A Legacy of Shame...But Whose?

A Legacy of Shame...But Whose?

By Gary Waltrip

Introduction

Andersonville is a name that most Americans immediately rank with other infamous prison hellholes of history like Devil's Island, the Black Hole of Calcutta, Auschwitz and Dachau. In many ways it is similar; it was a place of misery, suffering and death, with photographic evidence of its emaciated prisoners a seemingly irrefutable judgment against the men who operated this well-known Confederate prison for Union prisoners of war.
Indeed, Andersonville has for the past one hundred and thirty years been touted as undeniable evidence of the evil nature of the Confederate Government who is even today accused of carrying out a genocidal policy towards Union prisoners. If one can only believe that Confederates were people who delighted in the suffering and death of their captives, then perhaps those disturbing photos of burned and demolished Southern cities won't ache so perceptibly in the far corners of the Northern conscience.

Ken Burns, in his companion book to the PBS television series THE CIVIL WAR, says this of Henry Wirz, the commander of Andersonville: "On November 10, 1865, Henry Wirz, commandant of Andersonville Prison in Georgia, was hanged in the yard of the Old Capitol Prison in Washington for war crimes. He pleaded he had only followed orders."

Burns' subliminal comparison to the well-publicized pleadings of the Nuremberg Trials should not be wasted on the reader, where Nazi war criminals likewise claimed that they "had only followed orders." Burns' insinuation that Wirz was guilty of Nazi-like war crimes only gives new life to the myth of Southern infamy at Andersonville. It is time once and for all for all honest students of history to know the other side of the story, which as all know, is the one that is never taught in history class.
In this article we are going to consider Andersonville Prison, what happened there and why, the Union charges against Major Henry Wirz, Andersonville's commander, and his subsequent execution, and whether or not Wirz was the monster he was alleged to be, or simply an innocent soldier who was made a scapegoat to assuage public outrage over the Andersonville dead. Finally, we are going to try and answer the question that is implied by the title of this article: who was responsible for the Union dead at Andersonville? We will be looking, not only to Confederate sources for the answers; but also to Northern ones, most notably that of Lt. James Madison Page, A Co., Sixth Michigan Cavalry, who was a prisoner of war at Andersonville, and Louis Schade, the Washington attorney who defended Henry Wirz at his trial.

 This article originally appeared in The Southern Cross newsletter and was reprinted in The Confederate Sentry.  Gary Waltrip is a Confederate descendant and Certified Public Accountant in Northern California.