Abraham Lincoln was the leader of the Northern fanatics who brought on the war; and, as Commander-in-Chief of the United States Army and Navy, adopted and favored a policy of exterminating the Southern people by the most cruel and merciless measures and means….

Written to The Hon. John Tabb Duval, House of Delegates, Richmond, VA, by Giles Cook, last surviving member of General Lee's staff, Feb. 19, 1929, Matthews Courthouse, VA.

In my previous column, I mentioned that popular history concerning the War Between the States has generally been biased against the South, a bias displayed prominently in the treatment of Civil War-era prison camps. Contrary to what a few anti-Southern writers with a sparse knowledge of history would have us believe, the infamous Andersonville was only one of a long list of prison pens in the South and in the North.

A great many history students have been misled into thinking that Andersonville stood alone in its harshness and deprivation. To some extent, the former Confederate prison at Salisbury, now a national cemetery, has been subjected to similar misinformation, although a greater percentage of prisoners, based on total population, died at Salisbury than at Andersonville.

In recent years, a new crop of interested historic researchers and writers have put forth information that has been available but allowed to lie dormant for decades. These findings give much different accounts in their detailed coverage of Civil War prison camps. Their perspective is not so much from a Southern or a Northern viewpoint, but from that of overall accuracy.

Websites, such as the one for the "Point Lookout POW Descendants' Organization," have been created by descendants of Confederate soldiers to present an accurate history of what their ancestors endured in Federal captivity. The Point Lookout Prison on the Maryland shore had an extremely high mortality rate. Use this address to visit the site for more information: http://www.plpow.com/index htm .

Several researchers and writers, such as Lonnie Speers, author of "Portals to Hell," have helped to enlighten the current generation by exposing the terrible conditions of the Union Prison Camp at Elmira, NY. In a statement that revealed the core of cruelty at Elmira, Speers wrote: "The most remarkable aspect about Elmira Prison is that, unlike the other POW facilities around the country up to that time, it didn't start out as a fairly acceptable place of confinement and then slowly degenerate into a concentration camp; Elmira Prison was one from the very day it began."

In 2003, when the so-called scandal erupted concerning the mistreatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq, the world was shocked and aghast at acts described as torture by a frenzied, politically correct media. But the acts described were more those of college frat-house hazing than torture. Incidents at Abu Ghraib were insults to personal dignity, which were minor when compared with the deprivation endured by U.S. prisoners in Vietnam, or with what U.S. servicemen were subjected to by the Japanese and Germans during World War II. In degrees of total inhumane treatment - purposeful starvation, planned infection with contagious diseases, real torture and shootings by guards - the Union prison camps during the War Between the States have no equal in history.

The root of much of the viciousness displayed came straight from the Federal government, and not just from the U.S. Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, as mentioned previously. Imagine if the U.S. Senate had passed a resolution demanding the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. If you think that's a stretch, it's exactly what happened on January 26, 1865, when Senate Resolution 97 was passed.

Each side had its fanatics, and the Northern Republicans had, among others, Indiana Sen. Henry Lane. On January 16, 1865, Lane proposed SR 97, known as the Lane Resolution, to the 38th Congress. He was one of a group of congressmen who didn't just want to fight a war. They wanted to inflict revenge on the South, as shown in Lane's statement made on the floor of Congress: "I would make the war still bloodier, I would make every rocky ravine in Southern Georgia and Alabama run red with the blood of traitors, and I would drive into the Gulf Stream the last rebel there before I would recognize their Independence." So much for "civilized" warfare, if such even exists.

In the next installment of this series, I will borrow from myself, using comments from a previously published review of Phillip Burnham's book, "So Far From Dixie: Confederates in Yankee Prisons." The greatest experts of all, Confederate soldiers who were imprisoned in Union prison camps, will begin telling of their experiences through letters and documents they left for a future generation - ours.

Bill Ward lives in Salisbury and is a historian, writer, and member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Contact him at wardwriters@bellsouth.net