Everything about The Andersonville Prison totally explained
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
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
Andersonville 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 from
dysentery and were buried in mass graves, the usual procedure there. Some of the guards of Andersonville also died for the same reasons as the prisoners — however, it's highly debated whether these deaths were the same as the others or if they were from common factors in the American Civil War, such as
trench foot.
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.
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.
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
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 wasn't 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.
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