Andersonville Prison

DESCRIPTION: "On western Georgia's sandy soil, Within a lonesome prison pen, Lay many a thousand shattered forms Who once was brave and loyal men." The hellish conditions are described. One man, dying, remembers his widowed mother and sweetheart
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1929 (Randolph)
KEYWORDS: Civilwar death mother love prison war
FOUND IN: US(So)
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Randolph 237, "Andersonville Prison" (1 text)
Roud #4033
NOTES [1568 words]: This song is item dA39 in Laws's Appendix II.
Conditions for soldiers in Civil War armies were usually bad, and the fate of prisoners was worse. But there was no place in the world, before the concentration camps, that could compare with Andersonville prison. Never larger than 26 acres, it held, at times, more than 32,000 soldiers!
Although they were (theoretically) granted the same rations as Confederate field soldiers, the inadequate sanitation and health care led to immense death rates. Nearly 13,000 men are known to have been buried there, and it is generally conceded that many more died without having any monument.
Andersonville was opened in February of 1864, and was finally closed in April 1865. Its commander, Major Harry Wirz, was executed in November 1865. He was the only man in the entire Confederacy condemned for what we would now call "war crimes."
Some opinions on Andersonville:
Jameson (1894), p. 26: "Andersonville, Sumter County, Georgia, site of a Confederate military prison for Federal soldiers during the Civil War. THe mortality of this prison was very great, 12,926 soldiers dying there. Henry Wirtz, a Swiss adventurer, the superintendent of the prison, was tried, after the war, by a military commission and hung for excessive cruelty, November 10, 1865. As for the culpability of the Confederate government, opposive views have been maintained. Andersonville is now the site of a national cemetery for Union soldiers."
Vandiver (1970), p. 294, "Away in south Georgia, tucked remotely in the fastness of the Okefenokee Swamp, lay Andersonville Prison, presided over by Major Henry WIrz. Large segments of Northern opinion condemned all Rebel prisons and guards, but the storied atrocities of Wirz and his 'plug-uglies' made Andersonville a special inferno. Open, a swampy plot cut by a sluggish stream that turned putrid with human refuse long before it cleared the yard, the prison was bordered by a gruesome 'deadline' beyond which no prisoner might go and remain alive. Rations and medicines were appalingly scant, and in the summer of 1864 the place became crowded with bluecoats shipped from Richmond's packed dungeons and with men from Sherman's fringes. Sanitation vanished, men contracted all kinds of epidemic diseases and suffered the ills that hunger spawns, and more than 12,000 died. Wirz got the blame, not all of it deserved."
McPherson (1988), p. 796, "Andersonville prison was built in early 1864 to accommodate captives previously held at Belle Isle on the James River near Richmond, because the proximity of Union forces threatened liberation of these prisoners and the overtaxed transport system of Virginia could barely feed southern citizens and soldiers, let alone Yankees. A stockade camp of sixteen acres designed for 10,000 prisoners, Andersonville soon became overcrowded.... It was enlarged to twenty-six acres, in which 33,000 men were packed by August 1864 -- an average of thirty-four square feet per man -- without shade in a Deep South summer and with no shelter except what they could rig from sticks, tent flies, blankets, and odd bits of cloth. (By way of comparison, the Union prison camp at Elmira, New York, generally considered the worst northern prison, provided barracks for the maximum of 9,600 captives living inside a forty-acre enclosure -- an average of 180 square feet per man. [In other words, five times as much space per man as at Andersonville. At Elmira, each man had space equivalent to a a 15 foot by 12 foot room. At Andersonville, each man had an area only slightly larger than a one-person mattress.] During some weeks in the summer of 1864 more than a hundred prisoners died every day in Andersonville." On p. 797 n. 48, McPherson calculates that the cumulative mortality rate at Elmira was 24%. At Andersonville, it was 29%. Another southern camp, at Salisbury, North Carolina, 34% died!
HTIECivilWar, p. 837, has a capsule biography of Wirz (and, on the previous page, of his predecessor and boss, John Henry Winder). He was born in November 1823, in Zuric, Switzerland. His brith name was Heinrich Harmann Wirz. His biography indicates a tendency to lie about his history; he claimed to be (and perhaps wanted to be) a doctor, but his father had kept him from medical school. He was imprisoned in the late 1840s, though we don't know the reason except that it had something to do with money. He emigrated to the United States in 1849. He first took a job in a factory in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He seems to have gradually worked his way south. Apparently unable to set up as a practicing physician, he finally managed to find a job on a Louisiana plantation as "Dr. Wirz."
