Page 150 - Journal of Special Operations Medicine - Summer 2015

enemy, while providing him with little more than a se- referred to as “Helmira”), rivaled those at Anderson-
lection of unhealthy, poorly trained Continental Army ville, although history less willingly tells their story and
troops. Here, then, was the first POW situation from no Union commander would ever die for the atrocities
2
which the United States might have learned to avoid a committed there. The Union Army did no better than
6
comparable event in the future. Unfortunately, that was the Confederates in handling the challenge of manag-
not to be the case, and in less than 100 years, two Civil ing prisoners of war when, in early 1862, Camp Doug-
War POW camps would enter the realm of infamy. las was hastily converted from a training camp into a
POW camp, eventually earning the title “eighty acres
The POW camp at Fort Sumter, Georgia, more com- of hell.” Although the prisoner population at the camp
7
monly known as Andersonville, was one of the larg- never rivaled the 45,000 housed at Andersonville, Camp
est Confederate military prisons established during the Douglas had a comparable, and sometimes higher, death
Civil War. Although originally set up to move prisoners rate of almost 30% of its roughly 20,000 prisoners, and
from the Richmond, Virginia area to a more secure loca- many fewer excuses for the poor conditions there. 6
tion where food was abundant, the 26.5-acre stockade
with its minimal staffing could not adequately support The hasty placement of a POW camp in Chicago was
the more than 45,000 Union soldiers confined inside a tactical error of sorts on the part of the Union Army,
its walls. At the end of Andersonville’s 14-month exis- considering that the city was filled with spies and Con-
3
tence, nearly 13,000 men died of malnutrition and the federate sympathizers who made efforts to arm the pris-
diseases associated with poor sanitation, overcrowding, oners. Initially, the location may not have seemed ill
and exposure. As the former prison grounds appear conceived, as the city residents regularly visited Camp
4
now, one would find it difficult to imagine the condi- Douglas to gawk at the Confederate prisoners, and an
tions and challenges of running the camp in 1864, but observation platform was even constructed to aid the
the history of Andersonville tells a story of an Army un- citizens’ viewing. Conditions inside the camp were so
prepared for vast numbers of prisoners, a lack of under- deplorable that Henry Whitney Bellows, president of
standing or guidance of how to take care of them, and the US Sanitary Commission, wrote to Colonel Hoff-
an unfortunate officer, CPT Henry Wirz, who “wore the man, his superior, after visiting the camp:
blood of all prisoners on his hands.” 4
“Sir, the amount of standing water, unpoliced grounds,
CPT Wirz was not the first officer to take charge of the of foul sinks, of unventilated and crowded barracks, of
Andersonville prison, nor was he solely responsible for general disorder, or soil reeking miasmatic accretions, of
the lack of funds, resources, or personnel to run the fa- rotten bones and emptying of camp kettles, is enough to
cility. However, when people in the Union states learned drive a sanitarian to despair. I hope no thought will be
of the horrors there, he became the most convenient tar- entertained of mending matters. The absolute abandon-
get of northern angst. Although testimony from his trial ment of the spot seems to be the only judicious course. I
indicates that CPT Wirz did make an effort to improve do not believe that any amount of drainage would purge
conditions after his arrival at Andersonville, the reality that soil loaded with accumulated filth or those barracks
was that prisoners were dying every day (one every 11 fetid with two stories of vermin and animal exhalations.
minutes on one particularly bad day) of typhoid, gan- Nothing but fire can cleanse them.” 7
grenous infection, and communicable disease. To make
5
matters worse, the War Department stopped the prisoner Inside the prison, methods of torture such as the “white
exchange program, further stressing local families and oak,” Morgan’s Mule, and the ball and chain were regu-
contributing to the demand for vengeance. Since there larly used to keep the prisoners in line. In 1863, 75 pris-
6
was no plan for how to handle the situation at Ander- oners made a timely escape and managed to avoid the
sonville or Union prison camps, creating a spectacle of fate of more than 11,000 prisoners who died the follow-
the Wirz trial deflected attention away from the Union ing year. Camp Douglas was closed in 1865 when the
POW camps and the US Government. Ironically, CPT remaining prisoners were asked to take a loyalty oath to
Wirz’s trial and subsequent hanging appeased the popu- the United States and then set free. 4
lation that had been so appalled by the conditions at An-
dersonville—conditions that were, in part, a result of the Despite fewer pages in the history books, the Union
War Department’s termination of the exchange program. prison camps are, nonetheless, evidence that during the
4
There were, in fact, plenty of reasons for the government’s Civil War, neither side was prepared to handle POWs
attempts to deflect attention away from the Union prison and neither figured out how to successfully remedy the
camps, which harbored their share of squalor and death. situation once it presented itself.

Conditions at Camp Douglas in Chicago, Illinois, and In 1899, the Hague Convention on the Laws and Cus-
the lesser-known prison at Elmira, New York (frequently toms of War on Land first used the term “prisoner of

140 Journal of Special Operations Medicine Volume 15, Edition 2/Summer 2015