What Happened at Andersonville Prison?

What Happened at Andersonville Prison

Michael T. Griffith

2004

@All Rights Reserved

The question that really should be asked is, Why did thousands of Confederate prisoners die of starvation, disease, and exposure in Northern prison camps when the Union army could have easily given them adequate food, housing, and medical care?

Yes, thousands of Union prisoners died of starvation, disease, and exposure at the Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, but that was because the Confederacy simply didn’t have enough food, medicine, and facilities to care for them.  During this same period, tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers were going hungry on a regular basis and lacked adequate medical supplies--because of the Union naval blockade and because of the inhumane destruction that Union armies were inflicting on the South.  Confederate authorities  tried to obtain medical supplies for the Union prisoners at Andersonville, but Lincoln refused to sell them, even though the Confederates offered to allow Union doctors to accompany the supplies to ensure they were used for Union prisoners.  After the war, even some Union officers placed the blame for Andersonville squarely on Lincoln and on Ulysses S. Grant, not on the Confederacy.

One of the most balanced and objective treatments of the issue of Andersonville can be found in J. G. Randall and David Donald’s highly acclaimed book The Civil War and Reconstruction.  No one would argue that Randall and Donald were pro-Confederate historians—in fact, they were decidedly pro-Union in their outlook.  However, on most issues they were fair and objective, and one of those issues was the Confederate prison camp at Andersonville.  Among other things, Randall and Donald said,

The Andersonville prison, until the soldiers built huts for themselves, was but a stockaded enclosure of sixteen and a half acres in southwestern Georgia.  Mosquito-infested tents; myriads of maggots; pollution and filth due to lack of sanitation; soldiers dying by thousands; men desperately attempting to tunnel their way to freedom; prison mates turning on their fellows whom they suspected of treachery or theft; unbaked rations; inadequate hospital facilities; escaping men hunted down by bloodhounds—such are the details that come down to us from incontrovertible sources.  The causes of such conditions are to be found in the sheer inability of officers in charge to cope with the immense number of prisoners pouring in on them before preparations could be made to receive them, the insurmountable difficulties in obtaining supplies and equipment, and the poverty of the Confederacy in material resources.  Union prisoners at Andersonville were in no worse case than many of the soldiers of Lee’s army; and it should be remembered that “the prisoners received the same rations as the soldiers who were guarding them” [quoting pro-Northern historian James F. Rhodes]. . . . (The Civil War and Reconstruction, pp. 336-337)

Much could be said about the thousands of Confederate prisoners who died in Union prison camps and about the horrible conditions in many of those camps.  The Union had no excuse for not adequately caring for its Confederate prisoners.  Unlike the Confederacy, which was literally starving and was being invaded and blockaded, the Union had more than enough food, medicine, and equipment.  There was no reason that a single Confederate prisoner should have died of starvation or exposure.  Even Kenneth Davis, who is very critical of the Confederacy on nearly all issues, admits that thousands of Confederate prisoners were deliberately mistreated by the Union army:

The worst Union prison was in Elmira, in upstate New York, where 2,963 Confederate soldiers died, nearly a quarter of the 12,123 men held there.  This death rate was only slightly less than Andersonville’s and more than double the average death rate in the other Union prison camps.  Built in May 1864, after prisoner exchanges were halted, the camp was designed to hold 5,000 men.  The deaths at Elmira were caused by diseases brought on by starvation and terrible living conditions.  During a bitterly cold winter, clothes sent by families for the prisoners were deliberately withheld, and hundreds of men, forced to live in tents with no blankets, froze to death.  In May 1864 War Secretary [Edwin] Stanton ordered prisoner rations reduced to the same amount issued to Confederate soldiers.  This supposedly ensured that Confederate prisoners were receiving the equivalent of the rations Union prisoners were getting.  In other words, in the midst of plenty in the Union, malnourished Confederate prisoners suffered epidemics of scurvy, diarrhea, pneumonia, and smallpox. (Don’t Know Much About the Civil War, p. 354)