The American Civil War tore the nation apart, and in its shadow, Andersonville Prisoner of War Camp stood as one of its bleakest chapters. By early 1864, the conflict had raged for nearly three years, leaving both the Union and the Confederacy overwhelmed with a problem they couldn’t solve—thousands of captured soldiers with nowhere to go. Tens of thousands fell into enemy hands during battles across the country, and neither side had the resources or the resolve to care for them properly.
In the beginning of the war, a prisoner exchange cartel kept the numbers in check, swapping men back to their respective lines. The system had flaws, but it worked well enough. But in 1864, General Ulysses S. Grant, the Union’s bulldog, shut it down. He’d had enough of the Confederacy enslaving or executing black Union soldiers instead of exchanging them like the rest. His decision aimed to strangle the South’s faltering resources, forcing them to house and feed a growing mass of Union prisoners. The strategy succeeded in part, but it also turned Andersonville into a place of unimaginable torment.
The Confederacy faced a pressing need for a new prison site in late 1863. Existing facilities, such as Libby Prison in Richmond, overflowed, and Union advances threatened closer locations. They chose a remote spot in southwest Georgia, officially named Camp Sumter but known to history as Andersonville. Several factors drove the decision: its distance, 60 miles from Macon, shielded it from Union raids; a nearby railroad eased prisoner transport; and Sweetwater Creek promised a water supply. The land came dirt-cheap—a 16.5-acre pine forest they cleared quickly and enclosed with a stockade.
On paper, it seemed practical. In reality, the site harbored fatal weaknesses.
The creek became a polluted mire as the camp’s population soared beyond capacity. Sandy, swampy soil offered no hope for crops or for sanitation. Isolation, once an asset, crippled supply lines as the Southern economy buckled. Planners designed the camp for 10,000 men, but within months, it held over 30,000. It was a disaster in the making.
On February 27, 1864, Andersonville’s gates opened for the first time. Some 500 Union prisoners, already weary from battle, trudged in. They were from units like the 19th Massachusetts or 85th New York and they had been captured in battles over the previous months.
A 15-foot timber stockade greeted them, flanked by guard towers every 50 yards. Inside lay a barren expanse of dirt, dotted with tents and makeshift shelters, offering no barracks or real protection from Georgia’s harsh weather. Guards, a motley crew of teenage boys and elderly men pulled from the Confederacy’s dwindling ranks, barked commands.
Captain Henry Wirz, a Swiss-born officer with a limp and a short fuse, oversaw the chaos. He warned the newcomers that escape meant certain capture—his scent hounds guaranteed it. And he repeatedly hinted at a prisoner exchange, a false promise that he knew would never materialize. For those Union soldiers, a grueling ordeal began.
Conditions deteriorated rapidly. By that first summer, the population ballooned—20,000, then 30,000, peaking at over 33,000 in August 1864. Designed for a third of that, the camp became a festering pit. Sweetwater Creek transformed into an open sewer, clogged with filth and spawning sickness. Dysentery, scurvy, and smallpox ravaged the prisoners like a plague.
Rations amounted to little more than mockery: moldy cornbread, perhaps a sliver of rancid pork, barely enough to sustain life. Men withered away, some shrinking to 80 pounds, mere shadows in ragged blue uniforms. Shelter proved scarce—most burrowed into the ground or propped up scraps against the sun and rain, enduring scorching heat or slogging through muddy downpours.
The so-called “dead line,” a flimsy rail 19 feet inside the stockade, marked a lethal boundary; crossing it invited a bullet. Some guards, hardly more than boys, took grim pleasure in playing a sadistic game, luring prisoners over with false promises of food before shooting them down. Cruelty pervaded the place, though not always by design. The guards suffered too, hungry and fearful, their families starving as the Confederacy unraveled. They faced orders to maintain control, outnumbered and on edge.
The Union prisoners fought to endure. They clustered by regiment or hometown, pooling meager resources. Some dug tunnels through the sandy earth with spoons or bare hands, chasing a glimmer of freedom. Certain stories—like the grand tunnel escape depicted in the 1996 film—took on a Hollywood flourish, but the desperation rang true. Others fell victim to the “Raiders,” a band of prisoners turned predators, preying on their own for crumbs.
