After two years each side had taken thousands of prisoners.
In the beginning most prisoners were exchanged and returned to
their armies after a few months, but after 1863 far fewer exchanges
were taking place. One reason for decreasing exchanges was the
South's treatment of Northern black soldiers. The South regarded
black soldiers as runaway slaves and refused to treat them as
legitimate prisoners of war. Confederate policy was to execute
or enslave them. Although the South did not systematically carry
out this order, the North was reluctant to continue prisoner
exchanges. In April 1864 Grant stopped almost all exchanges because
the South, with fewer soldiers, had more to lose. The North and
its superior manpower could better withstand the loss of its
troops.
The treatment of prisoners has been the subject of
heated argument. Union prisoners suffered greatly in such Confederate
camps as Andersonville Prison in Georgia, and Confederate prisoners
suffered in such Union prisons as Camp Douglas, Illinois. In
both sections the death rate among prisoners was appalling. Prison
conditions, rather than willful mistreatment, caused most of
the deaths. Poorly clothed Southern soldiers could not stand
the harsh Northern winters. Northern soldiers suffered from the
intense heat of Southern summers. Even when the supply of food
was sufficient, the food was of poor quality. In general, prisoners
received the same rations as the troops who guarded them. However,
the fact that deplorable sanitary conditions resulted from ignorance
and overcrowding, rather than from malice, did not make their
effect less deadly.
~ Andersonville ~
Andersonville Prison, military stockade of the Confederate
army during the American Civil War, near Andersonville, Georgia,
used to confine captured Union army enlisted men. A total of
49,485 prisoners were detained at Andersonville between February
1864 and April 1865. As many as 30,000 men were confined there
at one time. More than 13,700 prisoners died in confinement.
The prison burial ground is now a national cemetery, and the
prison site and surrounding area were designated a national historic
site in 1970. The National Prisoner of War Museum, which memorializes
the prison experiences of all Americans captured during wartime,
is also located at the site.
Constant exposure to the elements, together with inadequate food,
impure water, congestion, and filth, led inevitably to epidemics
of scurvy and dysentery. As a result, the two Confederate medical
officers appointed to investigate the prison in 1864 recommended
that the majority of the prisoners be transferred elsewhere,
and many prisoners were removed that fall to Millen, Georgia,
and to Florence, South Carolina. A year later the superintendent
of the prison, Major Henry Wirz, was tried by a U.S. military
court, convicted of murder, and hanged.
The action of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Andersonville
(1955),
by the American writer MacKinlay Kantor, is set in the prison. |
