Dear Boo and Bubble,
In my last post, I mentioned an event in our country’s
history called The Civil War. Any war by nature is tragic and unleashes
horrendous consequences primarily born by the soldiers who fight and their
families. Society as a whole also
suffers. In the words of Brooks Atkinson
in Once Around the Sun – “It is better to win a war than to lose it,
but not much better. Everyone dies a
little when his neighbor is killed. No
society is sound and vigorous enough to sustain death on the staggering scale
that wars make inevitable. No one can
win a war. There are survivors but no
victors.”
A civil war, where sections of the same country fight each
other, is doubly insidious because it represents a nation tearing at itself,
ripping apart the very fabric that binds it together, sometimes literally
pitting brother against brother on the battlefield.
There is some debate about the ultimate causes of our Civil War, but according to Pulitzer Prize-winning author James McPherson, "The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states. When Abraham Lincoln won election in 1860 as the first Republican president on a platform pledging to keep slavery out of the territories, seven slave states in the deep South (South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas) seceded and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America. The incoming Lincoln administration and most of the Northern people refused to recognize the legitimacy of secession. They feared that it would discredit democracy and create a fatal precedent that would eventually fragment the no-longer United States into several small, squabbling countries."
The war began when Confederate warships bombarded Union soldiers at Fort Sumter, South Carolina on April 12, 1861. After the bombardment and Lincoln's subsequent call for 75,000 volunteers, the states of the Upper South (North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas) seceded from the Union, rather than participate in the invasion of their fellow slave states. Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland - though they were slaveholding states in 1860 and contributed men to the Confederate cause - never seceded.
For four years, the war raged. Approximately 620,000 soldiers died from combat, accident, starvation, and disease during the Civil War. To put this in perspective, the United States has lost 645,445 lives to date in all other wars combined.
Furthermore, 400,000 soldiers were captured over the course of the Civil War. At first, captured troops were regularly exchanged, but as the war progressed, that practice faded. The plight of prisoners of war became so bleak that nearly as men died in captivity during the Civil War as died fighting in Vietnam.
Among those held as a POW in Point Lookout, Maryland, was your great, great, great grandfather George Franklin Robinson. A typical southern gentleman from the small town of Pickens in the upstate of South Carolina, he answered the call to take up arms for the Confederacy. He left his wife Elvira, ten children and all things comfortable to go and fight against the Union over the right for states to break from federal control and continue the practice of slavery. He owned no slaves, but he believed in the Confederate cause.
I don’t know how or when he was captured and I have no direct knowledge of his experience at Point Lookout. My research leads me to surmise that it could only have been horrible. No barracks were ever built. The Confederate soldiers were given tents to sleep in until overcrowding became so bad that there were not even enough tents to go around. Approximately 50,000 Confederate enlisted men were contained within the walls of Point Lookout Prison Camp during its operation from 1863-1865. Prison capacity was 10,000 but at any given time, there would be between 12,000 and 20,000 soldiers incarcerated there. The extreme overcrowding, Maryland's freezing temperatures, shortages of firewood for heat, and living in tents took its toll and many lives were lost due to exposure.
When the war ended in the spring of 1865 with Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendering the Confederate troops to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomatox Courthouse, VA, the prisoners of war were released form Point Lookout. George Franklin left the camp and began the 550 mile trek to Pickens – walking. It took him over a month to get home.
The story goes that Elvira was sitting on the front porch of the house when she spotted a figure in the distance making his way down the road. At first, she didn’t recognize him, but as he drew nearer, Elvira realized that it was her husband. She screamed at the top of her lungs for the children to come out of the house. Their father was finally back.
The group raced towards George Franklin. He yelled back for them to stay away.
“I’m filthy and full of lice,” he called out. “Go bring a tub out into the yard and fill it with hot water. I need to take a bath with lye soap before I can touch any of you.”
I can’t imagine the restraint that it took – after four years of not knowing where he was or whether he was alive – to have to wait for a lye soap bath before a hug.
It was a scene being repeated all over the country in both the South and North - thousands of families reunited after such a devastating, costly, divisive conflict. Yes, I agree with Brooks Atkinson - It is better to win a war than to lose it, but not much better. Everyone dies a little when his neighbor is killed
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