Andersonville
Those who read me regularly know I have no love for the south. Those who have confederate flags on their trucks or either ignorant or monsters. They might claim that it does not mean racism to them, but if it does to the people they enslaved, then who is to say your victims are wrong? And even if it were true that there was no racism involved, you still are supporting a war against the United States.

But what I did not know until today, was about Andersonville Prison. Go ahead, read that. Here are some excerpts:

By January 1864 slaves from local farms were put to work on the prison...With no shelters built on the prison grounds, the prisoners made do with what they had, constructing tents, huts and lean-tos out of whatever materials they had with them or could find on the site...new prisoners kept coming, and by August Andersonville held nearly 33,000. Unofficially it was the Confederacy’s fifth largest city. It was so overcrowded, there were only 27 square feet per prisoner, a patch roughly 3 feet by 9 feet.

Salt, meat and sweet potatoes were eventually eliminated from the prisoners’ diets. The cornmeal allotment was decreased, and food wasn’t distributed every day. Some prisoners developed methods for catching the swallows that swooped low over the camp and would eat their quarry raw before anyone could take it away from them.

Mean-spirited guards would toss hunks of cornbread into the pen just to watch the prisoners scramble. Occasionally they would drop food into the forbidden zone beyond the dead line so they’d have someone to shoot at.

[A Confederate guard from the 26th Alabama regiment] heard a series of high-pitched, plaintive wails that carried over the din, and now there was no doubt in his mind that there was a child [born] down there. The silhouette in skirts swayed faster, bouncing the bundle on her shoulder. The guard didn’t like this development at all. He feared for their safety. A horrible thought passed through his mind—the emaciated prisoners falling upon this child for food.

I hate you, you damn confederate bastards. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. You'd kill your own so that you can keep human slaves. Evil, evil people. At least they're all dead, burning in hell forever. But ignorant ol' Bubba still wears his confederate flag hat. I sure hope he's ignorant.

But, at least the article had this to say about Alabamians:

As former prisoner of war Sam S. Boggs wrote in his memoir, Eighteen Months a Prisoner Under the Rebel Flag, A Condensed Pen-Picture of Belle Isle, Danville, Andersonville, Charleston, Florence, and Libby Prisons, “The Alabamans were intelligent and kind hearted… the Georgians were ignorant and brutal. The Alabamans would talk to us from their posts, while the Georgians were liable to shoot if we spoke to them.”

I, however, am a Texan.
- posted by Nick Postagulous @ 10:36 AM