Why did northerner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had never been on a southern plantation, elect to write the fiction novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” about how bad slavery was in the South? Why didn’t she write about factual slavery conditions in the north where she had some experience?
Articles such as the recent one by Al Benn concerning a book by Northern writer David Rothstein, of a fictional scenario at the Confederate POW prison at Cahaba, Ala., provoke similar questions.
Why do we have a historic marker at the main gate of Riverwalk Stadium that essentially says that the most atrocious Confederate POW prison was located down the street? Why wasn’t the marker put down the street?
The distinction between the Northern and Southern prisons is that the starvation, freezing and unsanitary conditions in Union prisons were imposed upon the Confederate soldiers by choice.
The Federal Blockades and Sherman/Lincoln scorched earth policy purposely starved every man, woman and child in the South for the duration of the war. There was little medicine or food for the people, soldiers or the prisoners of the Confederacy.
The Feds make a fabulous memorial park to the prisoners of Andersonville, Georgia, and hung the commander after the war’s end. The United Daughters of the Confederacy were allowed to place a little marker at Elmira, New York. That’s about as equitable and factual as things have ever been in this regard.
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