The Execution

The Execution

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.