Few people would go to Andersonville, Georgia, except that thetown was the location of a notorious prisoner-of-war camp duringthe Civil War and is now the home of the National Prisoner ofWar Museum. Among those who have made the trip is DouglasG. Gardner, lecturer in history at Indiana University-Purdue UniversityColumbus. Gardner,who has held a research fellowship at the AndersonvilleNational Historic Site, studies the experiences and memories of Civil War prisoners of war.
“I became interested in prisoners of war because I belong tothe post-Vietnam generation,” Gardner says. “As I learned aboutthe Civil War, I saw that just as stories about Vietnam prisonerswere used to continue to argue about that war, 19th-century Americansused stories about Civil War prisoners to argue about that war.”
At the beginning of 1864, the Civil War was entering its fourthyear. Confederate officials decided to decentralize the growingnumber of Union soldiers they held--wartime exchange arrangementsthat had mostly kept numbers of prisoners manageable had brokendown in 1863--away from Richmond. In February, the Confederacybegan assembling captured Union soldiers in a makeshift campnear a hamlet called Anderson in southwest Georgia. From thestart, Confederate officers on the scene voiced concerns aboutfood supplies and other logistical arrangements. By the earlysummer, 30,000 prisoners were crowded into the enclosure withno provision for shelter and precious little provision for foodor medical care.
More than 13,000 Union soldiers died at Andersonville from theeffects of exposure and starvation. In total, about 30,000 Unionsoldiers and 30,000 Confederate soldiers died while being heldprisoner during the course of the war; about one in 11 of thewar's dead died while captive. Among the last casualties wasHenry Wirz, the commandant of the Andersonville stockade, whowas hanged by Union authorities for alleged war crimes. “A lotof ex-Confederates, not unjustifiably, contended that thingshad been just as bad at the Union camp in Elmira, New York,” Gardnersays. “And perhaps with less excuse, given the greater resourcesof the Union.”
Gardner contends that disputes about the alleged mistreatmentof prisoners of war became a central point of friction in thepostwar generation. “Many historians have said that by the timeof the Spanish-American War in 1898, most white Americans hadlaid aside the bitterness of the Civil War. Many had, but anybodywho has read what was written or said about prisoners of warknows many had not.”
Today, visitors to the Andersonville National Historic Sitecan see the site of the prison stockade, one corner of whichhas been reconstructed in a much-sanitized version, and the nationalcemetery where the 13,000 dead are buried. Many Northern statesplaced monuments to their dead on the stockade or cemetery groundsin the years around 1900. In 1998, the National Park Serviceopened the National Prisoner of War Museum in Andersonville,with displays chronicling the plights of prisoners in all Americanwars.
