Andersonville, and the museum for every American prisoner of war

Camp Sumter, in southwest Georgia, operated for fourteen months. In that time
roughly 45,000 Union prisoners passed through it and nearly 13,000 died —
of dysentery, scurvy, and exposure, in a stockade with no shelter and a single
polluted stream for water. It became notorious before the Civil War was over.

What went wrong

The camp was built in early 1864 for 10,000 men. Within months it held more
than 30,000 in about 26 acres — roughly a hundred square feet per man, with no
barracks. Prisoners built shelters from whatever they carried: blankets,
branches, dug-out holes.

The stream running through the stockade was the water supply and the sewer at
once. With the Confederacy's own supply system collapsing, rations were poor
and sometimes absent. Scurvy, dysentery and starvation did the rest.

The commandant, Henry Wirz, was tried after the war and executed — one of very
few people executed for war crimes arising from that conflict. Historians have
argued ever since about how much was deliberate and how much was the failure of
a supply system that could barely feed its own army. The argument does not
change the number.

Why the site is not only about the Civil War

Andersonville could have been preserved as a Civil War site alone. It was not.
In 1970 Congress established it as a memorial to **all American prisoners of
war**, in every conflict — a decision that widened the subject from one camp to
the experience of captivity itself.

The National Prisoner of War Museum opened on the site in 1998. It covers
the Revolution through to the present, with the accounts of former prisoners at
its centre rather than the machinery of the camps. It was designed with former
POWs consulted throughout, which shows in what it chooses to dwell on: not
statistics, but hunger, boredom, improvisation, and the small acts that kept
people alive.

The cemetery

The burial trenches became Andersonville National Cemetery, and it remains
an active national cemetery — veterans are still buried there. The Union dead
are identified by name on their headstones because of one prisoner, Dorence
Atwater, who was assigned to record deaths and secretly kept a duplicate list,
which he smuggled out. Without it, almost all 13,000 would have been unknown.

Visiting

The site is in Andersonville, Georgia, and holds three things at once: the
stockade grounds, the museum, and the cemetery. Most visitors take the driving
route around the prison site first, which is laid out to be read in sequence.