Though it only lasted a year, Elmira Prison in 1864-65 housed 12,123 Confederate prisoners of war in squalid conditions so wretched that some 3,000 prisoners died there. (Courtesy Library of Congress)
(Oneida, NY – Oct. 2013) Remember the horrors suffered by the Union prisoners of war in Andersonville? By the Confederate prisoners in Elmira?
Historian Tom Henry will reveal the grim history of U.S. Civil War prisons, both North and South, in his illustrated talk “Prisons: The Dark Side of the Civil War” at Oneida Public Library Thursday, Oct. 10, at 7 p.m.
“Lost in the romance of the Civil War is the fact that nearly 10 percent of all deaths, 61,000, occurred in enemy managed prisons,” Henry noted. “Andersonville and Elmira are names etched in infamy, testaments to the intentional cruelty of war. Using these two prisons as primary examples, we will explore the dark world of Civil War prisons and the policy makers who created the nightmare.”
Henry last appeared at the OPL in June to present “Gettysburg: Central New Yorkers Hold the Line,” a well-received illustrated talk on the vital role the Union troops from Cortland, Madison, Oneida, Onondaga and Oswego counties played in the Battle of Gettysburg June 1-3, 1863. His continuing research into the Elmira Prison during the Civil War has led him to study the full scope of prisoner-of-war camps both North and South.
Henry, who retired from teaching social studies at Liverpool High School in 2009, has taught as an adjunct professor of history at S.U.N.Y. at Cortland and at Syracuse University and given courses on U.S. history, the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. Supreme Court at Oasis Senior Living in Syracuse. He was first runner up for the 1999 New York State Teacher of the Year award and was honored as the 2002 N.Y.S. Social Studies Teacher of the Year. Henry has been a writer for the education division of Colonial Williamsburg since 1997 and serves as a master teacher in Colonial Williamsburg’s Idea of America program.
The program is free and open to the public. For more information, stop by the Oneida Library, 220 Broad St., or call 363-3050.