This original post was a photograph of Camp Chase, Columbus, Ohio, for Confederate Prisoners of war.
See
http://www.forgottenoh.com/Cemeteries/campchase.html for details on the camp and more pictures.
I thought it was an interesting photograph, not realizing it was bait for us Northern Fish to comment on this guy's idea that Grant refused prisoner exchange because of?
Well the "because of" is always well known, just denied or evaded by Confederate partisans. The "because of" is because the CSA failed - deliberately - to treat the men of USCT - enlisted and officers - as soldiers. The Black enlistees were - if still alive - sold as slaves, the officers were threatened with execution.
That is why that chronological list above is both important, interesting, and gives all of us a basis in fact.
Now those Confederate partisans - since I have been cautioned about using the phrase "neo-Confederates" and "lost cause folk", I regard as demeaning - can say: Grant used the refusal to exhange USCT as a fig leaf to cover up his real motive - to deprive the Confederacy of man power. Or - as I actually heard a Park Service guy in Richmond say - the conditions in Libby prison were Lincoln's fault because he refused to exchange prisoners - never once mentioning Davis's attitude toward USCT.
I keep the quote "De nial is not the name of a river in Egypt." So we have posts: the member of USCT who was sold as a slave or taken by the Confederate government as a laborer was better off. We have folk who apparently claim Davis never did this, or was forced by Confederate gov't to do this.
Will someone please post the accurate record of what happened to USCT who were actually taken prisoner? Or what actually happened to their officers? Or is there a Ph.D thesis here that has never been done?
Two kinds of posts fascinate me: the Black Confederate soldier myth, and the denial that the CSA had a policy of grabbing any loose Black person and enslaving him/her.
So there is concurrent myth: the war was not about slavery and race.
You Southern partisans would love my high school history teacher - a New Englander who thought the south got a raw deal, and naming the hero of "Gone With the Wind" Rhett Butler was an insult to the Rhetts and the Butlers.