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.
Andersonville Prison was opened near Americus, Georgia on February 24, 1864. It was intended to be a model prison, spacious and with adequate water and abundant timber for firewood. However, the prison was built on the assumption that it would hold no more than 10,000 Union prisoners of war, and then only while they were awaiting exchange. Both of these assumptions provided impossible when the Federal Government ceased the prisoner exchange that had been agreed to by both sides early in the war.
After the U.S. Government ceased the exchange, Andersonville quickly filled with Union POWs. By June of 1864 the prison population had swollen to 20,000 men and by August reached 33,000 prisoners. This was also the summer of Sherman's march to the sea, when Southern farms, barns, and mills were being burned to the ground in the North's scorched-earth policy that was designed to starve the Southern populace into submission. Even medicine was declared contraband, and Union forces destroyed stores of medicines wherever they were found, even those in possession of private physicians. Needless to say, these privations worsened the lot of Union prisoners; the South could not provide the prisoners what it could not provide its own citizens, and because of disease, inadequate diet, and the summer sun, Union deaths at Andersonville began to soar. According to CONFEDERATE VETERAN magazine of Sept-Oct 1991, 12,912 of the 45,613 Union prisoners at Andersonville died during its fourteen months of operation. Most of these deaths occurred during the period of August through December 1864, when prisoners died at a rate of approximately 100 per day.
Why the prisoner exchange was stopped became a hotly controversial subject following the war, and many blatantly self-serving theories were forthcoming from the North. James Madison Page, the Union officer who wrote THE TRUE STORY OF ANDERSONVILLE PRISON (1908) describes some of these theories: "The South refused to exchange a negro for a rebel prisoner." "The rebels would not exchange on an equitable basis as to relative rank of officers;" "The rebel Government resorted to frivolous pretexts to delay exchange as death was doing its work at Andersonville, Salisbury and other prisons."
Page dismisses all of these arguments as mere subterfuge. Even today, howThe Movieever, many of these old Yankee lies have been dusted off and reissued with Ken Burns the most prominent quartermaster. In the PBS series "The Civil War," Burns had the audacity to suggest that Grant stopped the prisoner exchange because he was morally offended by the Confederate Government's refusal to exchange negro prisoners!
In his text, Ken Burns states: "...Grant ordered an end to the prisoner exchange in effect since early in the war, until and unless the South formally agreed to recognize 'no distinction whatever in the exchange between white and colored prisoners.’ " (Page 336.)
So we see that the real reason the prisoner exchange was stopped was because Grant was an egalitarian who was willing to sacrifice the lives of thousands of Union prisoners as an act of moral principle. Even considering Mr. Grant's demonstrated proclivity for expending Union lives, one might conclude that Ken Burns, and his Reconstructionist forbears, would be deterred by simple embarrassment at advancing such an unlikely tenet. After all, black prisoners of war were a minuscule number of the total Union soldiers in Confederate hands. Melvin Grigsby, a Union POW at Andersonville, wrote: "There was not a negro soldier in Andersonville or in any other prison for a considerable time. When they were captured they were either sent back to their old masters or put to work on rebel fortifications, and they were not starved and did not suffer. [Secretary of War] Stanton and others who insisted on this point, might as well have insisted that every black in the South, whose liberty had been granted him by the Emancipation Proclamation and who was detained by his old master, should be a subject of exchange."
James Madison Page agrees. In July of 1864, Henry Wirz had paroled five prisoners to act as emissaries for the others. These emissaries carried a petition to Washington that was signed by almost every Union soldier in Andersonville, demanding that the U.S. Government abide by the original exchange agreement. Their efforts were not successful, and some of them returned to Andersonville to report to their fellows. Page writes, "When the Andersonville emissaries returned from Washington there was not one word about the exchange of negro soldiers being in the way of our release. It was then not thought of. I know that for the past forty-two years that matter has been published broadcast in the North as the reason why we were not exchanged. Grigsby is right in this. The Washington authorities had concluded to stop the exchange before there were any Negro prisoners."
In spite of all the Northern post-war moralizing, the real reason the Union soldiers were not exchanged is because the Northern government considered them expendable. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton said, "We will not exchange able-bodied men for skeletons," and "We do not propose to reinforce the rebel army by exchanging prisoners."
