150 years ago today, Andersonville prison commander Capt. Henry Wirz was executed

[struggle4progress]

By Linda Wheeler
November 10 at 2:11 PM

... More than 150 witnesses, including a man on his prison staff, had testified to Wirz’s personal involvement in the harsh punishment given to prisoners for minor violations and the purposeful withholding of food and supplies ... Wirz could blame all the others involved in running the camp as well as his superiors but in the end he was held accountable for his own actions, how he personally treated prisoners ... After his execution, Wirz became a martyr for some in the defeated Confederacy who said he had been made a scapegoat for the Confederate effort and pointed out he was the only Southern officer arrested for war crimes. In fact, he wasn’t ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/house-divided/wp/2015/11/10/150-years-ago-today-andersonville-prison-commander-capt-henry-wirz-was-executed/

[struggle4progress]

1. Why Does This Georgia Town Honor One of America's Worst War Criminals?

By Greg Bailey

... During Wirz’s fourteen months in charge of Andersonville, 13,000 Union prisoners of war died from disease, starvation, exposure, medical neglect and murder. At its peak in August of 1864, more than 33,000 POWs were held in 26 acres of open ground. The only source of water was a small creek which ran dark with sewage. Rations, if they came at all, were barely enough to sustain life. Prisoners were never issued clothing or provided shelter, and lay under makeshift tents or in holes dug in the ground wearing the same ragged pieces of their uniforms for the duration. Everything in the camp, a prisoner later testified, was covered in lice and overrun with vermin. Witnesses also testified that Wirz personally murdered and tortured prisoners, and ordered guards to do the same ...

... Southern writers claimed Wirz’s trial was unfair, citing his absence from Andersonville on one of the days specified in the charges. The Lost Cause true believers even blamed the North for forcing the South to mistreat prisoners. The cult-like devotion to clearing Wirz even prompted some Southerners to seek a presidential pardon ...

In 1909, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) decided to erect their own monument to Wirz .. barely a mile from the site of the prison.

The tall stone monument contains four panels ... He was, the panel reads, “condemned to ignominious death on charges of excessive cruelty to Federal prisoners.” Another panel states, “To rescue his name from the stigma attached to it by embittered prejudice this shaft is erected by the Georgia division, United Daughters of the Confederacy.” At the time Union veteran organizations protested, but the monument still stands today ...

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/123365/why-does-georgia-town-honor-one-americas-worst-war-criminals

[Special Prosciuto]

4. My grandmother, 1898-1980 was DAR and a fierce defender of Wirz.

She argued that the Confederacy could not in its latter years feed its own troops let alone prisoners.

[gladium et scutum]

5. General U.S.Grant

Is largely responsible for the creation of places like Andersonville and Elmira. Up to early 1864, prisoners remained in their captors custody for a few weeks or months before being exchanged and returned to duty with their respective army. Grant ended the practice as a means to reduce the manpower available to the Confederate Army. Neither side was prepared for long term custody of prisoners. The system cobbled together by both the Federal and Confederate governments was poorly organized, poorly supervised,
and poorly managed. Officers sent to command these camps North or South were sent to guard prisoners because they generally had proven themselves incapable of commanding in combat. Units set to guard prisoners were generally units no general wanted in his army for a variety of reasons. These combinations of factors lead to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of men both Union and Confederate.

[moondust]

2. My relatives tell me

a great uncle was a Union doctor whose unit was captured and he found himself trying to care for prisoners at Andersonville with little or nothing in the way of medical supplies. Or something like that. The horror...

[FLPanhandle]

3. Yet, Northern POW camp commanders were rewarded for the same conditions.

Folks who only learned a cursory overview of the Civil War in High School are usually shocked to learn Andersonville wasn't the worst of the Civil War POW camps and the Northern Commanders were at least as bad.


Elmira Prison (New York)

Elmira Prison, also known as "Hellmira," opened in July of 1864. It quickly became infamous for its staggering death rate, unfathomable living conditions, and for its sadistic commandant, Col. William Hoffman.

Col. Hoffman forced Confederate prisoners to sleep outside in the open while furnishing them with little to no shelter. Prisoners relied upon their own ingenuity for constructing drafty and largely inadequate shelters consisting of sticks, blankets, and logs. As a result, the Rebels spent their winters shivering in biting cold and their summers in sweltering, pathogen-laden heat.

Overcrowding was yet again a major problem. Although Union leadership mandated a ceiling of 4,000 prisoners at Elmira, within a month of its opening that numbered had swelled to 12,123 men. By the time the last prisoners were sent home in September of 1865, close to 3,000 men had perished. With a death rate approaching 25%, Elmira was one of the deadliest Union-operated POW camps of the entire war.

Camp Douglas (Illinois)

A similar disregard for human life developed at Camp Douglas, also known as the “Andersonville of the North." Camp Douglas originally served as a training facility for Illinois regiments, but was later converted to a prison camp. 18,000 Confederates were incarcerated there by the end of the war.

Upon inspecting the camp, the U.S Sanitary Commission reported that the “…the amount of standing water, of unpoliced grounds, of foul sinks, of general disorder, of soil reeking with miasmic accretions, of rotten bones and emptying of camp kettles.....was enough to drive a sanitarian mad." The barracks were so filthy and infested that the commission claimed, “nothing but fire can cleanse them."

Union camp leadership was largely to blame for the death toll. Commandants purposely cut ration sizes and quality for personal profit, leading to illness, scurvy, and starvation.

One prisoner in seven died, for a total of 4,200 deaths by 1865.


The trick to avoiding war crime trials is to be on the winning side.