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Unearthing the Past
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Published: August 29, 2010 - By History.com Staff
Civil War Artifacts Unearthed from Former Confederate Prison
As the United States prepares for the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, archaeology students in Georgia have unearthed a treasure trove of rare artifacts from a Confederate stockade that until now had been cloaked in mystery. Experts are calling the find one of the most important Civil War discoveries in decades.

The Union mapmaker Robert Knox Sneden, who was imprisoned at Camp Lawton, painted several watercolors depicting the stockade and kept a journal chronicling the grim conditions there.
Led by graduate student Kevin Chapman on the grounds of the Bo Ginn National Fish Hatchery near the town of Millen, the dig yielded roughly 200 objects used by inmates and guards at the Camp Lawton prison, including an improvised pipe, a tourniquet buckle, buttons and coins. These everyday items, Chapman said in a press conference on August 18, 2010, bear witness to “individual men and their desire to survive” during America’s bloodiest conflict.
It has been known for quite some time that the site, which borders Magnolia Springs State Park, was once home to Camp Lawton, largely due to the remains of Confederate earthworks there and because freshwater springs are mentioned in descriptions of the prison, explained W. Todd Groce, president and CEO of the Georgia Historical Society. The 42-acre Camp Lawton, which opened in the fall of 1864 to accommodate men from the notorious Andersonville prison, lasted a mere six weeks before it was swiftly abandoned as Union troops approached. That was enough time for an estimated 725 to 1,330 of its 10,000 inmates to perish. While Andersonville has become a national historic site as well as a byword for the suffering faced by POWs on both sides of the conflict, Camp Lawton has remained “an obscure Civil War footnote,” said the historian John K. Derden, who wrote a book on the prison.
At the time of Camp Lawton’s construction, more than 32,000 prisoners were packed into the 26-acre stockade at Andersonville, where poor rations, inadequate shelter and a lack of sanitary facilities had triggered widespread unrest, disease and death. Meanwhile, General William Sherman and his Union troops had spent the summer plowing through the Confederate heartland, seizing city after city in a series of successful battles that included the decisive siege of Atlanta. Unsure of the path Sherman’s men would take through Georgia, Confederate officials feared they were headed for Andersonville and decided to evacuate all but the sickest prisoners there.
Some 10,000 of them were moved to a site near Millen, where stockades had been hastily built by slaves despite at least one doctor’s concerns that the poor quality of the local water supply could endanger inmates and guards. Believing they had made the 150-mile journey as part of a prisoner exchange, the prisoners were aghast when they arrived at Camp Lawton, as the Millen complex was called. Union soldier John McElroy described his unit’s transfer from Andersonville in his 1879 memoir: “We were ordered out of the cars, and marching a few rods, came in sight of another of those hateful Stockades, which seemed to be as natural products of the Sterile sand of that dreary land as its desolate woods and its breed of boy murderers and gray-headed assassins.”
As more and more war-weary and severely malnourished prisoners were loaded into the new stockade, conditions deteriorated. Instead of Andersonville’s sweltering heat, the men now faced torrential rains and plunging temperatures. The most fortunate among them had little more than two poles draped with a blanket to blunt the effects of the elements, while others burrowed into the dirt for warmth. According to McElroy, one out of every 10 prisoners died during the six weeks Camp Lawton remained in operation. The facility’s chief surgeon appealed for supplies, writing, “Thousands of sick, both at this post and Andersonville, are in a state of suffering that would touch the heart even of the most callous.”
Their misery did not last long, at least not at Camp Lawton. By early November, General Sherman’s troops had embarked on the campaign known as Sherman’s March to the Sea, which would take them straight through Millen. “The Confederate government moved the prisoners out of what they thought would be the path of Sherman’s army, but they inadvertently moved them directly into the path,” Groce explained. Camp Lawton was dismantled and emptied in three days. Some of its prisoners were sent to Savannah or South Carolina, but 1,000 of them returned to Andersonville, meaning they had been “shuttled around Georgia in a big circle,” Groce said.
Later that winter, a group of Sherman’s men came across the deserted stockade, finding a freshly dug pit and a board bearing the inscription “650 buried here.” Brigadier General John W. Geary described the “foul and fetid” scene, concluding, “This prison, if indeed it can be designated as such, afforded convincing proofs that the worst accounts of the sufferings of our prisoners at Andersonville, at Americus, and Millen were by no means exaggerated.” A chaplain later recalled the abandoned facility’s “miserable hovels, hardly fit for swine to live in.” On Sherman’s say-so, outraged Union soldiers burned the camp to the ground and set fire to Millen’s railroad station and warehouses.
Five years after the war ended, the Union dead of Millen were transported to their final resting places; many were re-interred at a Civil War cemetery near Beaufort, South Carolina. Camp Lawton remained virtually untouched until 2009, when Kevin Chapman and his team broke ground there at the suggestion of Sue Moore, an anthropology professor at Georgia Southern University. As a result, they uncovered “one of the most pristine Civil War archaeological sites discovered in recent history,” according to Mark Musaus, deputy regional director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which co-sponsored the project along with Georgia Southern University and the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.
A selection of the artifacts will go on display at the Georgia Southern University Museum on October 10. Meanwhile, excavations of Camp Lawton will continue, helping scholars piece together this tragic chapter of American history. For Chapman, who served in the U.S. military, the discovery sheds light on the experiences of a group of people who shaped the country’s future but left few traces of their contribution. “It’s the story of the men who didn’t write it down,” he said. “It’s the story of the men who went home and went on with their lives.”

