On July 11, 1864, more than 26,000 prisoners stood on a hill inside a pine stockade in Andersonville, Georgia, watching six fellow prisoners being hanged. The Confederate officer running the prison handed the six men over that morning and said he lacked the power to stop it. On November 10, 1865, he climbed onto a gallows in Washington because of what happened on that hill. Nearly 13,000 men were buried there, and he remains the only person ever hanged for it.
The six men on the gallows that day were known as the Raiders. Their names were Sarsfield, Collins, Curtis, Delaney, Moon, and Sullivan. Everything known about them comes from other prisoners because no record of their trials survives. The National Park Service acknowledges this plainly on its website, a directness that makes the source credible.
The gangs began forming in May, less than three months after the prison opened. Most men had little left to steal beyond a blanket, a rubber sheet, a watch, or paper money sewn into a coat lining. John Ransom, a Union soldier who kept a diary throughout his imprisonment and later published it, wrote on March 29 that the Raiders were growing bolder as conditions worsened and often stripped men of everything they owned in public. By June, they were beating prisoners nearly to death in broad daylight for a tin cup.
On June 29, a prisoner named Dodd was severely beaten by two of them. He went to the only man inside the walls with real authority, Captain Henry Wirz. Wirz responded by cutting all rations for the entire camp until the Raiders were handed over. More than 26,000 starving men were told they would get nothing until they enforced the law themselves, so they did.
Between June 29 and July 1, at least 75 men were arrested and taken outside the stockade wall. Some prisoners later claimed the number approached 150. During the first days of July, the prisoners ran their own court. Inmates, many from a group calling itself the Regulators, took on the roles of judge and jury inside a prisoner-of-war camp while Confederate guards watched from the towers.
On July 9, most of the convicted were marched back through a gauntlet, a line of men hitting them with whatever they held. One died from the beating. Six were sentenced to death by hanging. One of the six, a man named Moon, had been in the camp for about a month.
He had been captured when the Confederates seized the USS Water Witch on June 3, entered the camp around June 10, and was under arrest two weeks later. From a ship deck to a prison gallows in one month, with no records surviving to say what he did in between. On July 11, the Confederates allowed the Regulators to gather wood and build a gallows inside the stockade. Wirz personally handed the six men over, told them he could not stop the hanging, and left.
Catholic priest Peter Whelan, who had come to the camp that summer, stood before the crowd and pleaded for mercy for the six. His plea was ignored. Before the execution, one of the men’s ropes broke, and he ran into the crowd, was caught, and brought back. The National Park Service says the man was Curtis, who slipped his bonds and ran toward the swamp below the hill before the police brought him back up.
Either way, he climbed the gallows again. The six were buried in the cemetery outside the stockade, joining about 3,100 men already there. The park service notes that the Raiders’ story was highlighted after the war because it was a safe one to tell, giving both North and South villains and a hanging rope without making anyone feel guilty. Fewer than 3,000 men had died when the Raiders were arrested.
About 10,000 died afterward. The men who hanged six thieves on July 11 did nothing about the thing that was actually killing them, because they could do nothing about it. Five months before the gallows was built, the hill was a pine forest next to a railroad station almost no one in the Confederacy had heard of: Andersonville, Sumter County, in southwest Georgia. Richmond chose it because its prisons were consuming the city’s food.
The official history puts it in one sentence: the prisoner population had swollen so much that it drained the city’s dwindling food resources. The Confederacy needed a place with food supply away from the Union army and found a slope in the heart of Georgia’s farm belt with a stream running past it. The stream mattered because it was meant to be the water source. Construction began in early 1864.
They cut pine logs 20 feet long, sunk five feet into the ground side by side, forming a rectangle 1,620 feet long and 779 feet wide, about 16. 5 acres. Guard boxes were placed along the top of the wall every 30 yards, and 19 feet inside ran a low wooden fence enclosing the entire space, known as the dead line. Crossing it meant the guard had the right to shoot, and men were killed that way.
