When you think of prisoner of war camps, the first thing that jumps to people’s minds is World War II. Little do many know that there were camps in the Civil War.
The worst camp of all was Andersonville in Andersonville, Georgia. According to censusdiggins.com it was notorious for starvation, disease, and cruelty.
The camp was 27 acres long and was designed to hold 10,000 men with their 20 feet high walls. By the end of the war it held over 33,000 men at one time. Almost 50,000 men went through its doors by 1865.
13,700 men died in 3 months!
Of the almost 14,000 men who died at the camp, over 1,000 are unmarked.
The place where the men lived was called “the stockade” pretty appropriate because they were treated like livestock. The men left the prison looking like holocaust victims.
Despite the terrible treatment of the men civilwarhome.com states that the Confederate government always ordered that the soldiers be treated fairly, and had these rules.
Confederate mandated rules for prisons…
1. The Confederate authorities always ordered the kind treatment of prisoners of war, and if there were individual cases of cruel treatment it was in violation of positive orders.
2. The orders were to give prisoners the same rations that our own soldiers received, and if rations were scarce and of inferior quality it was through no fault of the Confederacy.
3. The prison hospitals were put on the same footing precisely as the hospitals for our own men, and if there was unusual suffering caused by want of medicine and hospital stores, it arose from the fact that the Federal authorities declared these “contraband of war,” and refused to accept the Confederate offer to allow Federal surgeons to come to the prisons with supplies of medicines and stores.
4. The prisons were established with reference to healthfulness of locality, and the great mortality among the prisoners arose from epidemics and chronic diseases which our surgeons had not the means of preventing or arresting. A strong proof of this is the fact that nearly as large a proportion of the Confederate guard at Andersonville died as of the prisoners themselves.
5. The above reasons cannot be assigned for the cruel treatment which Confederates received in Northern prisons. Though in a land flowing with plenty, our poor fellows in prison were famished with hunger, and would have considered half the rations served Federal soldiers bountiful indeed. Their prison hospitals were very far from being on the same footing with the hospitals for their own soldiers, and our men died by thousands from causes which the Federal authorities could have prevented.
6. But the real cause of the suffering on both sides was the stoppage of the exchange of prisoners, and for this the Federal authorities alone were responsible. The Confederates kept the cartel in good faith. It was broken on the other side.
But the North was not innocent of war camps either…
