The last time we visited Andersonville was in 2014, a year before Jim's Mom died. His father died in 1985 and is buried there, and when his Mom died, she was buried there with him. Also, the POW Museum was not there, so this visit we were able to go through the museum, take pictures and read about the prisoners of war.
The POW Museum describes both the Civil War prison camp and the hardships, experiences and sacrifices of American POWs throughout history. No matter what war or what country; what age, rank, gender or ethnicity; what level of experience as a military combatant, the people who become POWs experience a common set of circumstances.
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| The hanging of Capt. Henry Wirz |
Who was Capt. Henry Wirz, and why was he hanged? Swiss-born Henry Wirz enlisted in the Confederate army early in the war and was soon detailed to work in the Richmond, Virginia, prison network. He worked at prisons in Virginia and Alabama before taking command of Andersonville in March 1864. At war's end, nearly 1,000 individuals were tried for violations of the laws of war. Captain Wirz remains the most famous of the officers executed for war crimes.
Two hundred and fifty spectators bought tickets to witness the execution in the Washington Arsenal on November 10, 1865. Many more gathered to watch the grim proceedings which took place within view of the U.S. Capitol. At 10:32am the trap was sprung and the crowd changed "Wirz, remember Andersonville."
"I know what orders are, Major, and I am being hanged for obeying them." ~~ Capt. Henry Wirz
There was a big write up about him, so I thought I would highlight him. Many complex circumstances led to the establishment of Camp Sumter and the terrible sufferings of those interred there. As commander of the inner stockade, Captain Wirz was the person many Union prisoners blamed for their conditions. To the Federal government, he symbolized all the horror and atrocity of Andersonville.
When the war ended, Wirz was brought to trial before a military commission. At first the Federal government attempted to charge Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee as co-conspirators, but eventually Wirz alone was indicted. He was charged with conspiring to "impair and injure the health and destroy the lives of federal prisoners" and with "murder in violation of the laws of war." After 63 days and 148 witnesses, Wirz was found guilty of one charge of conspiracy and 11 of 13 specifications of murder. He was sentenced to hang.
"The duties I had to perform were arduous and unpleasant, and I am satisfied that no man can ... blame me for things ... beyond my power to control. ... Still I now bear the odium, and men who were prisoners have seemed to wreak their vengeance upon me for what they have suffered." ~~ Capt. Henry Wirz
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| The Raiders |
To prevent a potential lynching of the Raiders by their fellow prisoners, Captain Wirz placed them under guard outside the stockade. He offered the prisoners a compromise ~~ he would be in charge of the accused and their trial -- by a judge and jury selected from within the stockade -- and he would only turn them over for execution if they were found guilty.
On the day of execution, Wirz marched the condemned men under separate guard into the stockade, making one final plea for their lives. When the prisoners refused, Wirz asked God to have mercy on the Raiders' souls.
Who were the Raiders? Only enlisted soldiers were imprisoned at Andersonville. With no Union officers to maintain order, life in the pen became anarchy. A gang known as the Raiders roamed the prison yard, bullying, robbing, and even murdering other prisoners. Eventually, with the blessing of Captain Wirz, the prisoners formed a police squad called the Regulators, arrested the Raiders, and tried and hanged the six ringleaders.
Before their execution, the six Raider leaders were court-martialed by their peers. Confederates provided lumber for the gallows, which was erected near the prisoners' South Gate. The remaining Raiders were forced to run a gauntlet formed by their fellow prisoners.
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| The Raiders' Leaders' Graves |
These six graves were deliberately set apart from the other Confederate graves; these six prisoners were buried with dishonor. The names on the headstones may not be accurate. Several of the Raiders were deserters who re-enlisted under aliases.
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| The U.S. in 1860 |
Each full factory symbol represents $100 million dollars of outpost. Partial factories represent proportionally less production. Among the slave-holding states, the darker tinting represents a higher percentage of slaves in population. The actual percentage is also indicated for each slave state. Northern states had abolished slavery. Within the south, slavery was more important the farther south one went. Slaves made up 55% of Mississippi's population but only 10% of Missouri's. The south had a few industrial centers. but the north had many more.
The Civil War was the defining event in United States history. The war brought an end to slavery and established the Union as perpetual. The costs were devastating ~~ 620,000 deaths and billions of dollars. War brought widespread destruction, especially in the south where most of the fighting occurred. The Civil War and its legacy continue to shape American life today. Each generation must come to terms with this great rupture in the national past.
On the eve of the war in 1860, northern states and southern states shared much, but differed in their economic and social structures. The north had twice the free population of the south and five times the industrial output. In the south, four million black slaves produced the great export crops, cotton above all, that were the backbone of the southern economy.