Other camps had similar lines, but drawings of men shot at the dead line in Andersonville were so widely reprinted that the word and the place became linked. The prison was built for 10,000 men and was not finished when the first prisoners arrived. Roughly 400 men entered an unfinished prison on February 24, 1864, though some sources cite February 25. Three days later, a prisoner named Adam Swarner died.
His name is the first on a list that would reach nearly 13,000 names. Prisoners kept flowing in, about 400 per day for months. By June there were more than 26,000 men inside a fence built for 10,000. That month, the Confederates opened the north wall and added 10 acres, bringing the camp to 26.
5 acres. Ransom recorded his arrival on March 14 with one line: “Arrived at last at our destination, and what a gloomy place. ”
There were no barracks, no roofs, no wood, because the pines had gone into the wall. Men built shelters from blankets, coats, and mud.
Thousands had even less and slept in holes dug into the clay. The ration, when it came, was a quarter pound of cornmeal and either a third pound of bacon or a pound of beef, sometimes raw, sometimes with peas or molasses. Running through the middle of it all was the stream, a branch of Sweetwater Creek. It entered under the wall, had already passed through the guard camps upstream, and by the time it reached the prisoners it was their drinking water, their washing water, and their toilet in the same stretch of creek.
Where it slowed at the bottom of the slope, it became a swamp the men used as a latrine. In a Georgia summer, that swamp sat inside the stockade with 30,000 men. The three main killers, in order, were diarrhea, dysentery, and scurvy. Between February 25 and May 9, before the camp was even half full, the hospital admitted 4,588 men, of whom 1,026 died.
That was before the heat and before August. Scurvy is what happens when you eat cornmeal and pork for months without green food: gums bleed, teeth loosen, old wounds reopen, legs turn black and stiffen until you cannot walk to the creek. Dysentery is what the creek did while you could still reach it, taking everything you ate with it, leaving you weaker and thirstier, and you drank more. A man caught in that loop during a Georgia summer lasted weeks, sometimes only days.
You could buy food if you had money. The licensed sutler’s recorded prices in May 1864 were 50 cents for one egg, $12 a gallon for molasses, 40 cents for a loaf of cornbread. By June, a spoonful of baking soda cost 25 cents. Most of those men had already been robbed by the Raiders, so the food sat there feet away from starving men, priced for people not inside the camp.
The one thing a prisoner could wait for in the spring of 1864 was exchange, because no one was coming to rescue them. The reason traces back to July 1862, when both sides signed the Dix-Hill cartel, which called for exchanging prisoners by rank and paroling the rest. It worked well enough that no one needed large prisons for a year. Then, in December 1862, Jefferson Davis declared that captured Black Union soldiers and the white officers commanding them would not be exchanged.
The Confederate Congress made it law in May 1863, and in July it was applied to men of the 54th Massachusetts who were captured. On July 30, 1863, Lincoln signed General Orders 252, suspending the cartel until the Confederacy agreed to treat Black prisoners the same as white ones. The Confederacy refused, and large-scale exchanges stopped in August 1863, six months before Andersonville opened. The idea that Grant halted the exchanges is a myth the park service debunks on a full page.
What Grant did was put the condition in writing. On April 12, 1864, Confederate troops killed Black soldiers trying to surrender at Fort Pillow. Five days later, Grant wrote to General Butler setting his terms for any future exchange: there would be no discrimination between white and Black prisoners in any way, and the same treatment and release terms had to apply to Black soldiers as to white ones. If the Confederacy did not agree, that would be taken as a refusal of exchange altogether.
Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon replied that he doubted they could ever agree to exchanging Black men for their own soldiers. Lee’s position was that men who had been enslaved could not be returned. Exchanges stayed suspended. In July 1864, Wirz released five prisoners to carry a petition to Washington, signed by most of the camp, asking the government to resume exchanges.
The five swore they would return. Washington refused, and the five returned as sworn and told 30,000 men the answer. Wirz let them go, not the act of a man who wanted the camp full, and they came back to that hell because they had given their word to a Confederate captain. One rescue attempt was made.
