Part 26:
After the war, Republicans emphasized the horrors of Andersonville in partisan attacks on the Democrats as Confederate sympathizers. During the 1870s, Southern Democrats used Elmira as their response to invocations of Andersonville. If the Confederates could be blamed for the deaths at Andersonville, what was the North's responsibility for the Elmira dead? When a Georgia Congressman denounced Elmira on the floor of the House of Representatives, former staff of the prison sent letters read in Congress defending their tenures at the prison.
Whenever Elmira would be remembered in the future it would be as the "Northern Andersonville."
Whatever the political uses of Elmira, the prison itself was quickly dismantled after the war, its remains sold for scrap. In 1900 the local GAR post marked the boundaries of the old camp with stones. The graves of the Confederates in nearby Woodlawn Cemetery. The locations of the Confederate dead had been carefully recorded by Sexton Jones, but the wooden headboards were badly decayed by the start of the 20th Century. A 1906 Act providing for the marking of Confederate graves came soon enought to preserve the locations of the Confederate dead. Wooden markers were placed that year in cemetery and the Shohola dead were also located.
In 1907 headstones were placed in the Confederate cemetery. Gray writes of the inventory of the dead:
Virginia claimed 550 headstones, South Carolina 387, Georgia 314, Alabama 235, Tennessee 76, Louisiana 64, Florida 30, Mississippi 10, Texas 6, Arkansas 1, Maryland 3, and Kentucky and Missouri each 1. North Carolina accounted for almost half the markers, 1,233. At least seven prisoners could not be identified and were defined with the customary “Unknown.”