Ulysses S. Grant later confirmed this in his memoirs, explaining that exchange meant reinforcement of the rebel army, and that the exchanged rebel soldier behind brigades and fortifications fighting on the defensive was equivalent to three Union soldiers attacking him.
Page writes, "This was the Stanton policy, and if this atrocious and inhuman doctrine is anyway meritorious, the 'War Secretary' is entitled to the credit."
Henry Wirz was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1822. He graduated from the University of Zurich, later obtaining an M.D. degree from the medical colleges of Paris and Berlin. After practicing medicine for a time, he immigrated to the United States in 1849, establishing a medical practice in Kentucky. In 1854 he married a widow, Mrs. Wolfe, and became stepfather to her two young daughters. The family moved to Louisiana, and in 1855 his own daughter, Cora, was born. At the beginning of the Civil War, Dr. Wirz enjoyed a lucrative medical practice and was fluent in English, German, and Dutch.
When the war opened, Dr. Wirz enlisted in Company A, Fourth-Battalion, Louisiana Volunteers. This regiment fought bravely at the Battle of Seven Pines, where Sergeant Henry Wirz was severely wounded in his right arm by a minie ball. The arm was almost useless to him thereafter. On June 12, after returning to his unit, Wirz was promoted to Captain "for bravery on the field of battle." However, his wound rendered him unfit for battle, and he was detailed as acting adjutant-general to General John H. Winder, Provost Marshall in charge of Confederate prisoner of war camps.
After serving at prisons in Richmond and Tuscaloosa and carrying out special assignments for the Confederate Government, Capt. Wirz was ordered to take charge of the interior of Andersonville Prison in April of 1864. He assumed his duties there the same month, and remained at Andersonville with his wife and family until April of 1865, when he was included in the surrender of General Johnston and his forces to General Sherman. Shortly before the end of the war, Wirz was promoted to the rank of Major.
Wirz retired to civilian life until taken into custody by Union forces of General Wilson. He was taken to Macon, Georgia where he was questioned at length about the prison, then released to return to his family at Andersonville. While waiting for the train, he was arrested by Wilson's soldiers. A few days later he was transported to Washington, where he was placed in the Old Capitol Prison on May 10, 1865, to await trial on charges of war crimes. We will describe the trial and execution of Wirz in the second installment of this article.
fter the war some former Union prisoners of war wrote memoirs and books detailing the cruelty that Southern forces allegedly displayed to their captives. Lt. James Madison Page disputes these descriptions. He states in the preface of his book, THE TRUE STORY OF ANDERSONVILLE PRISON, that he was writing of his own experiences in Southern prisons "in the interest of truth and fair play," and to reduce sectional friction "caused by the exaggerated and often unjust reports of Major Wirz's cruelty and inhumanity to prisoners."
Page speaks of his Confederate captors in most generous terms, from the moment of his capture by Confederate cavalry, through his first internment in a field POW camp, to his transfer first to Libby Prison, then Belle Isle, and later to Andersonville.
James M. Page was in action near Culpeper Court House on September 21, 1863 when he as ordered with other company members forward, dismounted, only to find themselves facing a superior Confederate cavalry troop over the crest of a hill. Page and others ran from the overwhelming force, and were ordered to "halt!" by the advancing Confederates. He did not do so, and admits the Southern troops would have been justified by all the rules of war in shooting him down, but they did not.
Page was soon captured, genially interrogated by General A.P. Hill, and sent to a makeshift POW camp. His first night in camp, another Union POW cut his pockets open while he slept, stealing his watch, cash, pocketknife, and other possessions. He knew he had been robbed by the other POW, and reported the theft to the North Carolina troops in charge, who were indignant at the crime. They soon persuaded the thief to confess and return the goods, after they had put a rope around his neck and hoisted him off the ground a couple of times. Page's possessions were returned, and reported that he was consistently treated with kindness by his Southern captors.
While imprisoned at Belle Isle, Page became sick with fever for eight days, and his comrades feared he would die. A Confederate guard encouraged him daily, telling him he was due to be exchanged "tomorrow." Page later realized that the kindly guard told him the white lie so he wouldn't lose his will to live.