John Ransom, a Union soldier who chronicled the nightmare in his diary, laid it bare, all the filth, the despair, the animal instincts that emerged. His words, later fueling the film “Andersonville,” carried a bitter edge: “The Flying Dutchman (Captain Wirz) offered to give two at a time twelve hours the start,” a taunt that mocked their plight. Resistance flared when it could. In July 1864, after the Raiders killed a man named Dick Potter, and the prisoners snapped. A coalition stormed the Raiders’ turf, seized their leaders, and demanded justice. Wirz gave the nod but insisted they handle it themselves. A jury of new arrivals condemned six Raider chiefs to hang, and gallows rose within the stockade—a fleeting moment of order amid the turmoil.
For the Confederates, Andersonville spelled a different kind of ruin. Wirz floundered, saddled with a camp he couldn’t sustain and a government that sent no aid. He dispatched pleas to Richmond, but silence answered. His guards, a mix of pity and brutality, teetered on collapse. A Confederate colonel inspected the camp and berated Wirz for the squalor; Wirz shrugged it off, even requesting a promotion.
By late 1864, desperation gripped them. They proposed a deal: fight for the South, win your release. Most prisoners, including the 19th Massachusetts men, turned their backs in silent scorn. The guards watched as illness claimed thousands, over 12,000 by the war’s close, bracing for the blame that loomed.
The camp staggered into April 1865. The war neared its end; Lee surrendered at Appomattox, and Union cavalry scouts reached Andersonville on April 17. By May, the place emptied out. The survivors were transferred to other prisons or freed as the Confederacy disintegrated. They filed past rows of graves, 12,912 comrades buried in what became hallowed ground.
Wirz fled but didn’t escape far. Union troops captured him in May near the camp, dragging him to Washington, D.C., for trial. He faced charges of war crime, murder and conspiracy, all tied to the camp’s deaths. The trial unfolded as a spectacle, the first of its kind in America. Witnesses lined up: prisoners recounted the atrocities, doctors swore to the hunger, stacking evidence against him. Wirz insisted he’d followed orders and begged for supplies, but it didn’t sway the court. On November 10, 1865, he dangled from a gallows near the U.S. Capitol, the only Confederate executed for war crimes. The crowd roared. Some hailed it as justice, others saw a scapegoat’s fall.
Andersonville left behind a heavy legacy, one that stirred passions and lingered long after. For the Union, it served as a rallying cry, evidence of Southern barbarity that helped to stoke Reconstruction’s harsh hand. Newspapers splashed the horrors across pages; photographs of emaciated survivors shocked the nation.
Down South, many cast Wirz as a martyr, a man broken by a war beyond his grasp. Over 45,000 men passed through in 14 months; nearly 13,000 remained forever. In 1865, the site became Andersonville National Cemetery, its graves are a solemn marker. It endured as a National Historic Site, preserving the stockade’s outline, the creek, the sorrow.
In the Spring of 1997, I had a spare moment during a natural disaster, and I took advantage of the time to visit Andersonville. The place… clung to me. There is a whiff of death that hangs in the spring air there. It’s not just in the dirt, but it’s a deeper chill. There’s a ghost of agony that shook me. Silence reigned, pierced only by wind through the pines, as if the past refuses to let go.
For those unable to visit Georgia the 1996 film “Andersonville” offers a solid entry point to the story. Directed by John Frankenheimer, it draws from Ransom’s diary to reveal the raw truth. It has its faults. The critics carped about pacing or clichés—but it captured the grit, the guts, the human heart of it all. It brought the prisoners’ struggle to life. The film didn’t flinch, and it stands as a stark lesson in war’s ruthless cost, a point worth pondering today. Andersonville wasn’t just a chapter; it was a wound.
A warning.
Etched there in the Georgia clay. And in Union blue.
DAVE DOES HISTORY 
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