Andersonville Prison (1864-1865): The Civil War's Deadliest Camp

Andersonville Prison, officially Camp Sumter, was a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp near the village of Andersonville in south-west Georgia, in use from February 1864 to April 1865. About 45,000 Union soldiers passed through it, and nearly 13,000 died of disease, malnutrition and exposure. It became the most notorious prison of the American Civil War and led to the trial and execution of its commandant, Henry Wirz.

Background

Early in the war captured soldiers were usually exchanged or paroled under the Dix-Hill Cartel of 1862. The system collapsed in 1863, chiefly because the Confederacy refused to treat captured Black Union soldiers as ordinary prisoners. In 1864 General Ulysses S. Grant also halted exchanges, arguing that returning men strengthened the outnumbered Confederate armies.

Prison populations on both sides swelled. The Confederacy decided to move prisoners away from Richmond to a remote area of Georgia with railway access and supposedly abundant food, and built a new stockade there.

Conditions

The first prisoners arrived in late February 1864, before the camp was finished. The stockade of pine logs originally enclosed about 16.5 acres and was enlarged to roughly 26.5 acres in mid-1864. It was intended for about 10,000 men, but by August 1864 it held more than 32,000, making it for a time one of the largest “cities” in the Confederacy.

There were no barracks. Prisoners built shelters, called “shebangs”, from blankets, sticks and mud, or dug holes in the ground. A small stream, Stockade Branch, was the only water supply and soon became an open sewer. Rations of coarse cornmeal and occasional meat were often raw and insufficient.

Scurvy, dysentery and diarrhoea killed men in large numbers; in August 1864 about 100 prisoners died each day on average. A light railing known as the “deadline” ran about 19 feet inside the wall, and guards shot prisoners who crossed it. After a storm in August 1864 a spring broke out inside the stockade, which prisoners named Providence Spring.

Prisoners also preyed on one another. A gang known as the Raiders robbed and beat fellow captives until other prisoners, the “Regulators”, arrested them with the commandant’s permission. Six Raiders were tried by a prisoner court and hanged on 11 July 1864.

In September 1864, after the fall of Atlanta brought William T. Sherman’s army within reach, most prisoners were moved to other camps in Georgia and South Carolina. Sherman’s later March to the Sea passed far to the north-east of the camp. Andersonville continued to hold smaller numbers until the war ended in April 1865.

Key people

• Henry Wirz – Swiss-born Confederate captain who commanded the inner prison from spring 1864.
• John H. Winder – Confederate general in charge of prisons, who died in February 1865 before he could be tried.
• Dorence Atwater – Union prisoner who secretly copied the death register while working in the hospital.
• Clara Barton – nurse and later founder of the American Red Cross, who helped identify the graves in 1865.

Aftermath and the Wirz trial

After the war, Northern outrage at photographs of emaciated survivors led to the arrest of Henry Wirz. A military commission tried him in Washington from August to October 1865 for conspiring to harm prisoners and for specific murders. He was found guilty and hanged on 10 November 1865, one of very few people executed for war crimes committed during the Civil War.

The trial remains controversial. Critics argue that some witness evidence was unreliable and that Wirz was a scapegoat for the failures of the whole Confederate system, which struggled to feed even its own soldiers. Defenders of the verdict point to the camp’s needless cruelties and the lack of effort to improve conditions.

In summer 1865 Atwater and Clara Barton went to Andersonville with a team that used his list to mark the graves. Of nearly 13,000 burials, only about 460 could not be identified. The site became a national cemetery in 1865.

By the numbers

Prison conditions were also deadly in some Union camps, such as Elmira in New York, where about a quarter of the Confederate prisoners died.

Legacy

Andersonville became a bitter symbol in post-war politics, used by Northern politicians to attack the former Confederacy, while some Southerners defended Wirz; the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected a monument to him in Andersonville village in 1909. In 1970 the prison site became Andersonville National Historic Site, and the National Prisoner of War Museum opened there in 1998.

Timeline

• 1864, late February: The first Union prisoners arrive at Camp Sumter.
• 1864, 11 July: Six Raiders are hanged inside the stockade.
• 1864, August: The population peaks at over 32,000; Providence Spring appears.
• 1864, September: Most prisoners are transferred to other camps.
• 1865, April: The camp closes as the war ends after the surrender at Appomattox.
• 1865, 10 November: Henry Wirz is hanged in Washington.
• 1970, 16 October: Andersonville National Historic Site is established.

Why it matters

Andersonville showed how the collapse of prisoner exchanges, wartime shortages and neglect could turn a camp into a place of mass death. It shaped American debates about the treatment of prisoners of war and is preserved today as a memorial to all American prisoners of war.