Sherman, camped outside Atlanta that month, approved a cavalry raid under General George Stoneman to cut the Macon railway and, if successful, move on to Macon and Andersonville to open the gates. It failed. On July 31, 1864, at Sunshine Church, 19 miles northeast of Macon, Confederate cavalry under Alfred Iverson surrounded Stoneman and he surrendered, having held out long enough for two regiments to escape north. A Georgia historical society marker says 600 men were captured with him; another account says 500.
The general who came to free the prisoners became one of them. Records show 351 escapes from Andersonville; the U. S. Army lists only 32 men who made it back to Union lines out of 45,000, less than one in a thousand.
Men dug tunnels for months from wells they had dug for water, but informants betrayed them, guards found them, they collapsed, or the diggers emerged in darkness with no idea which direction to go. The camp kept tracker dogs, and escaped men were caught by Confederate patrols hunting runaways and fugitive slaves. The park service’s polite conclusion is that most of the family escape stories actually involve escapes from other camps 60 miles away. Wirz was born in Switzerland in 1822 and came to the United States in 1849.
He worked as a physician in New York, an interpreter in Connecticut, and an herbal healer in Kentucky. By 1857 he settled in Louisiana to manage a plantation called Cabin Teel, 2,200 acres with hundreds of enslaved people for an absentee owner. That job qualified him for his work in Georgia more than his medical career did. When the war broke out he joined the 4th Louisiana Battalion, and after First Bull Run in July 1861, he was assigned to guard duty at a tobacco warehouse prison in Richmond, where prisoners said he thought himself omnipresent and omniscient, a phrase the park service used as the title of its pamphlet about him.
He was promoted to captain on June 12, 1862, joined the staff of General John Winder, who managed Richmond’s prisons, and within months commanded the prisons at Belle Isle and Libby. At some point in 1862 he suffered a deep tissue tear in his right arm. He said it happened at Seven Pines while carrying orders for General Johnston, but the military records do not clearly support that. He took leave in 1863 to go to Europe for treatment, returned in February 1864, and was ordered to Georgia.
He took formal command of Camp Sumter, as Andersonville was officially known, on March 27, 1864. Inside the prison, Wirz managed roll calls, ration distribution, and supplies. He was not the commander of the site. A colonel named Alexander Persons, and later Winder himself, held that role.
Each guard regiment had officers senior to him, and the commissary office and hospital operated independently. He could request supplies and withhold them, but he could not go get them himself. That was the scope in which he lived. He ordered the construction of the dead line.
He ordered daily headcounts and withheld rations when numbers did not match, the same method he used against the Raiders. He kept dogs to track escapees, put recaptured men in irons and shackles, and confiscated relief supplies that arrived for the prisoners. He made constant threats because threats were the only tool he had that did not cost supplies. At least once, a threat became an order: records indicate he ordered a guard to shoot a prisoner, which the guard did, and Wirz later claimed he had only meant it as a threat.
He was a cruel man, and that needs stating plainly before anything else, because what follows complicates the picture without excusing it. His guards were from the Georgia Reserves, boys too young for the front and men too old for it, enlisted in early 1864 and put above the wall in the sun, most with farms at home and no one to work them. On July 20, 1864, there were 2,421 of them. Wirz saw them as useless and wrote it down: the uselessness of the guard force increases daily.
They took bribes, traded with prisoners across the fence, deserted, and some helped men escape. Between 200 and 250 of them died at Andersonville, a mortality rate around 10 percent, against 29 percent inside the stockade. The guards drank from the creek before it reached the camp, and they had gardens, game, and food parcels from local families. Winder took over on June 3, and on July 26 was placed in charge of all prisons in Georgia and Alabama, a chain of command above Wirz that grew longer without growing clearer.
Winder was born in Maryland in 1800, graduated West Point in 1820, and was appointed Richmond’s provost marshal in February 1862, putting him in charge of prisons from there to Georgia. His biographer describes him as rash, obstinate, quick-tempered, foul-mouthed, and unsocial. Historians have split into two camps: one argues he tried to treat prisoners fairly and reduced mortality once in charge of the prisons; the other argues mistreatment was deliberate policy. He was the man who held the power Wirz did not.
