Andersonville National Historic Site

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Andersonville National Historic Site
Reconstructed palisades
Reconstructed palisades
Andersonville National Historic Site (USA)
Paris plan pointer b jms.svg
Coordinates: 32 ° 11 '53 "  N , 84 ° 7' 44"  W.
Location: Georgia , United States
Next city: Andersonville
Surface: 2.1 km²
Founding: October 16, 1970
Visitors: 159,592 (2008)
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Andersonville (actually Camp Sumter ) was a prisoner of war camp of the Confederates in the American Civil War at Andersonville in the State of Georgia . The camp was used between February 1864 and April 1865. During this time around 45,000 prisoners were cooped up there under inhumane conditions. Of them, 12,919 inmates died.

Today it is designated a National Historic Site-Type Memorial , consisting of the partially reconstructed Camp Sumter Camp , Andersonville National Cemetery , a United States National Cemetery , and the National Prisoner of War Museum, opened in 1998, as the official museum for all prisoners of war United States Wars.

history

The camp was established in the spring of 1864. It originally covered 6.7 hectares and was fenced in by a palisade 4.6 meters high. The first prisoners arrived on February 27, 1864. The camp was used for 14 months until April 1865 and was designed for a maximum of 10,000 prisoners, but the maximum occupancy was 32,899 prisoners. An estimated 45,000 soldiers were interned at Camp Sumter in the 14 months of its existence .

The first prisoners were 500 men from Belle Isle , near Richmond , Virginia. They reached the prison on February 27, 1864, before it was even completed. In the period that followed, up to 400 new inmates were brought to Camp Sumter every day. Initially, mainly prisoners from detention centers inside and outside the Confederate capital of Richmond were moved to Andersonville.

In the summer of 1864, however, prisoners came directly from the battlefields of Virginia and Georgia , as well as prisoners from the camps in Florida and Alabama . The capacities of the camp were gradually expanded more and more. Indians, Afro-Americans, Europeans and even two women are documented among the prisoners.

As a result of the immense overcrowding, each of the cramped inmates only had an area of ​​2.3 square meters, although the camp was expanded by 4 hectares in the summer of 1864. The only water available to the prisoners was a small stream that flowed through the camp and also served as a source of drinking water , a latrine and a garbage dump. Insufficient transport capacities led to serious bottlenecks in the food supply to the camp. Due to the extremely hostile conditions in which daily camp life took place, a total of 12,919 inmates died. The Andersonville infirmary failed to meet the requirements of such a facility. It consisted of an area outside the camp, where the sick were housed in the open air on boards and piles of straw. The death rate was over 30 men a day.

When General Sherman's army threatened Atlanta in September 1864 , prisoners from Andersonville were transferred to Charleston and Savannah and a newly built camp near Florence , South Carolina .

After the end of the war, the trial of the Zurich- based camp commandant Henry Wirz began on August 23, 1865 . He was convicted of multiple willful homicides and hanged on November 10th . This made him the only officer in the southern states who received the death penalty for crimes after the war . His guilt for the fatal malnutrition of the prisoners is still controversial today. His superior, General John Henry Winder , the commander-in-chief of all prison camps east of the Mississippi , had secretly sold groceries for the camp, but had died on February 7, 1865 at a dinner in Wirz's house and could no longer be held responsible . However, Wirz made himself guilty of forbidding the prisoners to build houses.

The discovery of the conditions in the camp after the end of the war led Clara Barton , among others , to visit the camp. During the war she had founded a society that brought medical supplies to the battlefields and later set up hospitals to treat the wounded on both sides. Barton then founded the Missing Soldier's Office in Washington DC , in which data on missing and fallen soldiers was collected. Thanks to the help of a prisoner of war who had copied death records in the camp, she was able to clarify 20,000 missing fates, including 13,000 deaths. In 1869 she learned that Henry Dunant had already founded an organization with the same objectives in Europe in 1863 and from 1873 led her company as the American Red Cross as a national organization in his International Red Cross Movement . She has been dubbed the heroine of Andersonville because of her work .

memorial

The camp has been designated a National Historic Site since 1970 and serves as a memorial to all US prisoners of war from all wars in the United States. Adjacent to the NHS is the Andersonville National Cemetery , a United States National Cemetery that houses war graves.

Andersonville as a cultural theme

The suffering of the prisoners is also the subject of the Pulitzer Prize- winning novel Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor (1955), the hit Broadway play The Andersonville Trial by Saul Levitt (1959/60), a multi-award-winning PBS television adaptation based on it (1970) with William Shatner and the film Andersonville (1996) by John Frankenheimer .

literature

  • Raymond F. Baker: Andersonville - The story of a Civil War prison camp . Office of Publications, National Park Service, US Department of Interior, Washington, DC, 1972 ( online , PDF, 1.5 MiB).
  • Robert Scott Davis: Ghosts and shadows of Andersonville. Essays on the secret social histories of America's deadliest prison . Mercer University Press, Macon 2006, ISBN 0-88146-012-5 .
  • James Madison Page: The true story of Andersonville prison. A defense of Major Henry Wirz . Neale Publishing Co., New York 1908.
  • Ruedi Studer: The trial against Captain Henry Wirz and his background in 1865 (= Bern research on the latest general and Swiss history , vol. 5). Bautz, Nordhausen 2006. ISBN 3-88309-334-3 .
  • Jürg Weibel : Captain Wirz. A chronicle. A documentary novel . Edition Erpf, Bern 1991, ISBN 3-905-51736-1 .

Web links

Commons : Andersonville Prison  - Collection of pictures, videos, and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. http://www.nps.gov/ande/historyculture/places.htm
  2. http://www.nps.gov/nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/11andersonville/11setting.htm
  3. http://www.nps.gov/nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/11andersonville/11facts2.htm
  4. ^ National Park Service: Andersonville National Historic Site - Clara Barton