Volume 53 - No. 1
January 5, 2023
Andersonville by lyle e davis Andersonville, Georgia, is located in south-central Georgia, near the towns of Americus and Plains. Though this small Georgia town claimed only 20 citizens, Andersonville would become known as one of the more infamous names in history. Officially, it was known as Camp Sumpter. But, to the world, it will always be known as Andersonville. To the prisoners who endured Andersonville . . . it was known as Hell on Earth. Overseeing this monstrosity was Captain Henry Wirz, the commandant of Andersonville Prison and the only Confederate soldier convicted and executed for war crimes during the Civil War. Andersonville, Georgia, is the site of the best known of all the American Civil War (1861-1865) prisoner-of-war (POW) camps. How Did Andersonville Happen? Lacking a means for dealing with large numbers of captured troops early in the Civil War, the U.S. and Confederate governments relied on the traditional European system of parole and exchange of prisoners. The terms called for prisoners to give their word not to take up arms against their captors until they were formally exchanged for an enemy captive of equal rank. Parole was supposed to take place within 10 days of capture. Generally it was granted within a few days, especially after a major battle where thousands of troops were involved. Sometimes parolees went home to await notice of their exchange; sometimes they waited near their commands until the paperwork was processed. This practice evolved into a more formal exchange, and then was virtually discontinued altogether. Just one of the reasons for the practice
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of exchanging prisoners failing was the refusal by the Confederate Government to exchange or parole black prisoners. They threatened to treat black prisoners as slaves and to execute their white officers. While paroling was in force, many inequities surfaced in the system. Soldiers assigned to detention camps frequently suffered from shortages of food and clothing and poor sanitation and were victimized by a criminal element among them. The men often became pawns for the governments, officers at one point being denied parole until formally exchanged. Union authorities generally withheld parole and exchange from guerrillas, bushwhackers, and blockade-runners, which resulted in retaliatory action by the Confederacy. As paroles and exchanges became less frequent, the net result was the development of prison camps on both sides. Discussions on exchange continued until October 23, 1862, when United States Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton directed that all commanders of places of confinement be notified that there would be no more exchanges. This decision would greatly affect the large numbers of prisoners in both northern and southern prison camps. The so-called “holding pens” now became permanent prisons. Prisons that were open stockades existed only in the South, and the most infamous was Andersonville. The Hell Which Was Andersonville The history of Andersonville has startled and shocked the world with a tale of horror, of unspeakable living conditions. At times it seemed that the prison at Andersonville had been selected for the most terrible human sacrifice that the world had ever seen. Into its narrow walls were crowded thirty five thousand enlisted men. For long and weary months here they suffered, maddened, were murdered, and died. Here they lingered, unsheltered
from the burning rays of a tropical sun by day. One could, and did, witness every stage of mental and physical disease, as starving, emaciated, prisoners would wither away, festering with unhealed wounds; gnawed by the ravages of scurvy and gangrene; with swollen limbs and distorted faces, covered with vermin which they had no power to kill, exposed to the flooding rains which drove them drowning from the miserable holes in which, like pigs, they burrowed. The prisoners would lie in squalor, with naked limbs and matted hair. They were filthy with smoke and mud; soiled with the very excrement from which their weakness would not permit them to escape. They were eaten by the gnawing worms which their own wounds had attracted; with no bed but the earth; no covering but the sky; these men endured what has been described by many as a combination of the worst of Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Hell.
in the latter part of the summer of 1864 the Confederacy offered to unconditionally release prisoners if the Union would send ships to retrieve them. Union ships did not arrive until December of that year.
The deep south location, the availability of fresh water, and its prox-
To some, he is guilty of atrocities not repeated until Nazi Germany,
Andersonville See Page 2
Although death rates were high in other civil war prisons as well, none approached that of Andersonville. The condition of the prisoners at Andersonville on its liberation led Walt Whitman to write, “the dead there are not to be pitied as much as some of the living that have come from there--if they can be called living.” Clara Barton assisted with the processing and identification of bodies at Andersonville at the end of the war and realized the need for an organization to assist in cases of dire need. She founded the American Red Cross as a result sixteen years later. Captain Henry Wirtz