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Toddbike, read your own reference, especially the 14th, 15th, and 16th paragraphs of the American Heritage article. Those paragraphs support my points.

Before I go any further, I'll lay all my cards on the table. I have no emotional stake in the Yankees versus Rebs argument. My ancestors came to this country 40 years after the Civil War, so I have no sentimental attachment to either side. What does interest me are the facts of historically significant events. The bottom line is that the Union surpressed any information about the conditions and mortality rates in the Northern POW camps. After the assassination of President Lincoln the Radical Republicans dominated American politics up to 1876, and their view was that the Confederates deserved everything they got. Also, as soon as the war ended a glorious mythology of the war record of the Union forces was fabricated. Veterans organizations like the Grand Army of the Republic fostered this image, and they had considerable political clout. Any mention of Union misconduct or incompetence in the administration of CW POW camps would be considered unpatriotic.

The commander at Andersonville made a very good fall guy in the attempt to demonize the Southerners after the war. I believe Wirtz was an incompetent officer that was overwhelmed by the mission he was given. I do not believe the results at Andersonville were due to malice on his part. It seems that the POW camp at Elmira suffered from the same gross mismanagement. If you research the mortality rate for Elmira POW camp, you will find the 24% - 25% figure is consistant with the numbers given at the website I referenced. The widely accepted numbers are 3,000 deaths out of a total population of 12,000. Like Andersonville, Elmira was a poorly chosen location for a POW camp, with inadequate hospital facilities and a pond within the stockade that served as a cesspool.

I was wrong in stating Elmira was the worst POW camp in the Civil War. Two other camps had more total deaths as well as a slightly higher mortality rate. One is Andersonville, and the other is Camp Douglas near Chicago. As a matter of fact, The mortality rate of Camp Douglas is higher than Andersonville. Of 26,000 POWs, 7,500 Confederates were never repatriated. That's around 30% mortality rate. After the war the Camp Douglas records were destroyed, but in 1865 the total deaths documented surpassed 6,000. Interestingly, there is an additional number of approximately 1,500 Confederate POWs that are "unaccounted for". During the war the leadership at Camp Douglas not only officially interred POW dead in mass graves, but also tossed many corpses into Lake Michigan. The 1500 "unaccounted" POWs may have been disposed of this way.

One neglected issue in the calculation of the Union dead at Andersonville is the prisoner murder rate. There was a group of POWs that banded together to form a gang of thugs known as the "Andersonville Raiders". These characters murdered other prisoners for their food rations. The Andersonville Raiders became such a problem that another group of prisoners set up a vigilantee group known as the Regulators, who hanged a number of the troublemakers.

It is also interesting that both Elmira and Camp Douglas were immediately demolished at the war's end and turned into farmland. After the war both civilian communities distanced themselves from the wartime activities at Douglas and Elmira. As a matter of fact, Chemung County, where Elmira was located, engaged in a disinformation campaign to discredit any research into the POW camp facts. Only recently within the last 20 years have the facts about the Northern POW camps surfaced. BTW, the History Channel did a documentary on Camp Douglas a few years ago that included some of this info.

Here are some more links; http://www.chemunghistory.com/pages/prisoncamp.html/
http://www.angelfire.com/ny5/elmiraprison/
http://www.en.wikipedia.o...wiki/Camp_Douglas(Chicago)
http://www.geocities.com/...757/issues/camp/htm

I think Lincoln was a great president, but I think that he has been been glorified by being given demigod status by the popular culture. Lincoln was put into a bad position because of the terrible mismanagement of Filmore, Pierce, and Buchanan administrations. If Buchanan had any moral courage the CW would have broken out during his presidency. Lincoln made several hard decisions during the war that were unconstitutional, like the curbs on the freedom of the press and the suspension of habeus corpus. I also have problems with the way the draft was administered. Also, the Emancipation Proclamation has been heralded as something which in reality it was not. The only slaves it applied to were only those slaves still held in Confederate controlled territory as of January 1863.
It is unfortunate that Lincoln was assassinated when he was. I believe Reconstruction would have been accomplished in a much more fairminded manner by Lincoln. Lincoln would have restrained the vengeful Radical Republicans more effectively than the ineffectual drunk Andrew Johnson. One thing that blows my mind is the totally inadequate security measures in force to protect Lincoln from assassination or kidnapping.....after all there was a war going on and the front lines were not far from Washington DC.