I am simply disputing John Hurt's claim that 50% of the prisoners at Johnson Island died while in captivity. There is nothing remotely like that anywhere in the historical record. Not even close. He says he has documentation to that effect but hasn't given it to us.Soloist wrote: ↑Wed Apr 24, 2024 3:06 pmKen, the guy died and disappeared from a Union prison camp. The family can’t find any records of what happened to the body.Ken wrote: ↑Wed Apr 24, 2024 2:54 pm So in a war with mass casualties happening an era before DNA and other medical means of identifying remains, there were a lot of corpses that were buried without identification.
But it was also an era in which bureaucracies kept meticulous records and most of those records do still exist. So rosters of various military units, prisoners captured and detained in military prisons, payroll records, transfer records. All of those records were kept and still exist. So the Civil War isn't some black hole lost to history like the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage. We actually do pretty much know what happened and we have an immense amount of historical documents from official government records to contemporary correspondence and news reports, to memoirs of the participants.
You can argue all you want with your internet sleuthing, I only pulled this up a few minutes of looking for primary sources from prisoners.
I’m much more familiar with the confederacy camps as they lost so when someone questions the winning side’s historical account and my brief look turns up missing soldiers from the camp…
And in any event, what we have with the Civil War is not a history written by the "victors" We have history written by Americans on both sides. To the extent that we have anything resembling an official history, it is probably the National Park Service which is the custodian of this site: https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/national_ ... etery.html
from which we find that the actual graveyard was maintained by the Daughters of the American Confederacy and has 208 marked graves. Also that ground penetrating radar has identified 267 total individual remains at that site so about 60 graves were unmarked or have since lost their markers. The parks service provides a photo of the prison cemetary
And of the monument to Confederate dead erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy in 1910
So out of over 10,000 Confederate prisoners who were detained there during the war. Counting both the identified and unidentified remains, that makes for a death toll in the neighborhood of 2-3% and not the 50% claimed by John Hurt.