Editorializing PoW records

Story

1st Lieutenant
Joined
Aug 5, 2011
Location
SE PA
Might have been repeated verbatim from Provost Marshal entries, or someone's comments after-the-fact.

Either way, if you want characters for a Spaghetti Western this is how you get characters for a Spaghetti Western.

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@Story, somehow I missed this when you first posted it.

I've come across quite a few guys to whom this remark could have been applied. An occupational hazard, I guess, since I spend a lot of time digging into prisoners who committed crimes against other prisoners. I wonder what Jonas's date of enlistment was. Robert Kellogg once remarked that the quality of soldiers dropped dramatically once the draft was instituted, because suddenly you had regiments full of guys who didn't really care about the principles involved, and definitely were not happy to be serving!
 
Might have been repeated verbatim from Provost Marshal entries, or someone's comments after-the-fact.

Either way, if you want characters for a Spaghetti Western this is how you get characters for a Spaghetti Western.

View attachment 397434
Ive seen a number of records notated that way - "a very bad man" "a bad man" etc. Ive often wondered what it was about the folks that made them "bad" or "Very bad"
 
Ive seen a number of records notated that way - "a very bad man" "a bad man" etc. Ive often wondered what it was about the folks that made them "bad" or "Very bad"
1) If you kept any of the FOLD3 images, add them to this thread?

2) To couch it in terms of fiction, think of "the gangs of New York" but in uniform, the Raiders in "Andersonville" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andersonville_(film)) and Corporal King in "King Rat" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Rat_(film) ).

The war scooped up all sorts of men who were outright criminals and psychopaths, gave them a license to kill (mostly the enemy, but fratricide should not be considered beyond their prerogatives) and when let loose in a prison environment, merely allowed their worst qualities to float to the top of the bowl.

So back to my original snark in post 1, where did men like this go if they survived the war?
 
Well, no one is sure who Andersonville's "Limber Jim" was, but post war references, sightings and imposters tended to claim that he had moved "out west" where law enforcement tended to be kind of spotty. Your "spaghetti western" remark isn't too far off the mark.

Just to be obnoxious (can't help it), the Raiders are not fiction, although the story of them gets appropriated and fictionalized to suit the desires of the teller, and then THAT version gets taken for fact. Several of them were praying on their comrades before they even reached their regiments, let alone Andersonville. They committed at least two murders (and I could build a weak case for up to ten more, since buried bones kept turning up at Andersonville up until the early 1900s, although most are said to be victims of tunnel cave ins), and they were definitely opportunistically robbing whoever had a possession and was alone in the camp. But they were not all bounty jumpers (only one of the six hanged, Sullivan, was), they were not all deserters (Delaney and Sullivan and possibly Collins, but the other three were captured in battle, and as a group served an average of almost 13 month), and they did not dominate the prison - they were mostly active for May and June 1864 and most prisoners at the time estimated their numbers at 80-120 out of roughly 20,000 prisoners. The story gets REALLY interesting when you take a look at the guys who get credit for the arrests and hangings - I think they were actually a rival gang trying to get rid of the competition.

As for the movie, Andersonville, it's mostly based on the books by John McElroy and John Ransom, and I have a whole chapter in my book on the raiders as to why those two CAN'T be trusted. Let's just say that I've only seen then trial and execution scenes, and I'm not a fan.
 
That's a good question for which I have no answer.

My guess would be that Henry Jonas' was thinking of a Loyal militia unit.

* By late 1861 most of the Home Guard regiments had been disbanded. They were replaced by a smaller Six-month Militia under state rather than Federal control. This too was disbanded in January 1862, to be replaced by the Missouri State Militia (almost entirely cavalry.)

* With the aid of Missouri's provisional Governor Hamilton Rowan Gamble, a compulsory militia enrollment was declared on July 22, 1862, the Enrolled Missouri Militia
 
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