This white lie was used often by the guards, telling the prisoners that exchange would come "next week" or whenever; and though some postwar Northerners stated that this giving of false hope was a form of Southern cruelty, Page believes it was done with benevolence, because the Confederates knew that men without hope would soon succumb to despair and then death.
While Page was convalescing from his fever, a Confederate soldier passed him by, noticed his emaciated form, then handed him a big, red apple. "Stick your teeth into that apple, Yank, and try for a minute to fohget about the Nawth," he said. Page hugged the apple to his breast, then sat down and cried. His one abiding regret was that the Southern soldier hurried away without giving Page the chance to thank him. This was not the only act of kindness Page received from his Confederate guards. Later at Andersonville, a guard brought him some Irish potatoes to cure his scurvy.
Page refutes many of the myths that abounded after the war, ones like the story that "Southern women and children would hold picnics at the edge of the prison so they could enjoy the suffering of the inmates within," which as Page points out, would have been difficult to do in light of the fifteen foot walls all around; or the myth that Confederate guards would be given "thirty days furlough for shooting a prisoner." This latter propaganda would be given new life in Ted Turner’s movie about Andersonville.
Page says such shootings were rare indeed, and then were done only upon extreme provocation. Nevertheless, greatly exaggerated stories of bestial cruelty by the prison guards proliferated after the war.
Page states that the guards, particularly the 25th Alabama, were generally kind and humane. Page said of them: "And I said then, and I have ever since said, in speaking of our guards, the Twenty-fifth Alabama Infantry, I never met the same number of men together who came much nearer to my standard of what I call gentlemen. They were respectful, humane and soldierly."
Page also points out that though prison rations were poor and meager, they were the very same rations that were issued to the guards. Captain Wirz tried to diminish scurvy in the prison, paroled five men to act as emissaries to Washington to petition for exchange, pleaded with the Confederate Government for supplies and even to release the prisoners unconditionally.
Far from the "war crimes" he was hanged for, Henry Wirz did everything humanly possible to save the lives of the Union prisoners under his charge.
He was not alone in this effort; as early as January, 1864, the Confederate Commissioner for Exchange, Colonel Robert Ould proposed to his Union counterpart that doctors and medical supplies of opposing forces be admitted to POW Camps to care for their own sick countrymen.
This offer, if accepted would have done much to ease the suffering of Union POW's, but the offer was never even acknowledged by the North. Page writes of this: "...I have, during the past fifteen or twenty years, read accounts from Southern sources, that the Confederate Government during the summer of 1864 asked the Washington authorities to send physicians and hospital supplies for the express use of Union prisoners held in the South; they pledged that those supplies would be only for the Union prisoners; and it was said that Washington authorities ignored the proposition. This seemed incredible, and I hoped that this charge would be satisfactorily contradicted by Northern writers acquainted with the facts, but I have never read or heard a word of refutation of it."
Finally Ould offered to deliver up all sick and wounded Union prisoners without requiring an equivalent number in return. Though this offer was made in August, the U.S. Government did not send ships for them until December, almost five months later. As noted earlier, this was the very period when most of the Union deaths were occurring, where Federal haste in the matter would have saved thousands of lives. Ken Burns, in his book, “The Civil War,” page 335, writes: "One of the cruelest charges made against Abraham Lincoln was that he was guilty of ‘shameful disregard' of the thousands of Union prisoners languishing in Southern prisons."
The charge may be cruel, but is it true? We are content to let the reader decide.
On August 23, 1865, a Military Commission of the War Department, on the orders of the President, filed two charges against Wirz, the first alleging that Wirz had conspired with Jefferson Davis, John H. Winder, and various other high ranking Confederate officials to "impair the health and destroy the lives" of Union prisoners of war. The second charge had thirteen specifications, alleging that Wirz had murdered thirteen Union prisoners of war at Andersonville by shooting, stomping, subjecting such prisoners to the mauling of bloodhounds, and various other mistreatment.
Not a single one of the specifications could name even one of the alleged victims, nor describe their unit, rank or any other details about them, in spite of the thousands of Union prisoners who would have witnessed the alleged atrocities.
