I figured I have made the 1,000 mile trip across Dixie from my South Florida home to my Northern Kentucky home (used to be Cincinnati) about 150 times since the 1960s. I am making four round trips this year alone. According, I often stop at a place of interest along the way. The sights are getting slim, as most have already been on my itinerary. But this time I decided to visit the infamous Andersonville Confederate Prison and the new Prisoner of War Museu now located at the National Historic Site.

A few miles into Georgia, I veered off I-75 and started traversing a sea of white. Those old cotton fields spread across the red, sandy soil like a blanket on a bed. Mile after mile they spread, and I could envision a time in the 19th century where thousands of black slaves spent endless days picking the tiny cotton balls into sacks and baskets. Cotton was king in the heyday of the Plantation Era, and the South decided to fight for it’s right to maintain economic dominance and way of life. So along came the Civil War where thousands of soldiers from the North and South met in conflicts that resulted in death, injury and capture.

The incident of capture gave rise to Andersonville Prison. Located in South Georgia it is a remote area that was served by the railroad. The captured and injured Union soldiers were herded on trains and shipped to the Andersonville RR Station. There a 13 acre area had been fenced in and was capable of being guarded. There was fresh water from a stream but little else. The prisoners were given a simple canvas tent as there were no buildings on the grounds. They drank the water from the stream that soon became diseased and had some dried crackers to eat, when available. If they tried to escape, the local youth and old men had rifles with instruction to shoot to kill.

In a couple of years, the area accommodated 45,000 POWs of which 13,000 died of sickness and starvation. It was the shame of Dixie.

Now, the US government has erected a new POW Museum there. It shows the horrors of the German Stalags, the Japanese Death Camps, the Hanoi Hilton and some recent internment by Iraq in that war. It is not a pretty sight, as former American POWs beg for humane treatment of prisoners according to the Geneva Convention. Most of our enemies have never complied. Sen. John McCain is one of the presenter and has always been against prisoner interrogations and inhumane treatment, as he suffered for 5 years while in the hands of the North Vietnamese.

I was a sobering sight and I couldn’t get the images out of my head as I drove further north toward Atlanta.

This American Trilogy by Elvis Presley kept playing in my mind:

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