Andersonville Prison: I wasn’t ready for this
By Bob Ford Special to
Articles and Podcasts are complementary from those helping to preserve our history: Nodaway Valley Bank, Eagle Communication, Rupp Funeral Home, Stevenson Family Pharmacy and Anonymous Buffs. To comment or join them as sponsors, robertmford@aol.com.
I have traveled to many Civil War battlefields, historic sites and military forts but when I reached the Confederate prisoner of war Camp in Andersonville, Georgia, I wasn’t ready.
Usually on a battlefield you get the “feeling.” Something monumental happened here, it’s “mano-a-mano,” tragic, honorable and historic. In studying battles and being there you get a small sense of what went on. Reading the different accounts of all that was observed and ordered.
From a Union General: “General Wallace is to move his troops up the southern plank road to flank Hill’s 3rd Corps. Capt. McGilvery, I order you to move your artillery onto the south ridge overlooking the fire pits and support their withdrawal, open fire when in position.”
From the South’s General Hill’s orders, “Move 1st and 2nd Regiments to the bottom of the south ridge and attack the Union lines as quickly as possible.”
In analyzing battles you can now look at maps, reports, movements and countermovement’s simultaneously from both combatants. Being on site but detached because you are of course, a century and half later, it’s still humbling and thrilling, respecting the fallen and living the history as best you can.
At Andersonville, you got a different feeling, the “mano-a-mano” wasn’t there.
Neither side in the Civil War was prepared to take thousands of prisoners. Early in the conflict, prisoner exchanges were made fairly quickly and outright releases given if you signed a Loyalty Oath, written oath’s were big back then. The fragile exchange process fell apart in 1863 when the South refused to involve black prisoners; they were either held and worked to death or returned to their previous slave owner.
During the war, a total of 400,000 soldiers were detained for exchange or held in 150 separate camps with 56,000 dying.
Union prisoner of war camps were in general more humane. Each camp for both opponents varied in severity, security and supplies.
Andersonville was the worst of the worst. While a famous lithograph was made of Union prisoners playing baseball at Salisbury Prison in North Carolina, not so in Andersonville.
I will spare you much of the gore … but it’s our history, the good, bad and very ugly.
Most men in the camp died of disease, starvation or just gave up. Andersonville became a 26-acre, open air, stockade with a 15 ft. wooden wall surrounding the field holding up to 30,000 defeated men. Thirty feet inside the barricade was a “deadline,” marked by a single periodic white post. Eighty sentry boxes overlooking the prison held the guards who would shoot and kill anyone venturing past the line. Suicides were common.
Forty thousand prisoners entered the camp. Nearly 13,000 died. All of these soldiers were enlisted men. Union officers were sent elsewhere. The vast amount of men tried to make it, living in waste and disease while existing on a starvation diet.
Inside the camp, civilized norms spiraled downwards quickly, gangs of men would attack fellow prisoners gaining a want or evening a score.
From a survivors journal, “As we entered the place a spectacle met our eyes that almost froze our blood in horror, before us were forms that had been once active-erect stalwart men, now nothing more than walking skeletons … covered with filth and vermin. Many of the men exclaimed in earthiness, ‘can this be hell?”
Who oversaw this inhumane facility that allowed these deplorable conditions to continue? Captain Henry Wirz. Born in Switzerland, Wirz commanded, as a physician! He, no doubt, was in a tough position. The camp had little resources while the South was slowly losing the all out war. In 1865 at war’s end, he had 30,000 dying, malnourished and emaciated prisoners seeking release.
Escaping from prisoner of war camps are popular stories in our culture, films like “The Great Escape,” ”Escape from Alcatraz,” and “Shawshank Redemption” where Hollywood describes heroic efforts to escape evil. Even John Frankeneimer’s disturbing 1996 seldom seen film “Andersonville” is plotted around a rare escape into the Georgia woods.
According to Confederate records, there were 351 attempted escapes from Andersonville. Most were recaptured or died on the run but 31 men actually made it back to Union lines. Many of those found freedom as the South’s military structure was disintegrating in April and May of 1865. Once the word got out about the conditions in the camp the North was mortified. Famed American poet Walt Whitman saw camp survivors shortly after the war and wrote, ”there are deeds, crimes that may be forgiven, but this is not among them.”
Wirz would become one of the very few that faced war crime changes after the surrender. His trial was a public spectacle. At the War Tribunal, 160 survivors testified about the conditions and events that took place in Andersonville Prison. Wirz remains the only Confederate officer found guilty of murder and hanged on Nov. 10, 1865.
Was Wirz a scapegoat for the thousands of atrocities that occurred in the four year war? Perhaps.
As the rest of America tears down monuments and changes names of facilities with any connection to the Confederacy. Wirz still has a 30 ft. beautiful obelisk still intact on the town square of Andersonville, Georgia, a quarter mile from the concentration camp’s front gate.
American history can be brutal and uncomfortable but it’s our responsibility to those who suffered and sacrificed to tell their stories, to learn and not repeat those self-destructing times.
Next week … ”A cream pie in your mother-in-laws face, I promise!”
