Andersonville's stockade was crowded with prisoners. They used whatever they could for shelter; some built tents or lean-tos out of blanket scraps. (Photo from The Civil War)
Violence: William "Mosby" Collins
The prisoner of war camp at Andersonville was hastily constructed because there was an overcrowding of prisoners in Belle Isle Prison and Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia. The location for Andersonville was selected by Captain W. Sidney Winder, the son of General John Winder. On November 24, 1863, Captain Winder was told to find a location deep in the Confederacy that was safe from attack and that had an abundance of food. Captain Winder felt he had found the perfect location for the prison in southwest central Georgia at Station Number 8 of the George Southwestern Railroad. The location was accessible by train, abundant in produce and grain, and was far from the fighting. Benjamin Dykes, the owner and operator of the local sawmill and gristmill, offered the land for the prison to be built on. The land, heavily wooded with pine and oak, was located one and a half miles east of the railroad. The ground sloped gently on both sides to a five foot wide stream, a branch of Sweet Water Creek (Speer 259).
After obtaining the site, Captain Winder ordered that construction begin but the locals opposed the building of a war prison in their community. After getting the locals’ consent, the construction was further delayed by a lack of a work force. Finally, Winder forced slaves from local plantations to help construct the prison. Before construction could begin, a road into the area had to be cleared by axmen. The Confederacy originally planned to build a prison that would house 8,000 to 10,000 Union prisoners of war. Unfortunately, the construction of barracks to house soldiers was impossible for the Confederacy. The destruction of the railroads, food processing centers and distribution centers throughout the upper South resulted in a lack of funds. Therefore, the Confederacy decided to quickly build a simple stockade, the cheapest form of confinement. The area was cleared by January, and the fallen trees were stripped of limbs, round-hewed, and cut into twenty foot long pieces. Then the logs were dropped into five foot deep trenches to create a fifteen feet tall double stockade wall with the logs so close together that it was impossible to see through. The result was a 16.5 acre human corral in the shape of a parallelogram (Speer 259).
On February 25, 1864, the first prisoners were brought to the Andersonville facility, even though the stockade walls and bakehouses were not even completed. The prisoners were given uncooked rations: a pound of meal, a pound of sweet potatoes, and a pound of beef or one-half pound of bacon. The prisoners were also given an iron bake pan. By April, the pound of meal was reduced to one pint of meal. When the bakery was finished in May, the prisoners received the same rations as the Confederate soldiers guarding them (Speer 137).
The lack of barracks forced the prisoners had to make their own shelters. The first arrivals used scrapwood left over from the stockade to build huts scattered throughout the camp. Later arrivals used whatever they could for shelter; some built tents or lean-tos out of blanket scraps. Other prisoners dug holes, covered the bottom with pine needles, and erected blankets on sticks. These simple shelters were spread throughout the stockade in no particular arrangement (Speer 161).
The crude shelters soon crowded the stockade as prisoners rapidly filled the camp. Before being relieved of command, Colonel Alexander Persons, Andersonville’s first commander, decided to expand the camp by ten acres. A prisoner detail of 130 men enlarged the stockade on the north side. The addition was completed on June 30, after Colonel Winder assumed command. On July 1, a ten foot hole was made in the old north wall. Thirteen thousand of the prison’s 25,000 inmates were told to move within two hours or they would lose all of their belongings. By the morning of July 2, the old north wall had disappeared because the prisoners used pieces of it for fuel and shelter. The new addition made the camp 26.5 acres and gave it a capacity of 10,000 men, which was an average of 377 men per acre. However, within a few weeks, the population grew to 29,000 men, which is an average of 1,100 men per acre. The population of Andersonville was the highest during August 1864, when Andersonville was the fifth largest city in the Confederacy (Speer 262).
As the number of prisoners at Andersonville increased, the rations decreased. They stopped receiving rations in the following order: salt, sweet potato, cornmeal, and then meat. Not only did the amount of rations decrease, but the frequency of receiving rations was reduced. On one occasion, The prisoners were so hungry that they mobbed a wagon delivering bread to the camp. Captain Wirz, the third commander of Andersonville, punished the prisoners by canceling their rations for that day.
The combination of hunger and boredom forced the prisoners to find things to entertain themselves with. Not only did the prisoners play checkers, chess and cards, but they invented some games of their own. One game was to find different ways to catch low-flying swallows. Once the soldiers caught a swallow, he usually ate it raw. Another game, called “Odd or Even”, was played by several men sitting in a circle. Each man would take a turn by placing their hand in one part of their clothing and call out “Odd or Even”. Then each player chooses one as the man counts the number of lice or bugs on his hand. The object of the game is to correctly guess “Odd or Even” and have the most vermin (Speer 262).
Violence: William "Mosby" Collins
Rather than playing games, some men turned to violence to obtain food and occupy their time. One prisoner killed his own brother for food, buried the body under his tent, and then slept over his brother’s corpse. William “Mosby” Collins, a Union soldier from Pennsylvania, led an organized group of raiders called the “Mosby Rangers” that stole from and killed the other prisoners. Finally, with permission from the commanding officer, the other prisoners banded together and arrested the raiders. After holding a trial, they punished twenty four of the raiders, including hanging six of them. The remaining eighteen were forced to run a gauntlet, sending three to their death (Hesseltine 145).
