At the beginning of the US Civil War, both sides followed a policy towards captured prisoners known as “parole”: captured soldiers would be given a written statement to sign acknowledging that they would not participate any more in the fighting, then be released. It may seem incredibly naive to us today, but back then “honor” was important, and virtually nobody violated their oath. Every so often, both sides would negotiate a “parole exchange”, in which the paroles of an agreed-upon number on each side would be revoked and they would be allowed to rejoin their units and fight again.
But as the war dragged on and the armies on each side got larger, the parole system broke down. One of the primary sticking points was the treatment of captured African-Americans who were fighting with the Union Army. The Confederates considered them to be runaway slaves, sometimes killing them out of hand, and refused to either count them as POWs or to parole them or exchange them. The Union Commander, General Ulysses S Grant, resented this, and also realized that the loss of manpower through capture would hurt the Confederate Army a lot more than the Federals. So in late 1863 the US announced that it would no longer parole or exchange any captured POWs, and would instead hold them until the end of the war. The Confederates had no choice but to do likewise.
It made military sense, but it was a humanitarian disaster. Neither side had made any provision for holding large numbers of POWs. The Confederacy in particular was already suffering from a shortage of resources, and had little to spare for caring for Union POWs.
In the North, captured POWs were interred in hastily-built stockade prisons, usually located in Federal Army training camps. The South did not have the resources to do even that: so they simply found a number of large empty fields, built a fence around them, and dumped prisoners inside. One of the largest of these was in Andersonville GA.
Officially, the prison was “Camp Sumter”, but it was known, in both North and South, simply as “Andyville”. In all, some 45,000 Federal POWs were crowded into a field measuring about the area of five or six city blocks. Typhus, cholera and dysentery were rampant. Almost 13,000 prisoners died.
At the end of the war, the commander of Camp Sumter, Capt Henry Wirz, was tried for the “murder” of these prisoners, and was hanged.
Today, Andersonville is a National Historic Site. It is also the home of the National POW Museum.
Here are some photos from a visit.
