Decoration/Memorial Day

[L Verge]

(06-01-2019 10:22 AM)LincolnMan Wrote:  We had good turnouts for both of our Observances. It was great to have a WWII Army veteran there who was part of the D Day Operation.

We had good visitation at Surratt House during the Memorial Day weekend also. It's nice to know that there are still people who pay attention to history instead of car sales, trips to the beach, and beer and BBQ...

As for me, I watched the annual program from the National Mall and cried my way through it, as usual.

Just as an aside, when I was growing up, one of my friends' father had been a prisoner on the Bataan Death March. Though he survived and returned home to his family and a job, he never really regained his strength nor his weight. But, the telling thing was when you looked into his eyes. They were void of life - what I suspect any prisoner of an enemy camp has looked like since the beginnings of time.

Next Saturday, Surratt House is sponsoring a program on Point Lookout Prison Camp for Confederates, which was located on the southern tip of Maryland. It has never been given that much attention compared to the Union Camp Sumter at Andersonville, but the federal government ran just as deplorable prisons (while they had more resources for better treatment) as the Confederates (who lacked resources going into the war and lost even more through the raids and destruction laid down by Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley and the infamous March to the Sea).

It will be interesting to see how our audience reacts to the talk by Dr. Brad Gottfried, Civil War scholar and author of several books, and retired President of the College of Southern Maryland (but not a native to the area and now residing in Pennsylvania). I have heard the talk and came away further convinced that Edwin McMasters Stanton was a cruel, hard man -- even though I think he was crucial to the Union winning the war.

P.S. If interested, the book is entitled Hell Comes to Southern Maryland, and we do sell it at our gift shop. Check out surrattmuseum.org