General's letters donated to hometown

A collection of letters written by a famous Civil War general is being donated to his western New York hometown. The Daily News of Batavia reports that 13 military letters written by Gen. Emory Upton are being donated to the Genesee County History Department in Batavia by Sal Cilella of Atlanta.

The West Point graduate led Union troops in some of the war's bloodiest battles, including Antietam and Gettysburg. The books on battle tactics and military policy he wrote after the war were used for decades by the U.S. military. • Article  | • Biography of Upton

This weekend at Andersonville: A chance to hear voices of prisoners and guards

One hundred and fifty years ago this week, weary and worried Federal prisoners, after a long train ride from Virginia and a short march from the hamlet of Andersonville, were pouring into the new Camp Sumter in central Georgia.

“Every few days, about 400 come in,” says Eric Leonard, chief of education and interpretation at Andersonville National Historic Site.

Sign in lobby is being updated daily (NPS)

The camp grew exponentially in population and problems over the next months. By August 1864, nearly 33,000 men desperately clung to life amid squalid conditions. 

This weekend (March 8-9), the federal site northeast of Americus is putting on its free spring living history event. An estimated 100 participants will portray Union prisoners and Confederate guards.

Visitors, if they make a stop in the lobby first, will see a white board that helps tell the story of notorious Camp Sumter.

The board is updated daily to show the number of prisoners, those who died that day and total burials.

“It stops visitors and they stare at it,” says Leonard.

For now, the numbers are fairly small. The board, by this summer, will be especially shocking, as POWs died by the score each day in summer 1864. The mortality rate of prisoners was 29%. Nearly 13,000 would die over 14 months.

Camp Sumter was a relief valve for Confederate prisons in Richmond, Va., where authorities increasingly worried about escapes and liberation by Union troops just outside the capital.

The first prisoners arrived at Camp Sumter on Feb. 24. The first death was recorded just three days later.

(NPS)

Built over a few months, Camp Sumter filled rapidly; commanders and guards complained of shortages of supplies, food and medical material. And things only got worse.

Misery among the captives soared along with pestilence and the stifling middle Georgia heat.

Guards suffered from many of the same disease problems as the prisoners, although they sometimes received extra food to supplement meager rations. According to the National Park Service, 202, or 6.5% died, at Andersonville. Among the ill, the death rate was about the same as for POWs.

Like other parks, the staff at Andersonville has turned to social media to convey updates on camp life 150 years ago to the day of the postings.

“It allows us to reach dynamic audiences who are not necessarily going to come here,” says Leonard.

Attendance at the federal site is picking up with sesquicentennial interest and the increasing number of folks traveling to Florida’s beaches on Interstate 75.

This weekend’s programs will go from 10 a.m. to about 4 p.m. each day. An artillery crew from Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park will give weapon demonstrations at 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. each day. Guard drills are set for 2:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. on Saturday and 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. Sunday.

In between, living historians will discuss life for prisoners and guards. For the former, time was a relative concept. They never knew what might happen next.

Most of the activities will take place at a re-created section of the stockade wall, next to replica prisoner tents. 

Visitors, of course, will be spared the smell that emanated from the prison in 1864 and won’t witness anyone losing a life at the deadline – a post beyond which a prisoner would be shot.

“There are limits to authenticity, thank goodness,” says Leonard.

(NPS)

Artillery was set up at Camp Sumter to control the prison population and prevent escape.

Historians know that a round was fired on Aug. 9, 1864, to bring out the entire guard force after flooding breached the stockade wall.

Prisoners later gave accounts of comrades being shot by prison staff, but there is no firm number.

“If you heard the crack of a rifle or shotgun that …. means an unarmed American soldier has been shot,” says Leonard.

March 1864 was an important month in the growth and life on the prison. Perhaps the most notorious person in military uniform during the Civil War, Maj. Henry Wirz, had taken over stockade operations by the end of that month. 

His role in what became the nightmare of Andersonville has been long debated. Defenders said he was provided insufficient resources, while critics claimed he displayed cruelty and indifference. Wirz was executed in November 1865 after his conspiracy and murder conviction.

