Home : America At War : The Civil War : North And South :

Prisons

Emancipation Proclamation

The name Andersonville was synonymous with horror during the latter part of the Civil War. Largest of the Southern prisons, the huge open pen was a living hell for Union captives inside its stockades. More than 45,000 prisoners were confined at Andersonville. Almost 13,000 died there, not to mention those who were removed to meet their end in other camps throughout Georgia and the Carolinas.

Inadequate food, polluted water, indescribable sanitary conditions, primitive medical care, and constant exposure to the elements all took their frightful toll. Scurvy, acute diarrhea, dysentery, and gangrene were the major killers. Disease was brought on by starvation rations and foul living conditions, stemming from overpopulation of the prison. Built in late 1863 and early 1864, Andersonville had been intended for 10,000 men at most. Camp Sumter, as it was officially called, lay on a rail line connecting Albany and Macon, about sixty miles southwest of the latter city. A double stockade of squared tree trunks enclosed twenty-seven acres of barren ground. In the beginning, barracks were planned for the camp; but the sudden influx of prisoners, starting in February, 1864, swamped the authorities and shelters never appeared.

Rations fell off steadily as Andersonville's population increased. Unsifted corn meal, filled with husks and eaten raw, was each man's daily portion. The spare diet and accumulating filth brought disease. Doctors could do little. Day by day, prisoners carried their dead outside the stockade. The men who survived carried memories of Andersonville all their days.

Andersonville was the worst of prisons, North or South. Others, for temporary periods, were almost equally bad. At Camp Douglas, near Chicago, 10 per cent of the Rebel prisoners died during one month of 1863. Neither North or South set out to practice calculated cruelty on its captives. Both sides were victims of the lack of preparation for a long war.

Housing for captured men in large number was not in Yankee and Rebel plans. Neither was a ration system nor medical care. Converting existing structures, or building from the ground up when there was no other way, both governments did what they could, but it was never enough.

Confusion arose from the agreement for handling prisoners, which changed several times during the war. At the outset, captives were paroled and sent home after promising not to take up arms again. This system was economical, as it eliminated housing and feeding responsibilities, but there was no way of assuring paroles would be kept. In July, 1862, Northern and Southern governments agreed to exchange or parole all prisoners within ten days of their capture. For a time, the prisons were almost empty.

After the Emancipation Proclamation, as Negro troops joined the U.S. Army, Jefferson Davis decreed that all Negro slaves captured bearing arms, and their white officers, would not be treated as prisoners of war but delivered to the states to be punished by their laws. Because of these strong words, and other considerations of his own, Halleck ordered all exchanges stopped in May, 1863.

The order was not always obeyed to the letter, but the prisons soon began to fill again. By 1864, Grant took a firm stand against exchange: "We have got to fight until the military power of the South is exhausted, and if we release or exchange prisoners captured, it simply becomes a war of extermination."

Despite the seesaw policies of both governments, muster rolls climbed steadily in the major prisons. About 215,000 Confederates, captured on the field were confined by the Yankees. In Rebel jails, 195,000 Northerners served their time. Libby Prison, at Richmond, held Federal officers. At nearby Belle Isle, in the James River, a tent city accommodated enlisted men. Other Confederate prisons were Castle Thunder, at Petersburg, Virginia; Castle Pinckney, in Charleston Harbor; an abandoned cotton factory at Salisbury, North Carolina; and various camps and stockades in Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and Texas.

Largest of the Northern prisons was Point Lookout, Maryland, a tent camp. The worst was Fort Delaware, in the river of that name. Others existed in Lake Erie; on an island in the Mississippi; at Elmira, New York; and in New York City, Boston, Indianapolis, Washington, St. Louis, Baltimore, and Columbus, Ohio.

Prison life was miserable, debilitating, and often fatal. More than 30,000 Union prisoners died in captivity. The Confederate death toll was approximately 26,000. The fortunate men who lived through incarceration found conditions varying widely from place to place. In one Southern institution, Captain Frank E. Moran of the 73rd New York Volunteers saw prison life at its brightest: A minstrel troupe was organized ... A number of musical instruments were purchased, forming a respectable orchestra ... Refreshing music often enlivened the place where the weary-souled prisoner had laid down for the night. . . . Chess, checkers, cards, or such other games occupied much of our time ... It was not infrequent to see a lively breakdown at one end of the room and a prayer meeting at the other; to hear the loud turn of the banjo mingling with the solemn melody of the doxology.

Farther south, Private John McElroy, 16th Illinois Cavalry, looked at captivity through different eyes: Let me describe the scene immediately around my own tent . . . as an example of the condition of the whole prison: I will take a space not larger than a good-sized parlor or sitting room. On this were at least fifty of us. Directly in front of me lay two brothers ... They were now in the last stages of scurvy and diarrhea. Every particle of muscle and fat about their limbs and bodies had apparently wasted away, leaving the skin clinging close to the bone of the face, arms, hands, ribs, and thighs - everywhere, except the feet and legs, where it was swollen tense and transparent, distended with gallons of purulent matter. Their livid gums, from which most of their teeth had already fallen, protruded far beyond their lips. To their left lay a Sergeant and two others of their company, all three slowly dying of diarrhea ... To my right was a handsome young Sergeant of an Illinois Infantry Regiment, captured at Kenesaw. His left arm had been amputated between the shoulder and the elbow, and he was turned into the stockade with the stump all undressed, save the ligating of the arteries ... he had not been inside an hour until the maggot flies had laid eggs in the open wound, and before the day was gone the worms were hatched out, and rioting amid the inflamed and supersensitive nerves ...

