If you count Fort Sumter as the beginning of the war (April 12, 1861), then the war has been going on for one year and four months, and still Lincoln is writing his penpals emphatically that slavery is not the issue. Hmmm.

We know that Andersonville never would have happened had not Lincoln and Grant quit exchanging prisoners. They had settled on a strategy of victory by attrition. Your comments about Andersonville are the kind of disinformation the hatchet media loves to spew. It just makes those who learn the truth that much more surprised.

Of course, you didn't mention places like Camp Douglas in Chicago, Camp Chase in Columbus, Ohio or Elmira in New York. The Confederate POWs were intentionally starved and deprived of adequate clothing and medical attention even though supplies were plentiful in the North. Their intentional cruelty is inexcusable, yet the officers responsible were rewarded and promoted by Lincoln and his minions.

Confederates, on the other hand, were dealing with severe shortages of food and medicine. The guards at Andersonville ate the same pitiful rations as the prisoners and suffered from the same ravages of illness. Confederate officials pleaded with U.S. officials to send in their own doctors, food and medicines for the POWs at Andersonville. In desperation, the Confederates offered to deliver U.S. POWs to the port of Savannah----with NO exchange required. At one point, an entire trainload of POWs were transported to Savannah for this purpose---to be transported back to U.S. soil by U.S. ships. The U.S. government refused to take them and the entire trainload had to be returned to Andersonville. Who is really the cruel and inhumane party in this tragedy? The government in Washington, D.C.

As you point out, Confederate Heritage Month would afford us many opportunities to address questions about why so many "educated" people in Georgia, the South and across the country know so little about the true history of the War Between the States, or the War for Southern Independence, or the War to Preserve Federal Revenues. Why are there people like Eric Foner writing commentaries putting forth Abraham Lincoln as anti-war constitutionalists? Author Thomas J. DiLorenzo, in his essay entitled "The Unknown Lincoln," explains the prevailing Lincoln Mythology this way:

"It is a testament to the effectiveness of 140 years of government propaganda that a 308 page book filled with true facts about Lincoln could be entitled "The Lincoln No One Knows." It is not a matter of a poorly-performing government education system but quite the opposite: The government schools have performed superbly in indoctrinating generations of American school children with a pack of lies, myths, omissions, and falsehoods about Lincoln and his war of conquest. As Richard Bensel wrote in Yankee Leviathan, any study of the American state should begin in 1865. The power of any state ultimately rests upon a series of government-sponsored myths, and there is none more prominent than the Lincoln Myth."