John Surratt

[Bill Richter]

I disagree that the CSA really had an army in Elmira. Most of the Rebs there were little better off physically than the Yanks at Andersonville. Efforts top raise an army from escaped prisoners who had made it to Canada had failed in 1864. Most wanted simply to go home, as Thomas Hines and John Yates Beall found out. And the cooperation of the Copperheads proved to be a lot of talk and no action before the Election of 1864 in Illinois.