Andersonville Prison: The Deadline, the Raiders and a Smuggled Death List

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Camp Sumter, known as Andersonville, opened in Georgia in February 1864 as a 16.5-acre stockade of pine logs about 15 feet high, expanded to 26.5 acres by June. Nineteen feet inside the wall stood a light inner fence called the deadline, and guards in platforms called pigeon roosts were ordered to shoot without warning any prisoner who touched or crossed it. At its peak each man had roughly five by six feet of ground. About 45,000 Union prisoners passed through in 14 months, and nearly 13,000 died, a mortality rate of about 28 percent.

Prisoners received poorly milled corn flour and little firewood to cook it, and a single creek served as both water supply and latrine, spreading scurvy, dysentery, typhoid and likely hookworm. When the Andersonville Raiders began robbing and killing fellow inmates, prisoners formed the Regulators, held trials with a judge, Peter McCullough, and juries of new arrivals, and hanged six Raider leaders. After liberation in May 1865, commandant Henry Wirz was tried by military tribunal, convicted on evidence including a Confederate surgeon's inspection report, and hanged in November 1865.

• In July 1864 Wirz paroled five prisoners to carry a petition for renewed exchanges to the Union, and after it failed they returned to the camp as they had sworn.
• Prisoners played dead to be carried out with corpses until Wirz ordered surgeons to examine every body.
• Of 45,000 prisoners, only 351 escaped, and Army records show 32 reached Union lines.
• Dorence Atwater, assigned to keep the death register, secretly copied it and smuggled it out, and Horace Greeley's New York Tribune published it.
• Quartermaster's office worker James Duncan was convicted of manslaughter, and the Women's Relief Corps later planted grass, pecan orchards and roses on the site.