The Civil War from 30,000 Feet

I'm currently passing over Sandusky, Ohio, near Johnson's Island, where the Union had a big prison camp.  Purpose-built, prisoners were treated reasonably.  At first.  According to the Johnson's Island Preservation Society...

Prison life was severely impacted when the treatment of Union POWs in Confederate prisons such as Andersonville, Salisbury and Libbey, became known to the War Department. Rations were cut in half, and some items such as coffee, tea, and sugar were eliminated altogether. Prisoners were no longer allowed to buy food at the sutler’s store. However, they were still allowed to purchase such items as tobacco, clothing, pens, ink, and paper for letter writing. Packages from home could no longer include food and, much to the joy of the guards, items such as Virginia hams and alcoholic beverages were confiscated as contraband. However, even under these restrictions, the prisoners were eating better than many of those still fighting for the Confederacy.

Lots of interesting stuff on the website.  Of course men died at Johnson's Island, but only 200-300 out of 9,000 internees.  There is a Confederate cemetery on the site, and considerable efforts were made to preserve it from the 1880s onward.   In 1910 the United Daughters of the Confederacy dedicated a memorial statue:



As Lincoln said of the Union dead at Gettysburg, "it is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this."  So, as I fly over the state to which my ancestors immigrated, and in which my father and grandfather were born, I'll take a somber moment to remember that people died for the the Confederacy, too, and that their families and communities felt their loss as sharply as did those in the North.

Grant once wrote that on Lee's surrender he was "depressed at the defeat of a foe who had fought so valiantly," but added that he thought the Confederacy "the worst cause for which anyone has ever fought."