A casualty rate far greater than any battle Although precise figures may never be known, an estimated 56,000 men perished in Civil War prisons, a casualty rate far greater than any battle during the war's bloody tenure. The high mortality rate was not deliberate, but the result of ignorance of nutrition and proper sanitation on both sides of the conflict, according to scholars. Yet ignorance—coupled with shortages of food, shelter, and clothing—produced a cauldron of disease and death for inmates. While previous wars harbored similar prison conditions, the Civil War was unique in the sheer numbers of men confined. More than 150 prisons were established during the war. All were filled beyond capacity, with inmates crowded into camps and shelters with meager provisions. Prison diets consisted of pickled beef, salt pork, corn meal, rice, or bean soup. The lack of fruits or vegetables often led to outbreaks of scurvy and other diseases. In many northern prisons, hungry inmates hunted rats, sometimes making a sport of it. Starvation and poor sanitation inflamed outbreaks of diseases like smallpox, typhoid, dysentery, cholera, and malaria. Sores, left untreated, led to gangrene—a disease curable only by amputation. Of all these diseases, perhaps the most dangerous was depression.

Extreme conditions such as described by McElroy produced living skeletons, with wild, vermin-ridden hair, such as the men after being picked up by Federal troops near Wilmington, North Carolina, late in the war. The amount of misery and degradation brought about by prison life depended on the geographical location of camps, food available, water supply, medical care, and the character and quality of camp commandants and guards.

Southern soldiers, in Elmira, New York, or on Johnson's Island, in Lake Erie's Sandusky Bay, suffered through bitter northern winters. Yankees in the South cringed under the blistering sun of Georgia and South Carolina. Climate worked its worst discomfort in the big tent cities, north and south, and through the open-pen stockades peculiar to the Confederacy. Most Northern camps boasted barracks to shield men from the weather. Below the Mason-Dixon line, prisons were sometimes created from ship chandlers' lofts or tobacco warehouses, which permitted a rough degree of comfort.

Food was the major source of complaint on both sides. The breakdown of Southern transportation often kept Yankee troops from receiving adequate rations. Transportation was never a valid excuse for food shortages in Northern prisons, but many Confederates went hungry. Diaries and letters mention spoiling bacon and hard crackers as the full rations for temporary periods, and speak of constant hunger among prisoners.

Inadequate water supply cursed many locations. In the stockades, a single brook might serve thousands. Enclosed prisons sometimes had but a single "hydrant" for all their occupants. At the dreaded Fort Delaware, Southern inmates depended on standing rain water or visits from a small water boat that filled the prison tanks at intervals.

In October, 1861, the government at Washington appointed Lieutenant Colonel William Hoffman as Commissary General of Prisoners. He held the administrative post throughout the war. The South delayed such an appointment until 1864, when Brigadier General John H. Winder was given a somewhat similar position, less well defined than that of Hoffman.

Choosing staffs to run the prisons and men to guard them challenged the administrative chiefs. Volunteer troops and their officers had enlisted for action in the field, not to act as jailers. In the North, the Veteran Reserve Corps, made up of disabled soldiers, produced guards. Raw, untrained soldiers often drew the guard assignments turned down by their more experienced comrades. Negro troops were sometimes used.

Conscripted militia furnished guards for Southern camps. As the need for manpower haunted the South, in 1864, every ablebodied soldier went into the lines. The very old and very young took over posts at the prisons. Guards and prisoners often struck up relationships built around trade and barter. Money, buttons, boots, and miscellaneous equipment were turned over to captors who provided food in return. Many guards were friendly, some were cruel, most were callously indifferent.

Charges of cruelty and indifference were often leveled at prison commanders. In some cases, the accusations sprang from fact. In others, the alleged harshness resulted from red tape and material shortages. After the war, the collective sins of prison commanders fell on the head of Captain Henry Wirz, the Confederate chief at Andersonville. Brought to trial, he labored mightily in his own defense. His efforts failed and conviction for "murder in violation of the laws and customs of war" among other points followed. On November 10, 1865, Wirz was hanged.

John S. Blay. Prisons. The Civil War; A Pictorial Profile. Bonanza Books, New York, 1958.

Andersonville The Last Depot. Marvel. This is a carefully researched and compelling revisionist account of Andersonville Prison. Based on reliable primary sources - including diaries, Union and Confederate government documents, and letters - its analysis exonerates camp commandant Henry Wirz and others from charges that they deliberately exterminated prisoners, a crime for which Wirz was executed after the war.

---

top of page

back a page