So, when do we start rounding up the Teabaggers?

Let me be the first to call it the "War of Northern Aggression".

FTFA: Despite the camp's brief existence, at least 685 prisoners died there.

Sherman, you dolt! Let the prisoners out before you burn that thing!

GAT_00: FirstNationalBastard: Let me be the first to call it the "War of Northern Aggression".

Don't joke about that, people actually say that seriously.

Oh, I know. I just figured I'd get it in here in a sarcastic way before this goes to the main page, and someone uses the term in a serious way.

Is this a different camp than the one where the confederates starved and worked to death 15,000 union soldiers?

Next Braddock Movie?

Kudos to this guy who will now never receive tenure.

I drive past Andersonville every month on my way to National Guard duty - I really must see it one day. For that matter there is plenty of Civil War history around here, and in 17 years in Georgia, I've only seen Chickamauga. I'll tell you though, I got the shock of my life when, back in '93 and I was brand new in Georgia, I happened to walk into this nut's shop in Kennesaw. I was browsing, looking at Civil War artifacts, and thinking "Wow...how neat!". The whole while the owner was watching me closely....I turned a corner and he had mannequins in full KKK garb, and t shirts saying "Hitler was right!" and things of that nature. I was freakin' shocked (having grown up in California and never being exposed to blatant racism like that). I realized he was watching me because, my having Mexican blood, I was not your typical Aryan Nations poster child and he probably thought I'd steal something. I was so shook up I made a hasty exit. I can't believe this nut is even still in business, but you have plenty of backwards farktards outside the city so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

A joke I heard when I first came to Atlanta, that the locals don't like for some reason....

Q: What do you call a Yankee in Atlanta?
A: Boss

/'cept for the retarded racists, I love Georgia and have many dear native friends.

Going back to the archaeology angle, I'm amazed that in this day & age of amateur treasure hunters with metal detectors, Civil War buffs, and rampant development builders pouring concrete all over the place, that Camp Lawton could have survived intact and unrummaged for 150 years. Hopefully, they'll be able to learn a lot about the prison camp life that the more notorious camps couldn't tell us.

Interestingly (to me, anyway) one reason POW camps in the Civil War, both north and south, were so horrific is that it was the first time in any war anywhere that prisoners had been kept by their enemy for extended periods of time. In wars in Europe, and even in the Revolution, prisoners were either exchanged right away, stripped of their weapons and gear and released at once, or, if they were high-value and kept, were in such small numbers they could be held in regular jails or fortresses.

Until the US Civil War, nobody had ever tried keeping thousands of enemy soldiers in their own territory for the duration; plus, nobody at the time knew anything about the psychology of prison guards and prison camp commandants. Nobody realized, for instance, that the soldiers guarding the prisoners, being pissed at not being at the front (or being the dregs of the troops left behind) would be more likely to be brutal to the prisoners.

A lot of the mistakes that got made at Andersonville and Elmira had to be made, unfortunately, so they didn't get made again in later wars. The Japanese made the same mistakes later, in the Philippines.