When was andersonville prison

Wirz was born in Switzerland in andmoved to the United States in the late s. He lived in the South, primarily in Louisiana , and became a physician. Winder had Wirz transferred to his department, and Wirz spent the rest of theconflict working with prisoners of war. He commanded a prison in Tuscaloosa, Alabama ; escorted prisoners around the Confederacy; handled exchanges with the Union; and was wounded in a stagecoach accident. After returning to duty, he traveled to Europe and likely delivered messages to Confederate envoys.

When Wirz arrived back in the Confederacy in early , he was assigned the responsibility for the prison at Andersonville. Wirz oversaw an operation in which thousands of inmates died. Partly a victim of circumstance,he was given few resources with which to work. As the Confederacy began to dissolve, food and medicine for prisoners were difficult to obtain.

When word about Andersonville leaked out, Northerners were horrified. His trial began in August and ran for two months.

During the trial, more than witnesses were called to testify. Nonetheless, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. Just before he was executed by hanging in Washington , D. I am being hanged for obeying them. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present.

From to , the British forces occupying New York City used abandoned or Fort Sumter is an island fortification located in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina most famous for being the site of the first shots of the Civil War Wirz was the only person executed for war crimes during the Civil War. Andersonville prison ceased to exist when the War ended in April Some former prisoners remained in Federal service, but most returned to the civilian occupations they had before the War.

During July and August , Clara Barton, along with a detachment of laborers and soldiers, and former prisoner Dorence Atwater, came to Andersonville cemetery to identify and mark the graves of the Union dead.

As a prisoner at Andersonville, Atwater had been assigned to record the names of deceased Union soldiers for Confederate prison officials. Fearing loss of the death records at war's end, Atwater made his own copy of the register in hopes of notifying the relatives of the more than 12, dead interred at Andersonville. Civil War Article. Andersonville Prison. Andersonville, Georgia.

The deadline that kept prisoners back from the walls of the stockade was marked by a simple fence. The man in this image was shot reaching under the fence as he tried to obtain fresher water than was available downstream. Yet the overwhelming number of prisoners rendered their efforts hopelessly inadequate. Prisoners did little to improve the miserable conditions under which they lived.

Firewood details were curtailed when prisoners seized the opportunity to escape. Wells were covered over and made inaccessible after prisoners used them to hide escape tunnels. Camp inmates often preyed upon each other. Roving gangs of raiders, chiefly from eastern regiments, robbed fellow inmates, despite efforts by guards to stop them. The prisoners hanged six of the raider leaders on July 11, After that, a new police force made up of prisoners sought to impose discipline on their fellow inmates.

They tried to enforce sanitation practices, curtail robberies, and force captive officers to take care of the men under them. Men detailed to take care of the sick often robbed the hospital of food and supplies. The Swiss-born commander, a physician in Louisiana when the war broke out, tried to impose order and security, but his lack of authority over the guards and supply officers limited his effectiveness.

By August the prison population reached its greatest number, with more than 33, men incarcerated in the camp. By November the prison population was a mere 1, men. As these troops were called away for combat duty elsewhere, Georgia state reserves and militia from Georgia and Florida replaced them.

Cannons, guard towers, dog packs, and a second wall also served to foil escapes. Most of the prisoners who did escape Andersonville fled from work details on duties that took them outside the camp walls.

Inmates also attempted to dig at least eighty tunnels, nearly all of which were exposed by informants. Compared with other Confederate prisons, very few of those incarcerated at Andersonville made successful escapes. Those who did escape received help from sympathetic or war-weary white Southerners but found enslaved Blacks to be their greatest allies. Duncan, were arrested and tried separately for war crimes by federal military courts in Washington, D.

Both the defense and the prosecution tried to prove that the defendants were following orders. The prosecutors hoped to prove that Duncan and Wirz were receiving orders from Confederate superiors, including President Jefferson Davis, and the defense attorneys hoped to absolve their clients of responsibility by passing it up the chain of command.

After two and a half months, Duncan received a fifteen-year sentence, and Wirz was sentenced to death. Duncan escaped after serving only one year at Fort Pulaski. On November 10, , Wirz was hanged in the courtyard of the Old Capitol prison, just behind the Capitol in Washington. For decades, historians claimed that Wirz was the only man executed for war crimes committed during the Civil War, and some southerners came to see him as a martyr. The United Daughters of the Confederacy erected a monument to him in the town of Andersonville, and each year on the anniversary of his execution, local residents hold a ceremony paying tribute to him.

Wirz was, in fact, one of a few Confederates to be tried and executed for crimes committed during the war. Robert Kennedy, a Confederate officer, was tried and executed by a military tribunal in March for plotting to blow up New York City landmarks, and Champ Ferguson, a Confederate guerrilla fighter based in Tennessee, was tried and executed in October for killing Union prisoners of war. The propagandistic and exaggerated nature of these accounts perpetuated several myths and misconceptions about the prison and its officials.

Writer MacKinlay Kantor drew on such memoirs for his best-selling novel Andersonville, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in and was adapted as a television miniseries for Turner Network Television in