Labels: U.S. History

History Midterm Terms Review

George Washington: The first public servant of the United States in 1790. He was previously the commander of the Continental Army that fought and won in the War for Independence.

Thomas Jefferson: Founding Father and one of the men responsible for the creation of the U.S. Constitution. Jefferson was also the third public servant in 1800 through 1808.

John Adams: The second public servant of the U.S in the years of 1796 through 1800. He was a federalist whom was a prominent lawyer and well known in Boston.

Mary Wollstonecraft: Women's rights advocate who wrote "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1792) arguing that women and men should be as rational human beings.

De Witt Clinton: He was the mayor of New York and supported the construction of the canal; additionally, he was referred to as the "father of the Erie Canal."

John Paul Jones (JPJ): Destroys British navy ships during the War for Independence.

Labels: U.S. History

History In The News 10/19 Response Paper

Daniel Contreras
History 117
Monday/Wednesday
12:50 - 2:15 pm
19 October 2011

Rediscovering the Mayans

Members and researchers from the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have recently begun to further explore the areas which the Maya used to occupy. As of late, scientists have encountered a question regarding the lifestyle of those Mayans that lived near the sea. Not much is known about these sea thriving people but their trade habits are widely recognized. The sea Mayans flourished for a few hundred years before the Spanish conquest that began the decrease of mesoamaericans. Current researchers are hopeful to discover any remaining materials from these trades such as canoes.

In this course we have discussed various mesoamerican tribes among them the Mayans. This article mentions the crops that the Mayans traded and even a little sentence about Christopher Columbus. It is a modern expedition of a past civilization and

Labels: U.S. History

History In The News 10/19 ARTICLE ONLY

Researchers Explore the Seafaring Culture of the Maya
Published: May 23, 2011 - By History.com Staff

This month, researchers from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are combing the eastern Mexican coast for remnants of the Maya civilization, which once boasted a rich and sophisticated seafaring tradition. The current expedition focuses on the ancient port city of Vista Alegre, located where the Caribbean meets the Gulf of Mexico at the northeastern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula. The remote island site is thought to have been an important harbor and maritime trade stronghold for intermittent periods of time between 800 B.C. and the mid-15th century.

“The maritime Maya have been described much like ancient seagoing Phoenicians,” Dominique Rissolo, one of the expedition’s chief scientists, said in a statement. “Maya trade was far-ranging between the Veracruz coast of modern Mexico and the Gulf of Honduras, with each port a link in a chain connecting people and ideas. Yet there is still much to learn about the extensive history and importance of the maritime Maya and how they adapted to life by the sea.”

Historians believe that Maya sea commerce reached its zenith between 1100 and 1521 A.D., when the Spanish conquered the region and hastened the decline of indigenous Mesoamerican cultures. The Maya traded in a vast array of goods from across Mexico and Central America, including cotton, salt, jade, obsidian, cocoa, tropical bird feathers and slaves, Rissolo said.

Previous expeditions to Vista Alegre in 2005 and 2008 revealed 29 structures, including platforms, mounds, raised causeways and a pyramid within a central plaza that may have been used by lookouts to monitor canoes. Researchers also found a narrow walkway linking the island port to a temple on the mainland.

During the current expedition, the team especially hopes to uncover remains of Maya trading canoes, which Christopher Columbus’ son Ferdinand described in 1502 as fashioned from a single tree trunk and with a structure “not unlike those of Venetian gondolas.” These vessels could carry crews of 25 paddlers along with additional passengers and were piled high with cargo. (It was after capturing one of these boats that Ferdinand and his father puzzled over almond-like beans prized by the Maya and used to make a flavorful drink, becoming the first Europeans to encounter chocolate.)

Accessible only by boat, the secluded Vista Alegre site is frequently battered by tropical storms, offers little drinking water and teems with various jungle- and lagoon-dwelling creatures, including mosquitoes, snakes, spiders and crocodiles. How, then, did the ancient Maya survive in such a hostile environment? The port city had to support not only a permanent population of several hundred people but also passing traders who would paddle up in their canoes, requiring food, water and a place to stay, according to the researchers.

“In addition to understanding the role that Vista Alegre played in facilitating maritime trade and commerce, we also want to understand how the ancient Maya here at Vista Alegre and along this hidden coast transformed and interacted with their maritime landscape,” Rissolo explained in a video podcast earlier this month. “The Maya were primarily agriculturalists; they would tend to live in areas of deeper, fertile soils and access to fresh water. This is a very marginal landscape…so this is a challenge for us to figure out how the Maya were able to endure here for centuries, for millennia.”

Some 500 years after Vista Alegre’s bustling port disappeared, the NOAA-sponsored team has to face the same harsh conditions its early settlers surmounted. “The Maya largely had to live off the land in this remote area where they found and used resources to survive,” said Jeffrey Glover, the expedition’s other chief scientist and an anthropology professor at Georgia State University. “Like them, we have to search for scarce fresh water, but our challenges are more about making the research work in less than optimal conditions. It will involve some good MacGyvering.”

Article Internet URL: http://www.history.com/news/2011/05/23/researchers-explore-the-seafaring-culture-of-the-maya/

Labels: U.S. History