The lack of shelter and food at Andersonville resulted in sickness and a high death rate among the prisoners. The main causes of death were scurvy, typhoid, dysentery, diarrhea, smallpox, and hospital gangrene. Between March 1 and August 31, 1864, there were 4,529 deaths caused by diarrhea and dysentery (Speer 284). One new arrival to Andersonville made the following comment: “I saw several men who had been vaccinated...and into their arms the gangrene had eaten a hole large enough to lay half an orange in. They will be dead men soon enough” (Ward 338). Lice and vermin were also very common. John Ransom, a prisoner at Andersonville remarked in his diary that he “saw a man with a bullet hole in his head over an inch deep and you could look down in it and see maggots squirming around at the bottom” (Catton 180). Men used the stream that flowed through the camp as a toilet. As a result, the stream filled with fecal matter and, according to one prisoner, a layer of maggots, fifteen to eighteen inches deep. However, another reason for the high death rate was that a majority of the prisoners arrived at Andersonville in bad condition (Speer 260). On one day, every eleven seconds someone would die. The dead were buried in mass graves (Ward 338).
Some prisoners used the high death rate as an tool in their escapes. There was such a high death rate that a dead man’s body was placed in front of his tent until a prisoner detail picked it up. Prisoners desperate for freedom would lie down in front of their tents and pretend to be dead. They were stacked with the dead bodies where they would wait until nightfall before running away. Captain Wirz found out and then ordered that the dead bodies be stacked inside the gates to be examined by a surgeon (Speer 264). Some men tunneled their way out of Andersonville. For example, some prisoners were escaping from a tunnel they had made. Much to their surprise, the tunnel surfaced in the middle of a campfire the Confederate guards had build. The escapees jumped up through the fire and escaped because the guards thought a portal of hell had opened (Miller 148).
The terrible conditions at Andersonville could not escape the public eye after becoming the subject of publicity and propaganda. This publicity pressured the United States government to retaliate for what occurred in Confederate prisons. General Winder died, leaving Henry Wirz to take full responsibility for what happened at Andersonville (Speer 288). In May of 1865, Captain Wirz was arrested on orders of General Wilson. Wirz denied that he was responsible for the conditions in the camp and asked that he receive safe conduct to take his family back to his native Europe. Instead, the general ordered that he be brought to Washington as a prisoner (Hesseltine 238). The view that the Confederate men who subjected Union soldiers to cruelty in war prisons must be punished surfaced throughout the North. Pennsylvania’s surgeon general found out that 12,884 prisoners died at Andersonville. An agent was sent to Andersonville by the federal government to obtain information on prisoner brutality. The hatred of Henry Wirz grew as newspapers published sensational articles condemning him (Hesseltine 239). For example, Northerners viewed Andersonville as hell; therefore, Wirz was portrayed as the devil (Speer 292).
On August 23, 1865, Henry Wirz faced two charges. The first was conspiring with Richard B. Winder, Isaiah H. White, W.S. Winder, R.R. Stevens, and “others unknown”, meaning Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, General Winder, and J.A. Seddon, to destroy the lives of and impair the health of Northern prisoners of war. Specifically, the charge said that the men tortured the prisoners by doing the following: exposing them to the weather, not providing adequate shelter, forcing them to use impure water, and giving them insufficient food. Wirz was personally charged with willfully refusing to furnish shelter and wood, allowing dead bodies to remain in the camp, giving cruel punishments, and ordering the guard to kill some of the prisoners. The court also reported that 10,000 prisoners died as a result of poor food and water, and one thousand died from the “fetid and noxious exhalations” of unremoved bodies. They also reported that one hundred died because of Wirz’s cruel punishment of “fastening large balls of iron to their feet and binding large numbers of prisoners aforesaid closely together with large chains around their necks and feet, so that they walked with the greatest difficulty”. The court also said that three hundred men died on the deadline and that Wirz used “ferocious and bloodthirsty beasts dangerous to human life, called bloodhounds” to hunt down escaping prisoners (Hesseltine 240). The second charge was of murder and thirteen difference instances were specified. For example, Wirz killed a weak and sick prisoner by kicking and stepping on him. Four of the instances said that Wirz shot a prisoner with his revolver. Henry Wirz pleaded not guilty to these two charges (Hesseltine 241). The trial, continuing until October 16, consisted of 160 witnesses testifying about the conditions at Andersonville. One witness, Ambrose Spencer, testified that General Winder declared, when building the stockade, that he would kill more “damned Yankees than can be destroyed at the front!” (Hesseltine 242). Henry Wirz was found guilty of the first charge and ten of the specifications of the second charge. He was hanged on November 10, 1865, on the same scaffold the conspirators in Lincoln’s assassination were hanged (Hesseltine 244).
The horrific living conditions that made Andersonville famous were a result of the Confederacy’s poor planning and cruelty. The events and conditions that occurred between the walls of the stockade at Andersonville soon became public knowledge. After the war, the news of Andersonville’s conditions spread rapidly throughout the North, as did the desire for retribution. The blame for Andersonville fell upon the shoulders of Captain Henry Wirz. After his trial, where many more horrors were revealed, Wirz was hung, solely responsible for all of the atrocities that occurred in Andersonville. The events surrounding Andersonville became a prominent chapter in America’s history.
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