Raising of CSS Georgia: Project update

(USACE, Savannah)

Plans for the raising the wreckage of the Confederate ironclad CSS Georgia are continuing in Savannah, with the recovery expected to begin later this year.

A Civil Picket article in November indicated dives may begin in the summer, but that is not a certainty, said public affairs specialist Sandra Hudson of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers district in Savannah.

There is no firm date because final approval has not been granted for this part of the multimillion deepening of the Savannah River, she said. She said the raising is expected to begin "some time" in 2014.

The CSS Georgia must be moved as part of a $652 million project benefiting the Port of Savannah. With the expansion of the Panama Canal, even larger ships will be able to travel to U.S. cities. That requires deeper channels, officials say.

A proposal for a public outreach and education plan about the CSS Georgia project also is awaiting authorization, according to Hudson.

Corps officials are preparing a website to accompany the recovery.

“Much of the preliminary information will be brief and very general, but the site will grow as we get into the project and gather more data,” Hudson told the Picket on Thursday.

Last fall, a section of the CSS Georgia – which served as a floating battery to defend the city from Union forces -- was lifted by U.S. Navy divers a couple miles east of the famed River Street.

The CSS Georgia was scuttled in late December 1864, just a day before Union forces took the port city.

Sherman named Person of the Year at event co-sponsored by Museum of Confederacy

Hell’s broke loose over the selection in Virginia of William Tecumseh Sherman, the Civil War Union military commander who waged total war on the South, as the Person of the Year.

“What a disgrace.”

“They should have tried him for War Crimes”

“You people are a special kind of stupid!”

Such was the social media firestorm after the audience at a Civil War sesquicentennial symposium in Virginia cast their ballots for the most influential person of 1864. Their picks followed speeches by noted scholars and authors who made nominations.

And the perceived irony that the Museum of the Confederacy was one of three hosts of Saturday’s event at the Library of Virginia in Richmond brought an extra heaping of disgust on its Facebook page.

“Y'all ought to rename The Museum of the Confederacy to the museum of yankee domination.”

“You're the Museum of the Confederacy? How is this even remotely possible? Remind me to NEVER darken your doorstep nor support any organization that supports you in any way. You should be ashamed of yourselves. You have just insulted anyone who has ancestry tied to the South.”

Others pointed out that the criteria for Person of the Year, as indicated on a press release on the event, was for “most” influential,” not beloved. And they backed the Sherman pick.

“(For) who had the most impact on the war that year …  I doubt anyone can beat Sherman,” wrote JM on a Facebook post. “After Lee tied down Grant in Virginia, or the other way around as you please, the person who had the most impact was Sherman. Without his campaign to take Atlanta, I think the historic consensus is that Lincoln faces a near impossible re-election.”

Historians Gary Gallagher, Harold Holzer, John Marszalek, Craig Symonds and Joe Mobley backed their picks at the symposium hosted by the MOC, the American Civil War Center and the Library of Virginia.

When the dust settled, the final tally was:

Sherman- 38
Confederate Gen. Patrick Cleburne- 29
Lincoln- 15
Lee & Grant- 11
North Carolina Gov. Zebulon Vance- 8
Union Adm. David Farragut (write in)- 1
Citizens (write in)- 1

According to the MOC Facebook page, Mississippi State’s Marszalek nominated Sherman, saying “that he changed the way wars were fought and was most responsible for the outcome of the Civil War.”

Gallagher backed Grant and Lee, and Holzer endorsed Lincoln.

Of course, an audience vote is not scientific, or indicative of anything more than who was participating. Still, it followed pitches by subject matter experts.

Such “controversies” are common when someone receives a distinction. TIME’s Person of the Year went to Adolf Hitler in 1938 and Josef Stalin in 1939 and 1942. Some of the MOC commenters made note of Hitler.

TIME says its designation “is bestowed by the editors on the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year.”

Sherman was in Georgia nearly all of 1864, working his army from below Chattanooga, Tenn., toward Atlanta, which he took in early September. His March to the Sea ended just before Christmas in Savannah. Over the year, he cut the Confederacy and vital rail and supply lines. He demoralized Confederate soldiers and civilians alike. To this day, critics call him a barbaraian who did not keep his troops from excesses during the campaigns. Others consider his tactics brilliant.