In the 1850s, tensions over the status of slavery in the territories frayed the bonds of union. Many white southerners insisted on the right to take slaves into the west. Meanwhile, many white northerners were growing stronger in their belief that the territories should be reserved for free, white labor. Free blacks, some half a million in number, longed to liberate their enslaved countrymen.
During the turbulent 1850s, the Republican Party arose. It fiercely opposed the expansion of slavery. When Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860 entirely with northern votes, many southern leaders were outraged. Seven Deep South states -- those most dependent on slavery -- left the Union to form the Confederate States of America. Following Fort Sumpter, four other states left. The evidence is compelling that the first seven states seceded because their leaders feared that slave property was no longer secure within the United States. Lincoln's administration would not accept the breakup of the Union, and the Civil War was the result.
On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation allowing blacks, enslaved and free, to enlist in the Union army. The North demanded all captured soldiers be exchanged equally, but the South refused to exchange black prisoners. Some Confederate officers ordered black killed, not captured. Some former slaves were returned to their owners, some were sold, and others were forced to work for the Confederacy.
Records show over 100 black soldiers were imprisoned at Andersonville. Black prisoners set up their own area near the South Gate, received no medical treatment, and were forced to work the burial detail and other hard labor. They were discriminated against by their captors and fellow prisoners, who believed they were the reason the Union refused to make prisoner exchanges.
At the trial of Captain Wirz black prisoners testified they were treated "just the same as any of the rest." However, punishment was severe. Pvt. William C. Jennings, 8th US Colored Troops, received 30 lashes for not going to work and was put in the stocks, while Isaac Hawkins of the 54th Massachusetts infantry received 250 of 500 lashes. Records show 33 blacks died at Andersonville and were buried side-by-side with fellow prisoners.
Americans continue to ask whether sectional conflict could have been settled short of war. Following the war, the 13th Amendment ended slavery, but the path to equality for black Americans had just begun. It took decades for the south to recover from the war's effects. These and other consequences of the war continue to affect us today.
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| These are wasted bodies of American soldiers who died during the Bataan Death March, April 1942 |
Many POWs endure the worst part of their captivity during transport from the battlefield to the prison camp. Few suffered more than the defenders of the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines during the Second World War. Approximately 10,000 American soldiers, along with 62,000 Filipinos, were forced to surrender to Japanese authority on April 9, 1942. Having already survived months of rough fighting on minimal rations, they were scarcely prepared for the ordeal that lay ahead. How many men died on the Death March will never accurately be known. Rough estimates put American deaths at 600 or 700; Filipino deaths somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000.
While the mortality rate of camps varies widely, many POWs have battled illness, faced death, witnessed suicides, or buried their closest friends. Survivors believe that denial helped them live. In the words of a survivor of the Bataan Death March, some survived because they "never realized just how rotten the situation was. Others survived day to day -- bullheaded stubbornness would be a good explanation."
"Death was all around. ... They had something called a hospital. It was not a hospital, it was a place to put the guys that were going to die." ~~ Capt. Lloyd Mills, POW in the Philippines and Japan, WWII
Being taken captive is as old as the history of war. The assumption that POWs have any rights at all, however, is a recent innovation.
In 1901 and 1911 Emogene Marshall traveled from Ohio to visit the grave of her brother, Edwin Niver, buried at Andersonville in grave 2, 183. In the decades following the Civil War, Americans were haunted by the deaths of their loved ones in military prisons. Although Andersonville is now the most infamous Civil War prison, some 150 others were set up across the country. In 1863 the Union and Confederate governments adopted laws of war to protect prisoners, yet some 56,000 soldiers died in captivity. How and why did this happen?
When the Civil War started, neither side was prepared to hold thousands of enemy prisoners. Although no formal exchange system existed early in the war, both armies paroled prisoners to lessen the burden of providing for captives. Prisoners of war were conditionally released, promising not to return to battle until officially exchanged.
A formal exchange system adopted in 1862 failed when the Confederacy refused to exchange or parole captured black US soldiers. In the South, captured Union soldiers were first housed in old warehouses and barns around Richmond, Virginia. As the number of prisoners increased, prisons were hastily erected in Florence, South Carolina; Millen and Andersonville, Georgia; and other locations. In the North, federal training camps were converted into prisons at Camp Douglas, Illinois; Camp Chase, Ohio; and Elmira, New York. Other Confederate prisoners were held at Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Fort Warren in Boston Harbor, and other coastal fortifications.
Confined soldiers suffered terribly from overcrowding, poor sanitation, and inadequate food. Mismanagement by war-weary governments worsened matters. Most prisoners died from disease, starvation, or exposure. The end of the war saved hundreds of prisoners from an untimely death, but for many the war's end came too late. For the men who survived, the memory of the atrocities they witnessed was the cruelest legacy of all.
