Point Lookout

Went to a lecture last night sponsored by the Frederick County Civil War Roundtable. It was held at the Civil War Medicine Museum in downtown Frederick, and the topic was the prison camp at Point Lookout, MD. If you've never been to the museum, it's pretty cool. Check it out at www.civilwarmed.org/. Anyway, the talk was about the camp, which included not only a POW camp for Confederates, but also a hospital for Union soldiers. I never knew this, but it was the biggest Northern POW camp of the war. At it's peak, over 19,000 prisoners were there. Over 4,000 men died in a little over two years.

The speaker was a member of a Sons of Confederate Veterans group that has established a memorial to the dead with flags from states of those who served. There was discussion about how this camp compared to others, including Andersonville, the infamous Union POW camp in Georgia. In his opinion, Andersonville was as bad as it was because of the circumstances in the South at that time. The blockade prevented medicine from getting through, food riots were breaking out among the civilian population, and there were no supplies. Contrast this with the much better supplied North, and the prisoners were treated in a similar fashion. One does have to wonder if there was not some measure of retribution on Secretary of War Stanton's part. I'll have to do some more reading on the subject before I render my opinion.

Another camp talked about was the one at Elmira New York. The death rate there was the highest anywhere - 25 percent. Disease was rampant in these camps. Anyway, I'll be going down to Point Lookout over the summer. They have apparently reconstructed one of the original forts, and I'll checkmout the memorial. Due to erosion, a huge chunk of what was there 150 years ago is gone now. Pictures to follow later.