Symposium Spotlight: Derek Maxfield and the Union Prisoner of War Machine
We’re sold out for the ECW Symposium! (We have been for almost three weeks, actually….) However, we still have one more speaker to feature in our Symposium Spotlight (so, if you didn’t get a ticket, you can see what you’re missing!)
Derek Maxfield will speak on “Point Lookout, Elmira, and the Union Prisoner of War Machine in 1864.” Derek is the author of the Emerging Civil War Series book Hellmira: The Union’s Most Infamous Civil War Prison Camp–Elmira, NY.
About the talk:
In 1864, there would be as much change and conflict within the world of Civil War prison camps as there would be in the military realm. The Overland Campaign of that year caused POW camps to explode in size and grow beyond the ability of authorities to sustain them well. This was the year that the infamous Andersonville prison opened in Georgia, in an effort to move Union prisoners out of the Richmond area—and out of reach of potential raids. For the Union, the largest prison camp was Point Lookout, officially Camp Hoffman, in Maryland, at the junction of the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay. In an effort to relieve the dangerously crowded conditions at Point Lookout, Union authorities decided to open another prison camp in New York’s Southern Tier at Elmira, NY. By the end of 1864, that camp, too, had exceeded its stated capacity while a smallpox epidemic threatened and hundreds of POWs suffered in tents as the cruel northern winter chilled them to the bone.
