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Andersonville National Historic Site
The Andersonville prison, officially known as Camp Sumter, was the largest Confederate military prison during the American Civil War. The site of the prison is now Andersonville National Historic Site in Andersonville, Georgia. Most of the site actually lies in extreme southwestern Macon County, adjacent to the east side of Andersonville. It includes the site of the Civil War prison, the Andersonville National Cemetery, and the National Prisoner of War Museum. In all, 12,913 of the approximately 45,000 Union prisoners died there because of abuse, starvation, malnutrition, and disease.
Background
Reconstruction of part of the stockade wall. Conditions
Photo of Andersonville prisoners and tents During the summer of 1864, Union prisoners suffered greatly from hunger, exposure, and disease. Within seven months, about a third of them died from dysentery and scurvy and were buried in mass graves, the standard practice by Confederate prison authorities at Andersonville. Dorence Atwater, a soldier in the 2nd New York Cavalry kept a record of deaths at the camp. The prison originally covered about of land enclosed by a high stockade. It was enlarged to in June 1864. The stockade was in the shape of a parallelogram by . Guard towers, called pigeon roosts, were established at intervals. There were two entrances on the west side of the stockade which were known as "north entrance" and "south entrance".[1] A Union soldier described his entry into the prison camp: "As we entered the place, a spectacle met At Andersonville, a light fence known as "The Dead Line" was erected approximately 30 feet (5.8-7.6 m) inside the stockade wall to demarcate a no-man's land keeping the prisoners away from the stockade wall, which was a wall of rough hewn logs about long.[3] Anyone crossing this line was shot by sentries posted at intervals around the stockade wall in towers known as "pigeon roosts". 
Andersonville prison The guards, disease, starvation, and exposure were not all that prisoners had to deal with. A group of prisoners, calling themselves the "Raiders," attacked their fellow inmates to steal food, jewellery, money, or even clothing. They were armed mostly with clubs, and even killed to get what they wanted. Several months later, another group rose up to stop the larceny, calling themselves "Regulators." They caught nearly all of the "Raiders" and these were tried by a judge (Peter "Big Pete" McCullough) and jury selected from a group of new prisoners. This jury upon finding the "Raiders" guilty set punishment upon them. These included running the gauntlet, being sent to the stocks, ball and chain, and, in six cases, hanging.[4] In the autumn, after the capture of Atlanta, all the prisoners who could be moved were sent to Millen, Georgia, and Florence, South Carolina. At Millen, better arrangements prevailed, and when, after General William Tecumseh Sherman began his march to the sea, the prisoners were returned to Andersonville, the conditions there were somewhat improved. 
Some of the monuments at Andersonville. During the war 45,000 prisoners were received at the Andersonville prison, and of these 12,913 died. [5]A continual controversy among historians is the nature of the deaths and the reasons for it, with some contending that it was deliberate Confederate war crimes toward Union prisoners and others contending that it was merely the result of disease (promoted by severe overcrowding), the shortage of food in the Confederate States, the incompetence of the prison officials, and the refusal of the Confederate authorities to parole black soldiers, resulting in the imprisonment of soldiers from both sides, thus overfilling the stockade. A young Union prisoner named Dorence Atwater had been chosen to write down the names and numbers of the dead at Andersonville for the use of the Confederacy and the Federal Government after the war ended. He felt the Federal Government would never see this list, and he was right in this assumption, as it turned out. He sat next to Henry Wirz, who was in charge of the prison pen, and secretly kept his own list among the other papers. When Atwater was released, he simply put the list in his bag and took it through the lines without being caught. It was published by the New York Times when Horace Greeley, the owner, learned that the Federal Government had refused and given Atwater much grief. It was Dorence Atwater?s opinion that Andersonville was indeed trying to make soldiers unfit to fight.[6] 
A Union soldier who survived. Aftermath
Andersonville National Cemetery After the war, Henry Wirz, commandant at Camp Sumter, was tried by court-martial, presided over by Union General Lew Wallace and featuring chief JAG (Judge Advocate General)'s prosecutor Norton Parker Chipman on charges of conspiracy and murder. A number of former prisoners testified on conditions at Andersonville, many accusing Wirz of specific acts of cruelty. Some of these accounts have subsequently been determined by historians to have been exaggerated or false. The court also considered official correspondence from captured Confederate records, perhaps the most damaging of which was a letter to the Confederate Surgeon General by Dr. James Jones, who in 1864 was sent by Richmond to investigate conditions at Camp Sumter.[7] Wirz presented evidence that he pleaded to Confederate authorities to try to get more food and tried to improve the conditions for the prisoners inside. Unfortunately for Wirz, President Abraham Lincoln had recently been assassinated, so the political environment was not sympathetic. Wirz was found guilty of murder and was sentenced to death. On November 10, 1865 he was hanged. Wirz was the only Confederate official to be tried and convicted of war crimes resulting from the Civil War. The revelation of the sufferings of the prisoners was one of the factors that shaped public opinion regarding the South in the Northern states, after the close of the Civil War. The prisoners' burial ground at Andersonville has been made a national cemetery and contains 13,714 graves, of which 921 are marked "unknown". In 1891 the Grand Army of the Republic, Department of Georgia bought the site of Andersonville Prison from membership and subscriptions.[8] The site was purchased by the Federal Government in 1910.[9] See also
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External links
de:Andersonville it:Andersonville he:?????????? fi:Andersonville Source: Wikipedia | The above article is available under the GNU FDL. | Edit this article
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