The Civil War Trust’s biography of Maj. Gen. Sherman includes this passage:

“By 1864 Sherman had become convinced that preservation of the Union was contingent not only on defeating the Southern armies in the field but, more importantly, on destroying the Confederacy's material and psychological will to wage war.  To achieve that end, he launched a campaign in Georgia that was defined as “modern warfare”, and brought “total destruction…upon the civilian population in the path of the advancing columns [of his armies].” 

The choice of Sherman over other nominees brought spirited discussion on the Civil War Memory blog.

BH wrote: “Sherman is the perfect choice: one does not have to approve of his concept of war to appreciate the impact he had: people do often get more upset about loss of property than loss of life. Uncle Billy made Georgia howl!”

Past Person of the Year selections were Abraham Lincoln (1861), Robert E. Lee (1862), and Ulysses S. Grant (1863).

Lectures, Civil War ball set for Bennett Place surrender anniversary weekend in April

 Confederate forces surrendered at Bennett Place (NCDCR photo)

North Carolina’s Bennett Place, site of the largest surrender of Confederate forces, in April will host a lecture and living history program that is a run-up to next year’s 150^th anniversary of the end of the Civil War.

The April 26-27 events include “The Grand Blue and Gray Ball,” an evening of dancing and socializing to raise money for the renovation of the historic site’s museum.

The schedule for the lectures by historians and authors, entitled “The Many Roads to Surrender,” is being finalized.

Speakers will detail the stories of seven Southern surrenders -- at Appomattox Court House, Va.; Bennett Place; Citronelle, Ala.; New Orleans, La.; Galveston, Texas; Doaksville, Okla., and Liverpool, England; according to the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources.

Bennett Place State Historic Site will host a major program on the surrenders and the human cost of the conflict from April 17-26, 2015.

Most Americans are familiar with Robert E. Lee’s surrender of his army to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. But many more Confederate troops across the South fought on for up to two months.

The commander of the largest force soon decided it was time to furl the flags.

 

Gen. Joseph E. Johnston on April 26, 1865, reached a final agreement with Union Major. Gen. William T. Sherman, ending the war for nearly 90,000 Confederates in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

The two generals met at the James and Nancy Bennett farm, which lies on the Old Hillsborough Road in Durham. The pact effectively ended the bloody Civil War.

Bennett Place includes a rebuilt version of the Bennett home, a few outbuildings and the visitor’s center and museum.

Officials say the 7 p.m. April 26 ball, hosted by the Bennett Place Support Fund, will go toward an upgrade of the exhibits. Admission is $50 for couples and $30 for individuals.

“Our current museum will be undergoing some major changes to include a new floor plan and artifacts,” says Diane Smith, historic interpreter and volunteer coordinator at the farm. “The scheduled date for the beginning of the renovation is set for this summer with the completion set for March/April of 2015 in time for the 150^th anniversary of the surrender that occurred here.”

The Murphey School, located on the road that Johnston traveled to meet Sherman, is the venue for the ball, which will include a silent auction that includes sports memorabilia and an airplane ride, according to Smith.

All money from the sale of the tickets to the dance, as well as the silent auction items, go toward the museum renovations.

Back at Bennett Place, invited speakers include Patrick Schroeder, historian at Appomattox Court House National Historic Park; Bert Dunkerly, ranger historian of Richmond National Battlefield Park; Eric Richardson, historian and staff member of the Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Va., and John Hairr, curator of education of the North Carolina Maritime Museum, Beaufort. 

Descendants groups will provide visitors with genealogical information to help find their Civil War ancestors. Union and Confederate soldiers and civilians will perform living history demonstrations throughout the weekend.

Surrender negotiations at the Bennett farm were not without controversy. Initially, Sherman and Johnston’s agreement included political terms that were considered overly generous to the South.

Officials in Washington, angered over the recent assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, turned them down in favor of purely military terms.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis ordered Johnston to dissolve his army into guerrilla bands to continue the fight, but the general, who knew continuing the fight was useless without Lee’s forces, disobeyed the order and signed the revised agreement.

For more information, contact Bennett Place State Historic Site at 919-383-4345.