By mid-August 1864, nearly 33,000 men were packed into 26. 5 acres. Feeding the camp required nearly a million pounds of cornmeal in August alone. The Confederate commissary could not supply it because he worked at fixed prices set in Richmond and took a tenth of each farm’s production, which made farmers resist.
Large landowners were still planting cotton instead of corn. Civilians and soldiers around Andersonville reported food stores whose owners would sell only for gold or paper dollars. The park service states in one sentence: there was enough food and wood in the Andersonville area to improve conditions considerably, but since none of it was nationalized, the Confederate government could not get to it. About 3,000 men died in August, about 100 per day.
The water worsened as the swamp grew, until a spring burst from the base of the hill inside the dead line between the creek and the wall during a storm on August 9. Clean water flowing from the clay in a place where no water had been. The prisoners called it Providence Spring, and many meant that literally. It flowed, and men lived because of it.
In 1901, the Women’s Relief Corps built a stone structure over the spring. One of the men in the camp during that month was Boston Corbett, an intensely religious man who in 1858 had used scissors to end his personal temptations before attending a prayer meeting. He was captured in June 1864 near Culpeper, Virginia, by Mosby’s Rangers after firing at them from behind a tree until his ammunition ran out, and a Confederate officer stopped him from being shot while standing, saying he had the right to defend himself to the end. He spent about five months in Andersonville.
A fellow prisoner recorded that Corbett once left the ranks, crossed the dead line, filled his rubber blanket with water from the creek, and carried it to a wounded man while a guard screamed at him the whole way, yet he was not shot. He was exchanged in November 1864 and entered a hospital in Annapolis with scurvy, malnutrition, and exhaustion. Five months later, on April 26, 1865, he was the cavalry sergeant who shot through a crack in a burning tobacco barn in Virginia and killed John Wilkes Booth. The man who killed Lincoln’s assassin had been a prisoner at Andersonville.
Sherman took Atlanta on September 2, 1864. With the Union army there, the Confederates had to assume the next raid on the prison would be bigger than Stoneman’s, so they evacuated the camp. Between September 7 and 13, nearly 17,000 prisoners were moved by train to camps on the Georgia coast and South Carolina, including the new Camp Lawton near Millen and the Florence prison, which would have to keep their own death records through the winter. Another 2,000 or so were exchanged in mid-September.
In less than a month, 25,000 men left. By the end of September, the camp had just over 8,000. By November 1, about 4,000. By mid-December, about 2,000.
The common story is that Andersonville killed men because of overcrowding, but when 25,000 men leave, the death rate should slow down. It did not. The park service has a page debunking the myth that time at Andersonville is always August. Of the roughly 4,000 men held in October 1864, about 1,800 died, a mortality rate of 45 percent in a single month inside a stockade that was nearly empty.
Between August 30, 1864, and April 28, 1865, with the population never exceeding 8,000 and below 4,000 most of that time, nearly 5,600 more men died. Part of that rate is explained by the fact that the men left behind in October were too sick to be moved by train, so the camp was sorted, with the dying kept while the living were sent away. Only part, because rations did not improve even after the mouths eating them were gone. Shelters did not improve with the wood still in warehouses.
When a Georgia winter came, there were no blankets, no coats, no firewood. The men who survived the August swamp froze on the same hill in December. The site’s historians call this the Second Andersonville, and their view is that for 10 of the 14 months it was open, the camp held fewer than 10,000 men and still killed them. Overcrowding explains August.
The other 13 months are down to how the whole place was administered. Some men took another way out. Confederate recruiters came to the camps in the war’s last months offering enlistment in the Confederate army in exchange for leaving the stockade, and hundreds of Union prisoners across the South accepted. They became known as Galvanized Yankees and were treated as traitors by their old comrades for life.