When the Civil War began, he enlisted in the Confederate army -- as an infantryman, not a doctor. By the time of the Battle of Seven Pines, he was a sergeant. At the Battle of Seven Pines, he took a wound to his right arm which left him in permanent pain and unable to use the arm. After that, he was promoted to captain and put in charge of the Richmond Military Prison (where he earned mixed reviews, but most seemed to regard him as harsh). He then went on a mission to Europe, returning in February 1864. The next month, he was put in charge of Andersonville. He was taken prisoner in May 1865. His trial took three months. He was sentenced to death on November 6, 1865 and hung on November 10.
Those who defend Wirz say, correctly, that he was not given the needed supplies to support the prisoners at Andersonville. But this was a man who claimed to be a doctor (and lied) -- and he didn't do anything about the sanitation problems. And he was content to work on a plantation. I really don't think much of the neo-Confederate attempts to whitewash him. Even if he couldn't do anything about Andersonville, how many people did he endanger by pretending to be a doctor?
Apologists for the situation at Andersonville itself typically rely on three arguments: (1) That Union prisons were also bad, (2) that the Union could have freed the prisoners had they wanted, and (3) that the Union, not the Confederates, refused to exchange prisoners.
Argument (1) is false on two counts. First, what-about-ism is not a justification for anything. Second, while Union prisons were bad, none were anywhere near as bad as Andersonville.
Argument (2) has some limited merit. At the time of Sherman's 1864 Atlanta campaign, the Union armies several times considered ways to rescue the prisoners (McMurry, p. 146); I have also read that George H. Thomas proposed a plan to do so, But Andersonville was more than a hundred miles from Atlanta, making it a very difficult and dangerous operation.
Argument (3) is true but ignores the realities of the situation. Prisoner exchanges took place on a one-for-one basis -- but the Federal armies were much larger; one-for-one exchanges would strengthen the Confederate armies more on a proportional basis. Moreover, by this stage of the war, the Federals were attacking on all fronts, and often the men the Confederates took prisoner were the worst members of their armies (deserters or the faint-hearted), while Confederates captured were often good soldiers. Furthermore, because it takes more men to attack than defend, there was again a disproportion in the advantage to the Confederates of a one-for-one exchange. The only way to make prisoner exchanges work for both sides would have been to adjust the exchange ratio.
One interesting note about this song is that it was picked up in the Ozarks, not in Union territory. True, the Ozarks were mostly Unionist, but they had a lot of southern influence in their culture, too.
There are several books about Andersonville. I have not tried to read them; I haven't the heart. But here are the ones I know of:
- Dorence Atwater, Prisoners Who Died at Andersonville Prison, 1865, with a facsimile published in 1981
- John McElroy, Andersonville: A Story of Rebel Military Prisons, 1879 (an account of someone imprisoned there); 1957 edition edited by Roy Meredith titled This Was Anderstonville, reprinted by Fairfax Press, 1979
- N(orton) P(arker) Chipman, The Andersonville Prison Trial. The Trial of Trial of Captain Henry Wirz 1911 (reprinted in the Notable Trials Library, 1990; also reprinted as The Tragedy of Andersonville Prison : The Trial of Captain Henry Wirz. Available on Google Books under the title The Tragedy of Andersonville: Trial of Captain Henry Wirz, the Prison Keeper
- John Ransom, Andersonville Diary, republished as John Ransom's Andersonville Diary, Ericksson, 1976. William Marvel claims this is "spurious."
- Ovid L. Futch, History of Andersonville Prison, University Press of Florida, 1972
- William Marvel, Andersonville: The Last Depot, 1994. A "revisionist" history, which I assume means an apology for the Confederacy.
- James Madison Page, The True Story of Andersonville Prison: A Defense of Major Henry Wirz, CreateSpace, 2015. The fact that no publisher would take this is perhaps an indication of something....
- Robert Scott Davis, Andersonville: Civil War Prison, CreateSpace, 2010
- See also William B. Hesseltine, editor, Civil War Prisons, Kent State University Press, 1992
I can't say that I have much confidence in the revisionist histories. Wirz may not have wanted to be head of a murder camp, but a civilized man would have resigned the job (or, frankly, committed suicide). - RBW
Bibliography Last updated in version 7.0
File: R237

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