Andersonville National Historic Site

The Andersonville National Historic Site in Georgia preserves the former Andersonville Prison (also known as Camp Sumter), a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp during the final months of the Civil War.  The prison was created in February, 1864 and served until April, 1865.  The site also contains the National Cemetery and the National Prisoner of War Museum.  

Our first stop was the National Prisoner of War Museum.

Opened in 1998, the National Prisoner of War Museum tells the story of prisoners of war throughout American History.  The facility also serves as the park's visitor center.

Original cement memorial from the WWII Japanese prison camp, Camp O'Donnell in the Philippine Islands.

The museum is one of the largest in the National Park system.  Exhibits include information panels, photographs, letters, diaries, personal items donated by POWs, and actual artifacts from prison camps.  The bulk of the exhibits are on World War II, Vietnam, and the Korean War.

There is a separate section that deals with the Civil War prison camps, with a very minor focus on Andersonville itself.

During the Civil War, an estimated 194,000 Union soldiers and 214,000 Confederate soldiers became prisoners of war, more than in any other conflict in the history of the country.  Approximately 30,000 Union soldiers died in Confederate prisons while the death rate was almost as bad in the North with approximately 26,000 Confederate soldiers dying in Union prisoner of war camps.  Since both sides predicted a short war, neither prepared for large numbers of POWs during the four years of conflict.  By the end of the war, camps such as Andersonville suffered from a lack of supplies and experienced extremely high mortality rates, as well as death and desertion by many of the guards.  During the 14 months of its existence, Andersonville accounted for 43 percent of all Union deaths in Civil War prisons.

Port Lookout, Maryland, was the only Union prison without any barracks and prisoners were housed in tents.  At times as many as twenty thousand were crowded within the limits of the stockade.  

Some of the Confederate captives below.

We went to the back of the building to look around.

The commemorative courtyard and structure, "The Price of Freedom, Fully Paid" serves as a memorial to all prisoners of war.

And then learned some specifics about Andersonville Prison.

Off we went to walk the area where the compound once stood.

The original fences have deteriorated but excavation enabled them to find the exact area where the fences once stood.

The downstream end of Stockade Branch was the site of the camp "sinks" or latrines.  According to the Confederates' original plan, prisoners would get drinking water upstream and use latrines downstream, where the current would flush sewage out of the camp.

Inadvertently, the prison was designed for death.  Stockade posts showed the drainage, and during dry spells the creek became more swamp than flowing stream.  Dysentery swept the camp.

The "sinks" today.

As stated on the informational display below:

"From these heights near headquarters, Captain Henry Wirz could observe everything within the prison walls.  In the picture below, envision the white post perimeter as the stockade; 30,000 human beings within that area; the din of all those voices, the groans from the hospital, the shouts of the guards, the smell of unwashed clothes and bodies.  Today's landscape of quiet grass softens for us the images of Andersonville.  Wirz, the prison commandant, did not have that luxury."

Ten miles south of Andersonville, residents of Americus complained of the smell.

The ground at one end of the prison is pocked with deep holes - either tunnels or wells.  Overcrowding disguised the digging.  Beneath the sea of tattered shelters, prisoners could work undetected with mess plates, spoons, and canteen halves.  While many call every excavation an escape tunnel, many have been wells.  With the camp stream lethally polluted, the search for fresh water was as urgent as the need to escape.

One prisoner who attempted escape said:

"Just as it was coming light in the east we heard dogs after us.  In a few moments the hounds came up with us and began smelling of us.  Pretty soon five mounted rebels arrived on the scene of action.  They laughed to think we expected to get away."

Escape tunnel

Well marker

Much like battlefields, there are monuments throughout the site.

Massachusetts monument

Wisconsin monument

A group of prisoners, calling themselves the Andersonville Raiders, attacked their fellow inmates to steal food, jewelry, money, and clothes.  They were armed mostly with clubs and killed to get what they wanted.  Another group started up, organized by Peter "Big Pete" Aubrey, to stop the larceny, calling themselves "Regulators" who caught nearly all of the Raiders who were then tried by the Regulators' judge and a jury selected from the group of new prisoners.  This jury, upon finding the Raiders guilty, set punishment that included running the gauntlet, being sent to the stocks, ball and chain and, in six cases, hanging.

From the prison site we moved on to the National Cemetery.

Andersonville National Cemetery was established to provide a permanent place of honor for those who died in military service to our country.  The initial interments, beginning in February 1864, were trench burials of the prisoners who died in the nearby prison.  In fourteen months, more than 13,000 soldiers were buried there of which 921 are marked "unknown". Today, the cemetery contains nearly 20,000 interments.  The cemetery was deemed a national cemetery in 1866 and today is managed by the National Park Service.

The prisoners' headstones are only inches apart.  As the death rate at Andersonville escalated to 100 per day, officials abandoned the use of pine-box coffins and had the bodies buried shoulder to shoulder in trenches.  At first only numbered stakes marked the prisoners' graves.  

The dead might have remined unidentified except for the efforts of Dorence Atwater, a former prisoner.  Prison officials assigned him to keep records of the dead.  Hoping to notify bereaved relatives after the war, Atwater made a second copy of the death list, which he smuggled out in the lining of his jacket.  When he accompanied Clara Barton to Andersonville in July 1865, they were able to match his list with the numbered stakes.  Each prisoner could then be honored by name.

The story of the Raiders, their hanging, and their isolated graves evolved into one of the most-told stories of Andersonville.  Most of what is known about the Raiders comes from prisoner diaries and  memoirs and no records exist of the trial.  In 1865, when prisoners began publishing accounts of their captivity experience at Andersonville, the story of the Raiders made only minor mentions.  As the prisoner memoirs became more popular in the 1870s and 1880s, the stories about the Raiders evolved into dramatic accounts of battling gangs with evil characterizations of the Raiders and heroic portrayals of the Regulators.  Beginning in the late 19th century, historians portrayed the Raiders as villains, basing the aspect of the Andersonville story almost entirely on later accounts.  New research using primary sources reveals little about the Raiders except that they were tried and hung and now rest in separate graves in the cemetery.  Questions surround even the identities of the six buried in the cemetery.  In 1864 their alleged crimes set them apart - today these isolated, but not forgotten, six graves stand apart.

An interesting start to the day but we had more to see.........