Andersonville Prison

Andersonville National Historic Site
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
Nearest city	Andersonville, Georgia, Americus, Georgia
Area	495 acres (2 km²)
Built	April, 1864
Architectural style	No Style Listed
NRHP reference No.	70000070
Added to NRHP	October 16, 1970

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. Most of the site actually lies in extreme southwestern Macon County, adjacent to the east side of Andersonville. It includes the site of the Civil War prison, the Andersonville National Cemetery, and the National Prisoner of War Museum. In all, 12,913 Union prisoners died there because of abuse, starvation, malnutrition, and disease.

Background

Reconstruction of part of the stockade wall.

Early in the Civil War, prisoners were commonly paroled and sent home to await a formal exchange before they could return to active service. After an incident at Fort Pillow in Tennessee during which Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest's troops executed a group of mostly black Union troops after their surrender, Union General Ulysses S. Grant voided that policy on the Union's part, and Federal authorities began to hold Confederate captives in formal prison camps rather than paroling them, until the Confederacy pledged to treat white and black Union soldiers alike. Confederate President Jefferson Davis and General Robert E. Lee refused this proposal and Confederate military and political leaders began to likewise construct prison camps to hold Union prisoners. Maj. Gen. Howell Cobb, former governor of Georgia, suggested the interior of that state as a possible location for these new camps since it was thought to be quite far from the front lines and would be relatively immune to Federal cavalry raids. A site was selected in Sumter County and the new prison opened in February 1864.

Conditions

Photo of Andersonville prisoners and tents

Andersonville Prison was frequently undersupplied with food. Even when sufficient quantities of food were supplied, the supplies were of poor quality and they were poorly prepared. The water supply, planned to be enough when Andersonville Prison was designed, became polluted when too many Union prisoners were housed by the Confederate authorities within the prison walls.

During the summer of 1864, Union prisoners suffered greatly from hunger, exposure, and disease. Within seven months, about a third of them died from dysentery and were buried in mass graves, the standard practice by Confederate prison authorities at Andersonville.

Some of the Confederate guards at Andersonville are said to have also died for the same reasons as the prisoners. However, it is debated whether these deaths were due to the same causes as their prisoners or if they were from other common factors in the American Civil War, such as trench foot.

There is no debate on one issue: the Union prisoners suffered more deaths than the Confederate guards did at Andersonville Prison.

A Union soldier described his entry into the prison camp:

"As we entered the place, a spectacle met

our eyes that almost froze our blood with horror, and made our hearts fail within us. Before us were forms that had once been active and erect;—stalwart men, now nothing but mere walking skeletons, covered with filth and vermin. Many of our men, in the heat and intensity of their feeling, exclaimed with earnestness. "Can this be hell?" "God protect us!" and all thought that He alone could bring them out alive from so terrible a place. In the center of the whole was a swamp, occupying about three or four acres of the narrowed limits, and a part of this marshy place had been used by the prisoners as a sink, and excrement covered the ground, the scent arising from which was suffocating. The ground allotted to our ninety was near the edge of this plague-spot, and how we were to live through the warm summer weather in the midst of such fearful surroundings, was more

than we cared to think of just then."

At Andersonville, a light fence known as the deadline was erected approximately 19-25 feet (5.8-7.6 m) inside the stockade wall to demarcate a no-man's land keeping the prisoners away from the stockade wall. Anyone crossing this line was shot by sentries posted at intervals around the stockade wall.

Andersonville prison

The guards, disease, starvation, and exposure were not all that prisoners had to deal with. A group of prisoners, calling themselves the "Raiders," attacked their fellow inmates to steal food, jewellery, money, or even clothing. They were armed mostly with clubs, and even killed to get what they wanted. Several months later, another group rose up to stop the larceny, calling themselves "Regulators." They caught nearly all of the "Raiders" and these were tried by a judge (Peter "Big Pete" McCullough) and jury selected from a group of new prisoners. This jury upon finding the "Raiders" guilty set punishment upon them. These included running the gauntlet, being sent to the stocks, ball and chain, and, in six cases, hanging.

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.

Some of the monuments at Andersonville.

During the war 41,000 prisoners were received at the Andersonville prison, and of these 12,913 died. A continual controversy among historians is the nature of the deaths and the reasons for it, with some contending that it was deliberate Confederate war crimes toward Union prisoners and others contending that it was merely the result of disease (promoted by severe overcrowding), the shortage of food in the Confederate States, the incompetence of the prison officials, and the refusal of the Confederate authorities to parole black soldiers, resulting in the imprisonment of soldiers from both sides, thus overfilling the stockade.

Aftermath

Andersonville National Cemetery

After the war, Henry Wirz, commandant at Camp Sumter, was tried by court-martial, presided over by Union General Lew Wallace and featuring chief JAG (Judge Advocate General)'s prosecutor Norton Parker Chipman on charges of conspiracy and murder. A number of former prisoners testified on conditions at Andersonville, many accusing Wirz of specific acts of cruelty. Some of these accounts have subsequently been determined by historians to have been exaggerated or false. The court also considered official correspondence from captured Confederate records, perhaps the most damaging of which was a letter to the Confederate Surgeon General by Dr. James Jones, who in 1864 was sent by Richmond to investigate conditions at Camp Sumter. Wirz presented evidence that he pleaded to Confederate authorities to try to get more food and tried to improve the conditions for the prisoners inside. Unfortunately for Wirz, President Abraham Lincoln had recently been assassinated, so the political environment was not sympathetic. Wirz was found guilty of murder and was sentenced to death. On November 10, 1865 he was hanged. Wirz was the only Confederate official to be tried and convicted of war crimes resulting from the Civil War. 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".

In 1891 the Grand Army of the Republic, Department of Georgia bought the site of Andersonville Prison from membership and subscriptions. The site was purchased by the Federal Government in 1910.

See also

• Prisoner-of-war camp
• Camp Douglas (Chicago)
• Camp Morton
• Dix-Hill Cartel: The agreement reached in July 1862 to regulate prisoner of war exchanges.
• Elmira Prison
• Johnson's Island
• Libby Prison

Bibliography

• Chipman, The Horrors of Andersonville Rebel Prison (San Francisco, 1891)
• McElroy, John, Andersonville: A Story of Rebel Military Prisons (Toledo, 1879)
• Spencer, A Narrative of Andersonville (New York, 1866)
• Stevenson, The Southern Side, or Andersonville Prison (Baltimore, 1876)
• Rhodes, James, History of the United States, volume v (New York, 1904), for an impartial account.
• Marvel, William, "Andersonville: The Last Depot", University of North Carolina Press, 1994
• "A Perfect Picture of Hell: Eyewitness Accounts by Civil War Prisoners from the 12th Iowa", edited by Ted Genoways & Hugh H. Genoways, University of Iowa Press, 2001

External links

• Andersonville Civil War Prison Historical Background
• Andersonville National Historic Site at NPS.gov
• “Andersonville: Prisoner of War Camp”, a National Park Service Teaching with Historic Places (TwHP) lesson plan
• Andersonville Civil War Prison