One name from Andersonville itself: Joel Eaton of the 81st Illinois, who was galvanized into the 10th Tennessee, died shortly after in Macon, and lies today in the Confederate section of the cemetery there under a Confederate headstone. By November 15, 1864, the day Sherman began his march to the sea, fewer than 200 men were inside the stockade, fewer than 2,000 in the hospital, and the death count stood at about 12,100. The common defense that Sherman burned the food fails on dates: nearly all the deaths at Andersonville happened before Sherman destroyed anything in central Georgia. The camp stayed open on a small scale until May 1865.
Winder did not live to see it. He died of a heart attack on February 7, 1865, at the Florence prison in South Carolina, three months before anyone came to ask questions. That brings the story back to the record and the 19-year-old keeping it. Dorence Atwater was born February 3, 1845, in Terryville, Connecticut, lied about his age to enlist at 16, and was captured in July 1863 by two Confederates wearing Union uniforms.
He was among the first groups marched to Andersonville, became ill, and when he recovered, someone noticed his handwriting and put him in the Confederate hospital with the death list. Every man who died passed under his pen: name, company, regiment, date, cause, and grave number. He was 19 years old and keeping the records of the entire camp. At some point he decided the Confederates would never hand over the list, and that if it did not get out, most of those graves would remain numbered boards forever.
So he secretly started a second copy, hidden among the Confederate papers on the same desk, knowing that if discovered he would be hanged. He kept it up for months, through August and into the Second Andersonville, name after name. On February 27, 1865, a full year after Swarner became the first name, Atwater was released to Union authorities, walked out with the list, and entered the hospital with diphtheria, typhoid, and scurvy all at once. When he could stand, he went looking for someone who could use it.
That someone was Clara Barton. The army organized the expedition, and the army identified the graves. Quartermaster Captain James Moore, who had already overseen the reburial of nearly 50,000 Union dead across the South, left Washington on July 8, 1865, and reached Andersonville on July 25. Atwater went with them and with the list.
Barton came as a guest of the Secretary of War, nursed the burial details, and answered letters from families. The graves were matched using Atwater’s copy, a captured set of Confederate records, and the memories of released prisoners who had worked as clerks. The men who pulled the numbered boards from the ground and placed proper headstones over each grave were soldiers of the 137th United States Colored Troops, Black soldiers, the same category of soldier the Confederacy had refused to exchange, the refusal that had filled the camp in the first place. On August 17, 1865, Barton raised the flag over the new cemetery of about 12,000 graves, around 460 of them listed as unknown at the time.
Today there are 13,714 graves, 921 of them unknown, both numbers higher than in 1865 because it is still an active national cemetery and some original identifications did not hold. Then the army arrested Atwater. He had let them use his list for the mission, and now they wanted the original. He refused because he did not trust that it would be published if he handed it over.
He was court-martialed and imprisoned, and released by President Johnson’s general amnesty in December 1865. The list was eventually published by the government and reprinted in the New York Tribune, which is how a mother in Ohio could open the newspaper and find out where her son was. Atwater went as far from Georgia as possible. He became the American consul in Tahiti, married a Tahitian princess in 1875, and died in San Francisco in 1910.
Barton’s Missing Soldiers Office went on to answer more than 60,000 letters and tell more than 20,000 families what had happened to their men. Much of the response about Georgia was thanks to a copy that a teenager had hidden under a Confederate clerk’s papers. The famous photograph of the emaciated survivor, a man sitting on a chair or bed with ribs like a birdcage and arms thinner than the chair legs, is real, and those men were truly starving, but most of them were not from Andersonville. They came out of the Richmond prisons, Belle Isle, and the tobacco warehouses in the spring of 1864, before Andersonville began killing anyone in large numbers.
A congressional committee photographed them that May, wrote that their condition was impossible to describe in words, and printed the images as lithographs attached to its report. In early 1864, the worst prison in America, in northern public opinion, was in Richmond. The panoramic drawing of the stockade that appears in every documentary, with tiny figures at the dead line, the swamp, and the gallows all in one frame, was drawn by a former prisoner named Thomas O’Dea between 1879 and 1885 from memory. It is a view from a hill that no prisoner inside the stockade ever had.