In ancient times, prisoners of war were often sold into slavery, or worse, put to death. Beginning around 2000 B.C., valued warriors were ransomed for large sums. Over time, barter systems developed in which soldiers of equal rank were exchanged.
During the 20th Century, the treatment of prisoners became a subject of international law. At the Hague Convention of 1907, most western states agreed that "prisoners must be treated with humanity" and that they must receive the same food and clothing as the troops of the detaining power. While a vast improvement over the practices of previous centuries, the Hague Convention, nevertheless, proved inadequate during the First World War.
In 1929, 43 countries signed an expanded set of regulations. The 1929 Geneva Convention set more stringent standards for adequate food and shelter, the exchange of the sick and wounded, and payment for work required by the enemy. Confronted with the mistreatment of prisoners during World War II, the world community convened in 1949 to modify the Geneva Convention in an on-going effort to protect the rights of POWs.
Most POW camps quickly develop barter systems, so that goods and services can still be exchanged when currency is scarce. Fueled by a new shipment of Red Cross parcels, this is how the barter system worked in a POW camp in the Philippines in WWII, where the unit of exchange became one package of not-too-moldy Chesterfields.
Strictly forbidden by camp authorities, handmade crystal radio receiver sets provided POWs in Germany and Japan the most accurate source of news. Made from bartered, smuggled and stolen parts, these crude sets allowed POWs to hear something other than enemy propaganda broadcasts. Through the BBC and other stations, they kept abreast of how the war was progressing from an Allied perspective.
"We christened this tiny dungeon 'Alcatraz' ... Even though we were all kept in locked cells and in locked leg irons within those cells except at midday, the Vietnamese seemed convinced we would figure out a way to escape. ... There was never an instant when our little courtyard did not have at one armed guard on patrol." ~~ Adm. James B. Stockdale, Vietnam POW
During the Vietnam War, American POWs taken captive near the U Minh forest in Vietnam were held in crude wooden huts, or "tiger cages" as they have become known. Made of poles taken from the mangrove swamps nearby, some cages were large enough to accommodate ten or twelve men. Solitary cells, used to break a POW's will during the Viet Cong's indoctrination process, were much smaller, just long enough to fit a man lying down, not high enough to let him stand.
Less than 1% of Union prisoners of war at Andersonville made successful escapes. Many others tried and failed. Those who succeeded did so by running away while on work detail, not by tunneling. Most tunnels either caved in or were tipped off to Confederate guards by turncoats.
Anderson prison, officially named Camp Sumter, occupied a bare 26-1/2 acres enclosed by a double palisade made of pine logs. A railing inside the stockade constituted a "deadline." Guards had orders to shoot anyone who crossed the deadline. No shelter was furnished; men bought wooden poles for $1.50 and pooled their blankets to make tents. Water came from wells the prisoners dug and from the Stockade Branch of Sweetwater Creek which ran through the center of the camp. Open latrines bordered the lower end and sewage from the guards' camp, outside the stockade, also emptied into it. Spread by flies and maggots, a fatal dysentery, along with scurvy, resulted in a death rate of up to 130 men daily.
After the breakdown of the prisoner exchange system by mid-1863, the prison population exploded in both the North and the South. These Confederates captured at Cold Harbor wait to be transported to the Union prison camp at Point Lookout, Maryland.
More than 45,000 Union soldiers were confined at Andersonville during the course of the Civil War. The first prisoners arrived here in February 1864. By August of that year, the 26-acre stockade was home to more than 33,000 prisoners, becoming in one prisoner's words, "a sickly, dirty place." When the war ended in April 1865, almost 13,000 had died from disease, poor sanitation, malnutrition, overcrowding, or exposure to the elements, a death rate of approximately 29%.
"My heart aches for these poor wretches, Yankees though they are, and I am afraid God will suffer some terrible retribution to fall upon us for letting such things happen. If the Yankees should ever come to southwest Georgia and go to Anderson and see the graves there, God have mercy on the land." ~~ A Southern woman who climbed a guard tower and looked down upon the stockade, 1864
Belle Isle, located in the middle of the James River near Richmond, Virginia, came into use in 1863 when the city's six other prisons became overcrowded. Officers remained behind at Libby prison and other converted warehouses, tobacco factories, and city jails. The enlisted men and non-commissioned officers confined on Belle Isle were housed in tents. By November 1863, 6300 were encamped on a site intended for half that number. When the Andersonville stockade was ready for prisoners in February 1864, several hundred captives were transferred from Belle Isle, a move that proved fatal for many. Two other Civil War prisons which used tents for shelter were Point Lookout, Maryland, and until barracks were built, Elmira, New York.
