Civil War Photo Friday: Prisoner Exchange

This image shows non-commissioned officers from the 19th Iowa Infantry. They were recently prisoners at Camp Ford, Texas, before being exchanged and arriving at Union-occupied New Orleans. This shot was taken at their arrival back on friendly territory and shows their mixture of relief and exhaustion.

For much of the war, prisoner exchanges were common. A group of prisoners would be traded for a like number of prisoners from the other side. Sometimes prisoners wouldn't even see the inside of a jail. They'd be "paroled" on the spot wherever they'd been captured if they took an oath not to fight until exchanged. They would then return home and await a notice from their commanding officer that they had been exchanged and should return to duty.

The exchange program mostly broke down a few times during the war due to mutual mistrust. General Grant was always wary of exchanges. He had launched a war of attrition against the South and every prisoner exchanged meant one more soldier for the rebellion, he decided against further exchanges. While this led to horrible overcrowding of southern prisons such as Andersonville, it did bleed the South of men.

Image courtesy Library of Congress.

The Confederacy is cut in two!

A hundred and fifty years ago last week, the Confederacy was cut in two. The last bastions on the Mississippi River, Vicksburg and Port Hudson, were both invested by Union forces. It would be another month before they fell, but with the main rebel armies on the river cooped up behind defenses, the Confederacy was essentially divided between those states west of the Mississippi and those east of it.

This would have a profound effect on the war to the west of the river, the so-called Trans-Mississippi Theater. Most of the experienced rebel troops had already been transferred to the East, and those who were left were slowly whittled down by sickness, death in battle, and increasing levels of desertion. Confederate commanders west of the river did their best to find new recruits, but war weariness was already setting in for many in Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, and Texas.

One would think that this would be a prime opportunity for Union forces to sweep down and take these weakened states, but northern states west of the river such as Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and the loyalist parts of Missouri had also been drained of men to fight in the east. Most of the Union military strength remaining in these areas was made up of local militias who only fought in their county or state. The few Union campaigns west of the river after this point were generally weak and poorly planned affairs.

That didn't mean the action was over. As we shall see, the war west of the river was only getting worse.


Image courtesy Library of Congress.

Civil War Photo Friday: Black Union soldiers kidnapped for the Neo-Confederate cause

This photo shows a unit of black soldiers and their white officer. It's obviously a Union unit because of the officer's uniform and a belt buckle saying "US" on one of the figures. I've zoomed in on him; he's the man in the center in the photo below. The uniforms on the soldiers look very light, but often Union troops wore a light shade of blue that appears gray in these old photos.

Nothing is otherwise known about this photograph or what unit it represents. That's what gave it new life.

In an article titled Retouching History, Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite, Jr., describe how a doctored version of this photo was put up for sale by a self-styled "Rebel" website as a photo of the First Louisiana Native Guard, a Confederate unit in New Orleans made up of free blacks that never saw action and was opposed by many Confederate officials. It isn't even clear if they were ever fully equipped. It seemed they were only kept around for the propaganda value. When New Orleans fell to the Union, some of these men joined the Union army.

This is retouched the photo:

As you can see, that pesky Union officer has been cropped out. A closer inspection of a larger-format version of this photo (which you can see in the original article) shows that the US belt buckle has been blurred over. Also, the font is a modern one called "Algerian", developed in 1988.

Neo-Confederates assert that thousands of blacks fought for the Confederacy. This is used to bolster their claim that the war wasn't about slavery, despite the fact that Confederate officials repeatedly said it was about slavery and that there is no evidence whatsoever for thousands of black soldiers fighting for the South. Did a few blacks (like maybe a dozen) fight for the South? Yeah, probably. Does that change what the war was about? Nope.

Since most of my readers are American, Canadian, or British, let's play an imagination game. Imagine you're surfing the net and see a photo of one of your relatives who fought in World War Two, but the photo has been doctored so he now wears a German uniform. The caption says, "An American volunteer in the Wehrmacht!" How would that make you feel?

Photos from the original article, used under the terms of "Fair Use", the justification being that they are being used for nonprofit, educational purposes and the original image is in the public domain. If the folks who doctored the photograph want to sue me for infringing on their creative copyright, feel free to expose yourselves in the comments section.