Modern forensics are answering Civil War-era questions in rural Georgia
Investigating a 157-year-old crime scene.
Three hours east of Atlanta, outside a town called Millen, Georgia, a small team of investigators is trying to solve a 157-year-old mystery by digging around in the dirt.
Understanding exactly what happened outside Millen, a swampy town of 4,000 people, could help answer what went down during a skirmish during the waning months of the Civil War, and help dispel myths about the treatment of some Union prisoners in the Confederacy.
A team led by archaeologist Ryan McNutt, of Georgia Southern University, recently completed a field study outside Millen where they dug up liquor bottles, ceramic plates, guns and shell casings dating back to 1864.
Surveying the land around the Millen woods — where lynch mobs once congregated — is less of a dreary historical assignment, though, than a probe into a buried cold case.
“There’s a lot of Civil War misinformation out there we need to correct,” said McNutt. “A lot of historical sources are the equivalent of a witness statement to a detective after a crime, where they’re presenting a narrative that’s subject to biases and influences.
“But this kind of archaeological data is a forensic record.”
It works like this: McNutt was reading through letters from soldiers who were in Georgia when Union General William Tecumseh Sherman embarked on the March to the Sea.
Recollections from Confederates in the area in 1864 mention encountering Sherman’s troops and engaging them in hit-and-run encounters, harassing supply lines and burning bridges in the army’s path to slow Georgia’s eventual fall.
Using diaries and notes as a guide, McNutt used light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technology to scan ground in the area. LiDAR tools sift through modern earthworks like shrubs and topsoil to detail how an area once looked, and have been used to find everything from old structures in Angkor Wat to vast cityscapes in the jungles of Central America.
Here, the LiDAR maps returned evidence of downtrodden paths indicating troop movements, and neat lines of spent shell casings that only could have been left by formations of enlisted men. The spent bullet rounds flew out of a gun when a soldier pulled a trigger, burying itself in the ground. Long lines of riflemen pulling the trigger simultaneously produced long lines of discharge in the ground where they stood.
When McNutt and his team brought metal detectors into the area, they found enough artifacts to prove that an hour-long gunfight between a total of roughly 100 Confederates (Alabama’s Ninth Division, to be exact) and Union fighters from Sherman’s famed XX corps occurred, likely on Dec. 2 or 3rd, 1864.
“We almost immediately started turning up old munitions, horse tack, bridal balls and stuff that fell off of saddles,” the historian says now. “And the mapping software pointed out areas of approach and withdrawal — areas where folks were concealed to take cover on oncoming fire.”
The science is enough to identify the person who likely held a weapon, or the percussion caps that ignited at the sound of gunfire.
“You can use that all to track an individual’s behavior,” McNutt added. “A hammer will leave a fingerprint mark. And there’s a good possibility that if you have percussion caps and cased ammunition, you can follow a person’s movements around a conflict site.”
By the time of the gunfight outside the Lawton Station rail depot, it was clear the war would soon be over. The Confederacy’s high-water mark at Gettysburg was 18 months before. Sherman’s command of 66,000 soldiers was destroying supply lines, taking on enslaved people as refugees and ultimately capturing Savannah with only intermittent resistance from 13,000-or-so Southerners.
With a massive Union army approaching, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Confederate guards at Camp Lawton, a nearby stockade that held more than 10,000 captured prisoners-of-war, ran off.
Examining the Camp Lawton site now, the team of archaeologists and historians from Georgia Southern have uncovered hundreds of plates, pieces of silverware, empty liquor bottles, discarded tins of beef, as well as piles of contraband. Since the site made national news in 2010, McNutt and his team are using the artifacts to try to understand the severity of life in a 19th Century POW camp.
Life was miserable for captured soldiers on both sides of the war. Some 15.5% of POWs held in prison camps in the South died, compared to roughly 12% of those jailed in Union areas. Images of surviving POWs who lived through the horrors of Confederate camps, particularly Andersonville, galvanized newspaper readers after the war.
“There are Union POW narratives talking about deprivation and strife they experienced in this camp, and having no access to medicine or supplies,” McNutt told me.
“Some of that is a post-war treatment from POWs who spent almost their entire war in a camp, and want to come off as valorous as someone who fought on the battlefield,” he said. “But excavations show there were movements and supplies coming in, even if the place was no paradise.”
Digs in the guard camp have turned up tinned rations like salted pork and sardines. Plates with fork and knife marks — indicating guards had access to meat that required cutting — were buried nearby, while the captives’ quarters had more spoons and bowls, which seems to indicate the incarcerated Union soldiers’ main access was to stew and rice.
“These are mostly kids who were 16 or 17 years old at the time, and they were certainly getting a high quality of beef and tumblers and whiskey bottles and some other luxury goods,” McNutt said. “That’s gone, they would have taken it with them, but we can see whatever’s left.
“Archaeology is just the science of garbage,” he added.
in Buffalo, curry spice meets Texas BBQ
[h/t to everybody’s favorite chef, Cam Smith]
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one more thing
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