners

Sunday, April 6

Hillary writes.  A wide range of people from Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois visited Stones River Battlefield this week.  We heard one common theme:  winter weariness.  Responses we didn't solicit in the least.  Just today a family from Michigan arrived, their daughters wearing shorts.  The friends, whom they were visiting here in Murfreesboro, told me to ask them why they were wearing shorts.  "64 degrees feels like a heatwave after our winter," was the prompt response. 

A six-year-old girl from Rhinelander, Wisconsin, simply announced, "We had to leave.  I am so tired of winter."  Another visitor from Indiana asked, "Do you know we had 70 inches of snow in our town?  We never have more than 25-30 inches at the most."  These few samples are common in our daily encounters with visitors.  Economic impact is a common subtext of climate change, but what about the emotional cost?  It seems that this long, arduous winter is having an impact on many people's psyche.

This week also brought a young man whose great-great-great-grandfather was taken as a prisoner of war during this Stones River Battle.  He did survive, married a woman from the south and moved back to Illinois.  Reading more about Civil War prisons and prisoners has been stunning.  Portals to Hell is the source for the following data.  At the beginning of the Civil War most prisoners were exchanged between the federal and confederate armies, but the Union quickly realized that the policy was simply providing more men for the south, and prisoner exchanges stopped.  But neither side had made any preparation for holding prisoners so conditions soon degenerated in a "living hell."  To give a perspective:  674,000 soldiers were taken captive during the course of the Civil War.  This amounted to roughly 16% of the total enlistment for both sides.  Of those 674,000 taken prisoner, 410,000 were held in 150 compounds.  The death toll overall in both confederate and union prisons ranged from 12-15%. 

Imagine turning any old building, from barracks to warehouses, into a prison.  Some of the barracks were designed to hold 4000 maximum, yet \8,000 - 10,000 were consistently crammed into the space.  Blankets, food, bedding and clothing were in short supply, if at all.  Lice were a common companion.  As  the war dragged on, provisions for food diminished even farther and at times prisoners were reduced to catching rats as a food supplement.  The effects of this confinement on prisoners were long-lasting in terms of both mental and physical health issues.  The death rate was probably higher than the 12-15% noted above because many survivors died post-liberation.  This is a largely unknown dimension of the Civil War.  If interested, here are three books to search out:

Lonnie Speer, Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War, provides a good overview.
Arthur Bergeron, Elmira: Death Camp of the North
Robert Scott Davis, Andersonville Civil War Prison.