Andersonville Prison

Andersonville prison

The Andersonville prison, located at Camp Sumter, was the largest Confederate military prison during the American Civil War. The site of the prison is now Andersonville National Historic Site in Andersonville, Georgia. It includes the site of the Civil War prison, the Andersonville National Cemetery, and the National Prisoner of War Museum. More than 13,000 Union prisoners died there, mostly of diseases. Captain Henry Wirz, commandant, was the only Civil War soldier executed for war crimes.

From November 1863 until the end of the Civil War it was a Confederate military prison. A tract of 16.5 acres (67,000 m²) of land near the village was cleared of trees and enclosed with a stockade. Prisoners began to arrive in February 1864, before the prison was completed and before adequate supplies had been received, and in May their number amounted to about 10,000. In June the stockade was enlarged so as to include 26.5 acres (107,000 m²), but the congestion was only temporarily relieved, and in August the number of prisoners exceeded 33,000. No shelter had been provided for the inmates: the first arrivals made rude sheds from the debris of the stockade; the others made tents of blankets and other available pieces of cloth, or dug pits in the ground.

Photo of Andersonville prisoners and tents

Because of the scarce resources of the Confederacy, the prison was frequently short of food, and even when this was sufficient in quantity it was of a poor quality and poorly prepared on account of the lack of cooking utensils. The water supply, deemed ample when the prison was planned, became polluted under the congested conditions. During the summer of 1864 the prisoners suffered greatly from hunger, exposure, and disease, and in seven months about a third of them died. In the autumn, after the capture of Atlanta, all the prisoners who could be moved were sent to Millen, Georgia, and Florence, South Carolina. At Millen better arrangements prevailed, and when, after General William Tecumseh Sherman began his march to the sea, the prisoners were returned to Andersonville, the conditions there were somewhat improved.

The execution of Henry Wirz before the US Capitol as the trap door is sprung

During the war 49,485 prisoners were received at the Andersonville prison, and of these about 13,000 died. The terrible conditions suffered there were mostly due to disease (promoted by severe overcrowding), the shortage of food in the Confederate States, the incompetence of the prison officials, and the refusal of the Federal authorities in 1864 to make exchanges of prisoners, thus filling the stockade with unlooked-for numbers. After the war Henry Wirz, the superintendent, was tried by a court-martial on charges of war crimes and on November 10, 1865, was hanged. Wirz was the only Prominent Confederate to have his trial heard and concluded (Even the prosecution for Jefferson Davis dropped their case). The revelation of the sufferings of the prisoners was one of the factors that shaped public opinion regarding the South in the Northern states, after the close of the Civil War. The prisoners' burial ground at Andersonville has been made a national cemetery, and contains 13,714 graves of which 921 are marked "unknown".

It should be noted that many guards of Andersonville also died for the same reasons as the prisoners.

See also

• Camp Douglas (Chicago)

External links

• Andersonville National Historic Site at NPS.gov
• See Andersonville: Prisoner of War Camp for a lesson on the prison camp from the National Park Service's Teaching with Historic Places.