Okay, I know these are very treacherous waters to wade into, but as someone who does social history work I gotta.
While there were undoubtedly plenty of atrocities committed against Black slaves and escaped/freed slaves during the American Civil War, this is almost certainly at best an exaggeration. It seems like OP might be conflating concentration camps and “contraband camps”, which weren’t amazing but weren’t Nazi/Ustasha/Khmer Rouge-style extermination camps like the one described here.
There were refugee camps during the war, and conditions in them weren’t awesome, especially because of overcrowding and a lack of planning and resources. People died, sometimes in significant numbers. But it wasn’t like this, and it wasn’t done like this.
(I wish I could provide better citations here, but that’s because I literally couldn’t find a single decent one that cited any primary or even good secondary sources. The one “historian” talking directly about this, as far as I can see, is a woman who also leads ghost tours and considers herself an expert on the paranormal. Which for most historians isn’t a great sign. All other blog posts and articles seem to be taking their cues from her, though they may not cite her. Otherwise the best I can do is secondhand stories about local historians in the linked thread. Plenty of things are hidden histories, but if you can’t find any primary sources related to them at all, that’s a red flag. People hide stuff, but rarely that well.)
Why does it matter to get this stuff right?
Well, first of all, it matters because it matters. But it also matters because it’s absolutely true that every time atrocity or genocide happens, someone works to cover it up. My doctoral dissertation deals with Nazi extermination camps, with a special focus on the lengths to which the SS went to conceal the existence of camps like Bełźec and Sobibor, down to razing them to the ground and camouflaging the remains as a farm. It matters to get this stuff right precisely because other people are working so hard to erase these things from history, and we have an obligation to not further muddy the waters.
We owe it to the dead to make sure that what we have is accurate.
All you had to do was shut up and scroll but you decided to come here and sound off where you should’ve just been quiet. But I got time for it today. So by definition, the Devil’s Punchbowl WAS a concentration camp being that freed slaves were forced to do hard labor and were killed in mass numbers with an estimated 20,000 black slaves killed my the Union army by way of either execution, disease, or simply just exhaustion.
Did I mention that the working and living conditions in this camp were so bad that these freed slaves would often times beg to be put back on the plantations? When they died or were murdered at the hands of the Union Army guards, they couldn’t take the bodies outside the camp so the guard would throw the prisoners a shovel and say “bury em where they drop.” Every once in a while when this area is flooded by the Mississippi River, skeletal remains of deceased slaves will wash up.
So no, in no way, shape, form, or fashion is this an “exaggeration at best” as your irrelevant little misinformed soul put it Becky. I’m very well versed in the history of MY people. So now just mind your little business and keep scrolling like you should have the first time