Henry Wirz was defended by a competent Washington, D.C. attorney, Louis Schade, who promptly filed for dismissal of the charges on the grounds that a military tribunal had no jurisdiction to try a civilian, that the charges were vague as to time, place and manner of offense, and that as a Confederate officer Wirz was entitled to the terms agreed to between Generals Sherman and Johnston upon the latter's surrender. All of these pleas, though valid, were overruled, and Wirz then pleaded not guilty to all charges. Wirz's trial began on August 25, 1865. Col. N.P. Chipman, USA Judge Advocate, headed the prosecution. Louis Schade, a Washington attorney and Swiss countryman of Wirz was counsel for the defense. Schade acted in this capacity without pay and as a volunteer since the penniless Wirz had no funds with which to pay him.
The government presented 160 witnesses, nearly all of whom had been prisoners at Andersonville; but their key witness was one Felix de la Baume. This witness was good-looking, had a pleasant voice, was a good speaker, and captured the court. "De la Baume" (for that was not in fact his real name) testified to the manifest cruelty of Major Wirz, as de La Baume witnessed most of the killing attributed to the defendant, or so he claimed. Page wrote of this witness: "His omnipresence while at Andersonville seemed something bordering on the supernatural. Nothing escaped him. Witness de la Baume held the surging crowd like an inspiration."
Before the trial was even ended, "de la Baume" was rewarded for his testimony on the government's behalf and given a position in the Department of the Interior, a blatant payoff for services rendered. Soon after Wirz's execution, some Union soldiers of German ancestry identified Monsieur "de la Baume" as a deserter from the 7th New York Infantry whose real name was Felix Oeser. Oeser, who had never set foot in Andersonville Prison, was then fired from his job in the Department of the Interior and quickly disappeared from the public's eye.
Of the 160 witnesses called by the prosecution, only ten or twelve testified to any alleged cruelty on the part of the defendant. Approximately 145 of the government's own witnesses, almost all of whom were former inmates of Andersonville, testified that they had no knowledge of Wirz ever murdering or killing a prisoner with his own hands or otherwise.
James Madison Page (a former lieutenant with the Sixth Michigan Cavalry, former Andersonville inmate and the author of "The True Story of Andersonville Prison" (1908)) was subpoenaed, but after being interviewed, was not called as a witness. Page stated that any act of cruelty that was described in the specifications could not possibly have taken place without his knowledge, and he heard nothing of the alleged murders until Wirz's trial. The Andersonville prisoners had little to do all day but talk, and any events within the prison that affected prisoners would be the subject of intense, widespread discussion. Acts such as those alleged against Wirz could not have happened without the widespread knowledge within the inmate population. But Page never heard of the alleged incidents, for one clear reason: they never happened. It should be further noted that of the eleven Union prisoners whom Wirz was convicted of murdering, none were ever identified as to name or any other particulars. Fictitious men do not need names.
The defense was forced to operate under a different set of rules than the prosecution. Where the prosecution could call anyone of its choosing as a witness, potential witnesses for the defense had to be approved in advance by the prosecution! Witnesses who could have helped Wirz's cause, like the former Confederate Commissioner of Exchange Robert Ould who could have testified about prisoner exchange and the offers of unreciprocated prisoner releases, were not allowed to testify. The defense, like the prosecution, was a farce, but not due to any lack of effort on the part of Wirz's selfless and dedicated attorney. The trial was a show trial, whose decision had already been rendered before one word of testimony was heard in court.
The trial ended on November 4, 1865. Henry Wirz was found guilty on the first charge of conspiring with other Confederate officials to murder the prisoners even though not a shred of evidence or testimony of any kind had been presented in support of this theory during the trial. On the second charge, Wirz was found guilty of eleven of the thirteen alleged murders of Union prisoners. The sentence was that he be "hanged by the neck til he be dead."
Henry Wirz was remanded to his cell to await execution. But he was to suffer one last insult before the gallows. On the night before his execution, government officials visited Wirz in his cell as he was giving confession to a Catholic priest, Father R.E. Boyle. These officials informed Wirz, in the presence of his priest, that they represented a high cabinet member, and that if Wirz would implicate Jefferson Davis in a plot to kill the prisoners, Wirz's sentence would be commuted and his life spared. These same officials repeated the offer to Wirz's attorney, Louis Schade. Wirz rejected the offer with scorn. An honorable as well as an innocent man, Wirz told Father Boyle "I will not purchase my liberty by perjury and a crime."
