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you’re mad about confederate statues and monuments in the south? wait until you hear about the one in elmira, new york
the history of the confederacy within elmira is long and important, and not a single person outside of the area’s history teachers seems to have a complex understanding of what actually happened here. would you be interested in a thread?
alright, let’s begin-
before we get started, you might wanna mute me if you’re not interested in history lessons or explanations on how the heck a jefferson davis statue ended up in the north! this is gonna be thorough.
before we get started, you might wanna mute me if you’re not interested in history lessons or explanations on how the heck a jefferson davis statue ended up in the north! this is gonna be thorough.
to start with geography- as you can see, this is *not* the south. elmira’s position allowed it to play some important parts in transport of both people and cargo, thanks to canals, such as the Chemung Canal, and a few railroads. this connected it to larger cities, including NYC.
because it connected to much larger cities such as Rochester, Buffalo, and Albany, it was a busy city- and with the addition of two new railroads in the 1850’s, which connected to the south and to the west, the city became a prime spot for an army training ground.
4 sets of army barracks were built in Elmira, but the one we’re going to pay attention to here is camp rathbun. while it originally trained union soldiers, it became used for storing confederate POWs in 1864. although this was post-gettysburg, there was still a lot of war ahead.
there’s a lot of history within the union training camps themselves, but when the fort became empty, it was set aside as a POW camp- originally to trade prisoners between the two sides, but then converted into a straight up camp that could hold about 4,000 confederate prisoners.
note “could hold about 4,000 prisoners”. when word came to lt. colonel seth eastman that he had about 10 days to transform the now empty pow-transfer center into a full-fledged camp, you can imagine that the provisions were less than pleasant. in a month, it was “ready”.
it was a disaster from the start. despite its design for 4-5 thousand people, the camp dubbed “hellmira” held up to 12,000. the mortality rate hovered around 24%, making it the second worst prison camp in the whole civil war, only behind andersonville, a confederate camp.
complete crowding, not enough food, a horrific cesspool used for “sanitation”, lack of housing, and one of the coldest winters between 1864-1865 left almost 3,000 dead at elmira by the war’s end. the final total was 2,950. 17 had escaped.
they certainly enjoyed humiliation, opening up a tower on water street for ordinary citizens to pay about 15 cents to gawk at the starving prisoners. here’s a photo of some “barrel shirts” in elmira, a form of taunting the prisoners, as well as a drawing in better detail.
all of this was, to put it lightly, quite unfortunate. but one hero did emerge out of all of this- an escaped slave named john w jones.
john w jones was in charge of burying the nearly 3,000 who died at elmira, and was completely astounding in his dedication. he kept careful track of each of the dead’s belongings, mailing them home to family, and out of the ENTIRE 3,000, he failed to identify only 7.
he buried them at woodlawn national cemetery in Elmira, where the above mentioned statue now resides. but to talk about jones again- it cannot be overstated how much dignity and care this man buried each confederate with.
in fact, very few family members of the deceased who died at elmira even wanted to bring their bodies back home, despite it being the newest trend. it was obvious how much care mr. jones had taken to bury them, and they thought it best to let them remain as they were, up north.
Mr. Jones isn’t talked about much up here, but i wish he was. he escaped to elmira on the Underground Railroad, worked to help more from his new home, buried the dead with such honor, was a local sexton, and was noted as being one of the richest black men in all of New York.
pictures is the house of John W. Jones, now a historic landmark after being saved from demolition in 1997. lucy brown worked to save it from being destroyed. thanks, lucy brown!
but back to our main story- how did a daughters of the confederacy statue wind up way above the Mason-Dixon Line?
the saying is “history is written by the victors”, and it was true here as well. demolished quickly after the war, elmira denied its terrible conditions.
the saying is “history is written by the victors”, and it was true here as well. demolished quickly after the war, elmira denied its terrible conditions.
official records claim they died of “homesickness”.
the daughters of the confederacy- the group responsible for rewriting history to make it appear that the war was about “state’s rights” and not slavery; the group that put up endless statues to war criminals; the group that rewrote textbooks- placed a monument here in 1937.
this thread is not to discuss the impact of the daughters of the confederacy, but rest assured they are responsible for the vile statues, glorification, and celebrations of confederate history- there are many more threads on them, please read them or research.
rest assured that their monstrous erasing of history is still felt today, and much, if not all, of the lasting confederate glamorization comes from them. they’re the reason why your racist neighbor flies the flag, or your schools made named after confederate generals.
and so, that is how elmira wound up with a confederate statue, making it the northernmost place in the whole country to have one.
which raises the question- what do we do about it?
which raises the question- what do we do about it?
it is possible to understand that the 3,000 confederates who died here were the result of prison mismanagement and cruelty, as well as understand that they were the losers of a war fought entirely on a basis of keeping humans as property?
yeah, history is hard.
yeah, history is hard.
i’d love to hear input. the DOC represent a tragic, calculated, and revolting aspect of american racism, and anything to do with them turns the stomach, especially in one’s hometown.
this sign dedicated to Mr. Jones sums it up best, in my opinion. his compassion lives on.
this sign dedicated to Mr. Jones sums it up best, in my opinion. his compassion lives on.
i want to make it absolutely clear that this thread is NOT sympathetic to confederates in any way. it is rather an exploration into the weird, tragic, and unlikely history of my hometown, and how a confederate statue wound up so far north.
my thoughts, in sum- we have NO NEED to celebrate or mourn the ideals the confederacy stood for to understand that the prisoners who died here were a product of gross mismanagement. in fact, we should be REVOLTED by the ideals, disgusted, EMBARRASSED.
i don’t really have a strong conclusion to end this on, but we must keep fighting for the black lives around us and work to repair the tragic injustice of not just the confederacy, but all of american history that has led to where we are today.
they lost the war. they died at the hands of the north. we can remember the lessons learned, remember that even the victors were cruel, but must we also remember and CELEBRATE the ideals for which the war’s losers stood for- racism, plain and simple?
absolutely not.
absolutely not.
and that was a brief (actually, pretty long) summary of an upstate town’s tangled history with the confederacy, and what remains of it today- i would love to hear input, especially from black voices.
keep fighting, keep protesting, do NOT give up!
educate yourselves, friends.
keep fighting, keep protesting, do NOT give up!
educate yourselves, friends.
hope you learned something today-
end of thread.
end of thread.