Even the vocabulary is borrowed. The word often used for the prisoners’ shelters, shebang, appears only four times in about 1,200 pages of postwar prisoner testimony and is almost absent from the diaries, where men wrote tent, hut, hole, and burrow. It became attached to Andersonville through MacKinlay Kantor’s 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which used the word for every shelter in the book. Elmira Prison in New York opened the same summer for Confederate prisoners and was meant for about 4,000 but held 12,100, burying 2,970, a death rate of 24.
5 percent against Andersonville’s 29 percent. Men called it Hellmira, and in the summer, businessmen across the street built observation towers and charged the public 10 or 15 cents to climb up and watch the prisoners. Chicago and Elmira expanded over their prison sites before anyone preserved anything. Andersonville is the one with the cemetery, the photographs, and the gallows, which is the main reason it is the prison you can name.
Wirz was arrested at Andersonville on May 7, 1865, by Captain Noyes under orders from General Wilson, and placed in the Old Capitol Prison in Washington. The commission that tried him convened August 21, 1865, in a courtroom inside the Capitol, presided over by Major General Lew Wallace, who had just served on the commission that tried Lincoln’s conspirators and would write Ben-Hur 15 years later. The prosecution was run by Colonel Norton Chipman. The trial lasted 67 days, with 167 witnesses on both sides.
There were two charges. The first was conspiracy to injure the health of a large number of federal prisoners at Andersonville. When first drawn, it named as co-conspirators Davis, Howell Cobb, Winder, two more of Winder’s family, Surgeon Isaiah White, and hospital chief Randolph Stevenson. By the time the trial began, the list had been rewritten to name unknown persons.
The second charge was murder in violation of the laws and customs of war in 13 specifications, for shooting men, ordering others to shoot them, setting dogs on them, and putting men in irons and shackles until they died. Some killings were said to be by his own hand, most by orders to others. Each of the 13 murder specifications describes its victim the same way: a soldier of the United States Army, name unknown. Thirteen dead men with dates of death.
The first was a man shot on July 8, 1864, who died the next day, placing the crime in the same week the prisoners were holding their own court against the Raiders, three days before the Regulators’ gallows went up. One on September 20, when the camp was already half empty. One beaten on August 20, dying on the 30th. None of them had a name in the indictment.
At the same time, in the same city, Atwater sat in a cell for refusing to hand over a list of nearly 13,000 names with their dates, and no one carried it across town. A story runs through every popular account of the trial claiming the star witness was a Frenchman named Felix de la Baume, who said he was Lafayette’s grandson and swore he saw Wirz kill men with his own hands, and who weeks after the hanging was exposed as a German fraud named Felix Oeser. The exposure part is true. The Washington Evening Star reported on November 27, 1865, 17 days after the execution, that the German witness Baum had been dismissed from the Interior Department after being proven a deserter from the 7th New York.
What the park service found in the actual trial record is that no one in 1865 treated him as the star witness. His testimony was one of several retold in the prosecution’s closing argument, and Wirz did not bother to answer it in his own closing. He was a fraud, and the verdict did not rest on him, and both things are true at once. The trial’s real problems were elsewhere.
The commission refused to hear evidence about the collapse of the exchange cartel, on the grounds that it was irrelevant to what Wirz did. It also refused to hear evidence about conditions in Union prisons. Wirz’s lawyers withdrew from the case twice in protest, and eventually no defense was present in the room, with Chipman giving the closing argument for both sides. Wirz’s written statement rested on an inspection report sent to Richmond in 1864 by a Confederate colonel named Chandler, whose point was that Chandler, who saw the camp at its worst and reported on it to his own government, never blamed him.
The conspiracy charge convicted a captain for conspiring with unknown persons, when the known ones were either dead, like Winder, or in a cell at Fort Monroe, like Davis, who was never tried for anything. The park service’s summary of the trial contains a sentence that keeps coming back: both sides were trying to prove Wirz was acting under orders. The prosecution wanted that so it could pursue those above him. Wirz wanted it so those above him would bear the burden.
Then the charge against those above him was dropped, and he was left alone under the weight. There is one more thing, with a source warning. Wirz’s lawyer, Louis Schade, later said that on the night before the execution, a man came to his cell with an offer to implicate Davis in a plan to kill the prisoners in exchange for a commutation. Wirz refused.