The next morning, on November 10, 1865, Henry Wirz received the last rites of his church. He told Father Boyle that he forgave his enemies. The officer in charge of the execution came and told him that his time had come. "I am ready, Sir," Wirz replied.
In a carnival atmosphere, surrounded by soldiers shouting "Andersonville, Andersonville" over and over, Henry Wirz mounted the scaffold in the prison yard, accompanied by Father Boyle. Wirz displayed no fear and faced his death stoically. He said "I die innocent." The trap was sprung, but Wirz did not die immediately. To the shouts and taunts of the mob, he slowly choked to death.
Father Boyle later wrote, in a letter to Jefferson Davis: "I attended the Major to the scaffold, and he died in the peace of God and praying for his enemies. I know that he was indeed innocent of all the cruel charges on which his life was sworn away, and I was edified by the Christian spirit in which he submitted to his persecutors."
The government refused the request of Wirz's widow to return the body to his family for a Christian burial. Instead, Wirz's body was to be buried "without ceremony" in the prison yard next to another victim of Yankee "justice," the innocent Mary E. Surratt.
The fact that Wirz's trial was a transparent farce is beyond any serious dispute, and this fact is readily admitted by modern authorities. According to Confederate Veteran magazine, Captain Glen LaForce of the U.S. Army's Judge Advocate General's School wrote an article in 1988 in which he detailed the trial's glaring improprieties, and stated that "The trial of Henry Wirz was a national disgrace." But why did it happen? One modern source gives this explanation:
All of the anguish of Andersonville required someone to blame, someone to hate. And all of the blame was laid upon its commander, Major Henry Wirz. He was an easy man to hate, a foreigner who spoke poor English....
"Hysteria and exaggeration of prison excesses in the South soon swept the Yankee press and pulpit. Tales of every sort of torture were told, many of them imagined, more greatly exaggerated, but the public listened and believed. Inevitably, someone had to pay for the horrors. Winder was dead, and that left Wirz.
"In May 1865 he was arrested and taken to Washington where he was subjected to a sham of a trial before a military tribunal. Wirz became the classic victim of circumstance.. he was convicted of 'murder in violation of the laws and customs of war.' There had never been any doubt about the verdict or the sentence.
"Ironically, today, over the spot where he died, symbolic of the justice which he was denied, stands the United States Supreme Court."
--From "The Fighting Men of the Civil War," Galley Books, New York, N.Y., 1989.
Lt. Page says it more concisely:
"Major Wirz was the object of that popular injustice which personifies causes and demands victims for unpopular movements. All the accumulated passions of the war were concentrated on this one man. He was a magnet that drew the Northern wrath to satiety."
We are deeply in the debt of Lt. James Madison Page for his courage in telling the unpopular truth at a time when few wanted to hear it. In that regard, perhaps things have not changed much since Page published "The True Story of Andersonville Prison" in 1908.
Though many Northerners conspired to hang an innocent man, many others, men who had been prisoners of Wirz at Andersonville, came forward in a courageous effort to save their soldier-brother. Many Union veterans testified on Wirz's behalf, and many others were denied the opportunity. For these Northern men of principle, the sons and daughters of the South should be forever grateful.
James Madison Page was no watered-down Yankee. He believed steadfastly in the Union cause and, after his release from Andersonville in December of 1864, rejoined his unit and marched in the Grand Review in Washington at the close of the war. Page wrote his book and defended Wirz's memory with a passion, for one simple reason: he believed that Wirz was innocent.
Page sincerely admired his former opponents in the South, and was devoted to the cause of healing the wounds of the war. He felt empathy with Southerners for suffering the degradations of defeat. He lauded the Southern soldier for his bravery in battle and the Southern woman for her sacrifices at home. He advocated government pensions for Confederate veterans as well as Union. He pleaded for a new union of the American spirit as well as the American states, saying "Then let us wipe out the so-called 'Mason and Dixon's line' and hang out the latch-string for each other."
Page described the purpose of his book in simple terms: "I love my country - my whole country, and was no more loyal to the perpetuity of the Union in 1861 than I am today, but I have come to the conclusion that after forty years we can at least afford to tell the truth."
It is now 136 years and counting, and there are still many who refuse to do exactly that.