Andersonville: The Civil War's Deadliest Prison Camp

Andersonville National Cemetery, drawn by James Monroe Wells, 1909. New York Public Library.

"We were at Andersonville"

In 1864, John McElroy described arriving at the Confederacy's largest prison camp in southwest Georgia — officially Camp Sumter: five hundred men walking in silence toward a massive palisade of upright squared logs, lit by fires, until two great wooden gates swung open and they passed through. "We were at Andersonville."

About 45,000 prisoners would enter those gates in the camp's 14 months. Nearly 13,000 never left.

Why prisons filled up

Early in the war, both sides expected a short fight. In 1862 the Union and Confederacy informally agreed on parole and exchange: a captured soldier pledged not to fight, went to a camp for paroled men, and returned to service once officially exchanged. In the fall of 1863, the U.S. suspended exchanges, and prisons North and South began to overflow. Conditions were bad in both, but Andersonville's death toll, and the Confederacy's defeat, brought it national outrage.

Union and Confederate prison camps, including Camp Sumter at Andersonville. NPS map.

Building the camp

In 1864, Confederate leaders decided to move the Union prisoners held in Richmond, Virginia, far from the fighting — somewhere needing fewer guards, safer from rescue raids, and with more food. Andersonville, a village on a railroad about 65 miles southwest of Macon, in remote farm country beside a small stream, seemed ideal.

• Work began in January 1864 on a 16 1/2 acre stockade of pine logs 20 feet long, sunk five feet into the ground; in June it was enlarged to 26 1/2 acres — a rectangle 1,620 feet long and 779 feet wide.
• Sentry boxes — "pigeon roosts" — stood every 30 yards along the top. 19 feet inside the wall ran a light rail on posts: the "deadline." Any prisoner who crossed it could be shot.
• Small earthen forts with artillery ringed the camp, to quell disturbances and fend off Union cavalry.

The location of Andersonville, Georgia. NPS map.

The first prisoners arrived on February 25, 1864, before the wall was finished. Built for 10,000, the camp held 22,000 by June and more than 32,000 by August. Struggling with a failing economy, poor transport and the needs of its own army, the Confederacy couldn't provide enough shelter, food, clothing or medical care. Of more than 45,000 men sent there, 12,912 died — of disease, malnutrition, overcrowding or exposure — and were buried shoulder to shoulder in shallow trenches.

When Sherman took Atlanta in September 1864 and Union cavalry threatened the camp, most prisoners were moved to other camps in Georgia and South Carolina; Andersonville ran on a smaller scale for the war's last six months.

Life inside

Prisoners came from 26 states and the District of Columbia, and included American Indians, African Americans, men from several foreign countries — and two women. All faced the same struggle for shelter, clothing, food, water and care.

• Shelter: many built crude huts called "shebangs" from cloth, mud bricks, branches and brush — one group sewed together blouse linings, sugar and coffee bags and a knapsack flap. Some shared them and nursed the sick.
• Clothing: rags were endlessly mended; some men had none. The dead were stripped at the "deadhouse" and their clothes brought back inside — once revealing that the dead prisoner was a woman. With no soap, men scrubbed with sand. Albert Shatzel, a twenty-one-year-old private in the First Vermont Cavalry, wrote on his first day that he had never seen such misery. John Ransom ran a barbershop and laundry.
• Food: the daily ration was one-quarter pound of cornmeal and one-third pound of bacon or one pound of beef, sometimes peas or molasses — often uncooked, with little firewood. Men with money could buy from the sutler's store: in May 1864, eggs cost 50 cents each, molasses 12 dollars a gallon, bacon 6 dollars a pound.
• Water: the camp's only water, Stockade Branch, first ran through two Confederate camps and the bakehouse. The latrines — "sinks" — sat on the slope above it and overflowed in heavy rain. After an August storm a spring burst from the ground; the prisoners called it Providence Spring.
• Sickness: from February 25 to May 9, 1864, 4,588 patients were treated and 1,026 died. The main killers were diarrhea, dysentery and scurvy.

Andersonville Prison, looking southeast from the sinks, 1864. NPS.

The Raiders: in spring and early summer 1864, gangs of prisoners armed with clubs robbed — and sometimes killed — fellow inmates for money, food and clothes. In late June and early July, other prisoners, the "Regulators," rounded them up with Captain Wirz's permission. Many were made to run the gauntlet or put in balls and chains or stocks; six leaders were tried by a jury of 12 prisoners, convicted of murder, and hanged on July 11, 1864.

Getting by: prisoners carved, sang, played checkers and cards, read what they could and wrote letters (censored, many never delivered) and diaries. Some dug tunnels, though none is known to have succeeded; a few escaped from work crews, and one man, Ransom noted, played dead, was laid among the corpses, and ran at dark. Ransom credited his own survival over seven months to an iron constitution and a determination to make the best of everything.

Burying the dead at Andersonville, 1864. NPS.

After the war

• The cemetery: in 1865, Clara Barton — later founder of the American Red Cross — and Dorence Atwater, a former prisoner who had kept the burial records and noted each dead soldier's name and number, identified and marked the graves. The cemetery was dedicated as Andersonville National Cemetery in August 1865.
• Captain Henry Wirz: the commandant was tried in Washington for conspiring to destroy prisoners' lives and for murder. Many former prisoners testified — including one who had never been a prisoner. Records show officials did try to get supplies but were hampered by the army's needs, and whether Wirz could have done more is still debated. Amid Northern outrage he was convicted and hanged on November 10, 1865 — "the last casualty of Andersonville," some say.
• Remembering: an ex-prisoner, Thomas O'Dea, spent five years drawing the camp from memory, finishing in 1885 — saying that anyone who had been there would carry the whole scene in memory to their dying day.

Andersonville Prison as it appeared in August 1864, drawn from memory by former prisoner Thomas O'Dea, 1885.

The site today

Within a few years of the war, most of the stockade had rotted or been taken for firewood. Today the northeast and southeast corners and the north gate are reconstructed, and early-20th-century state monuments honor the troops held there. Since 1971 the prison site and national cemetery have been Andersonville National Historic Site, 10 miles northeast of Americus, Georgia — 482 acres, with a museum on prisoners of war.

The Andersonville prison site. NPS.

More: the park's website, the NPS Civil War site and the Civil War Soldiers & Sailors System.

Sources

Based on "Andersonville: Prisoner of War Camp," a Teaching with Historic Places lesson by Alan Marsh, former supervisory park ranger at Andersonville National Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The lesson's readings draw on books by Ovid Futch, J. Mark Bollinger and Brenda Landrum, and the diaries and memoirs of John McElroy, John Ransom and Albert Shatzel, which are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The source spells McElroy's editor both "Ray" and "Roy" Meredith.