That account comes from the defense, from a man with every reason to say it, and no confirmation from the other side exists. Wirz, whatever he was, faced the noose without naming anyone. He was convicted of conspiracy and on 10 of the 13 murder charges, acquitted on three. The sentence was death by hanging, with two-thirds of the court concurring.
On Friday, November 10, 1865, at 10:32 a. m. , he was hanged in the yard of the Old Capitol Prison. There were 200 spectators inside the walls and 120 soldiers guarding them, with more men in the trees outside watching, described in congressional records as perched over the treetops like eagles.
Alexander Gardner photographed the execution. The rope fall did not break his neck. He strangled slowly before the crowd. A reporter for Leslie’s Illustrated wrote that there was something in his face and step that might have been called heroism in a better man.
He was buried in the Washington Arsenal beside Lincoln’s conspirators. The case against Wirz was strong. He ordered the dead line built. He built his authority on threats, dogs, and shackles, tools learned from managing 2,200 acres of enslaved people in Louisiana.
He once ordered a guard to shoot a man, and the guard did. Prisoners feared him in Richmond in 1861, years before Georgia, and they were not wrong. The commission heard nearly 150 witnesses, and much of what they said was true. He was a genuinely cruel man, and if you want a villain in this story, he is the right one.
His defenders’ best argument is that he was just a captain in a box, and that the box was what was killing people. That is true to a degree, and many men were in similar boxes that year. Whelan had only a prayer book, and he stood before a crowd and demanded the lives of six thieves. Atwater had a pen, and used it to steal 13,000 names from Confederate hands.
Corbett crossed the dead line carrying water. Wirz had the dogs, the shackles, and the ration wagon, and what he did with his box, according to the records, was withhold the wagon and order a guard to shoot. The box was real, and it still does not excuse what he did with it. The consequences are not simple either.
The exchange that would have emptied the camp ended in August 1863 over the question of Black soldiers, and the man in the dock could not raise that in court because the commission excluded it. Food and wood sat near the camp, but Confederate price controls kept them in warehouses, and the commandant could not buy a single nail. The camp’s worst death rate came in October 1864, when 4,000 men sat in a stockade built for 10,000, and 45 percent were dead by November. Overcrowding did not cause that.
The system did, and the system’s names had been in the first draft of the conspiracy charge and then erased. The United States also prosecuted others. About 1,000 courts-martial were held after the war, mostly about prisoner treatment. The commander of Salisbury Prison, where the death rate was also appalling, was acquitted unanimously in 1866.
James, the Andersonville commissary officer, was convicted of manslaughter for withholding supplies and sentenced to hard labor at Fort Pulaski, but he escaped. Champ Ferguson was hanged the same autumn for personally executing at least 53 captured Union soldiers, worth knowing when you hear that Wirz was the only man the government hanged. He was the only prison commander. Becket was investigated for executing 22 men in North Carolina and never arrested because Grant intervened.
Davis was indicted and never tried. Winder was dead. Depending on which park service page you read, the death count at the camp is 12,912, 12,920, or nearly 13,000, because the record a boy kept in secret did not catch every name, and 921 graves still say unknown. Wirz stood at the foot of the Regulators’ gallows on July 11, 1864, handed them six men, and told them stopping the hanging was not in his power.
He may have been right about that. Sixteen months later, in a room in the capital with the exchange evidence excluded and the defense seats empty, a commission asked itself the same question about him and answered it differently. The Old Capitol Prison was torn down in 1929, and the building on the site now, at First and A Streets, is the Supreme Court of the United States, meaning the yard where the only prison commandant in American history was hanged after a trial that excluded half the evidence now sits beneath the only court in the country whose job is to decide whether a trial was fair. No one planned that.
In Sumter County, the graves still stand in rows on the slope, and at the bottom of the slope stands the stone springhouse over the place where water flowed from the clay on August 9, 1864. The record that began with Swarner is why most of those headstones have a name on them.