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| The North Gate |
The North Gate was the main prison entrance; it was where the captured Union soldiers marched from the village railroad station to the main entrance. After prisoners passed through the outer door, it was barred behind them. Then the inner gate swung open on the prison yard. New arrivals, or "fresh fish" as they were often called, had no idea what awaited them there.
"Five hundred weary men moved along slowly through the double lines of guards. Two massive wooden gates, with heavy iron hinges and bolts, swung open as we stood there, and we passed through into the space beyond. We were in Andersonville." ~~ Pvt. John McElroy, 16th Illinois Calvary
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| The "Sinks" |
A branch of Sweetwater Creek ran through the prison, and was their primary water source. However, the stockade posts slowed the current, turning the stream banks into acres of stagnant swamp. The prisoners' "sinks" or latrines stood downstream. Overcrowding soon fouled the water, and the sluggish current failed to wash sewage out of the prison. The stream's bacteria quickly became lethal. To the Confederate officials, this source of fresh water made Andersonville an ideal site for a prison. Just upstream, however, the bakehouse and guards' camp polluted the creek before it even entered the stockade.
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| Providence Spring |
Then one day during a heavy rainstorm ~~ August 14, 1864 ~~ a spring suddenly gushed from the hillside. The prisoners were desperate for fresh water, and over time the event became legendary. Several men claimed to have seen lightening strike this spot just before the spring burst forth. Men were also digging the stockade trench in this area and may have covered up the spring's outlet. Whether an act of nature or divine providence, the effect of the stream was an answer to thousands of prayers.
From the heights near headquarters, Capt. Henry Wirz could observe everything within the prison walls. Envision the white post perimeter as the stockade; 30,000 human beings within that area; the din from all those voices, the groans from the hospital, the shouts of the guards, the smell of unwashed clothes and bodies. Today's landscape of quiet grass softens for us the images of Andersonville. Wirz, the prison commandant, did not have that luxury.
Some ten miles south of Andersonville, residents of Americus complained of the smell. By the summer of 1864, the stockade became so overcrowded that all those individual prisoners may have appeared as a single, shuffling organism.
The men were wary of going to the prison hospital. They soon realized that few patients returned. Knowing that medicines were in short supply, even the sickest men resisted going to the hospital. They preferred to die among friends and comrades.
"The hospital is a tough place to be in .... In some cases before a man is fairly dead, he is stripped of everything, coat, pants, shirt, finger rings (if he has any). These the nurses trade to the guards." ~~ John L. Ransom, 9th Michigan Calvary, April 15, 1864
This photograph was taken in August 1864 from a sentry box just downslope from here. The photographer was A. J. Riddle, who was preparing a report for the Confederate government. Riddle's seven glass-plate negatives were apparently the only photographs taken of Andersonville prison during the war. Like a double exposure, the surviving photos superimpose the historic reality on today's pastoral scene. The below photograph is the same piece of ground Riddle photographed. The photograph shows the deadline, a camp road, and the crowed shebangs. Shelters were more scattered in the swampy area near the creek.
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| Prisoner Burials |
The prisoners' headstones are only inches apart. As the death rate at Andersonville escalated to 100 per day, officials abandoned the use of pine-box coffins and had the bodies buried shoulder to shoulder in trenches. At first only numbered stakes marked the prisoners' graves. The dead might have remained unidentified except for the efforts of Dorence Atwater, a former prisoner.
Prison officials assigned Dorence Atwater to keep records of the dead. Hoping to notify bereaved relatives after the war, Atwater made a second copy of the death list, which he smuggled out in a lining of his jacket. When he accompanied Clara Barton to Andersonville in July 1865, they were able to match his list with the numbered stakes. Each prisoner could then be honored by name.
"If a man died in good clothes he was buried nearly naked. The living needed apparel; the dead none." ~~ G.E. Reynolds, 86th Ohio Infantry, August 3, 1864
After the War ~~ What happened to Andersonville prisoners? Hundreds died on their way home when the steamboat Sultana exploded and sank near Memphis, Tennessee on April 27, 1865. Many others died of diseases contracted during their imprisonment. In 1890 the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veterans organization, purchased the site. The Women's Relief Corps of the Grand Army took charge of the property, hoping to create a memorial park. In 1910 the Women's Relief Corps donated the prison site to the people of the United States. It was administered by the War Department and the Department of the Army until Congress designated it a national historic site in October 1970.
Surviving records indicate that there were 195,000 Union POWs with a death rate of 15%, or 30,000; and 215,000 Confederate POWs with a death rate of 12%, or 26,000.
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And last but not least, we visited the graves of Jim's parents. His dad was buried at Andersonville in 1985, and his mother in 2015. Her information is on the back side of his father's. Look at all those grave markers behind Jim -- those are all the veterans who have passed since 1985. Those are not all of them either, there were more across the street and near one of the corners.
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