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Camp Sumter: The Battle Of Andersonville

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The camp was built by slave labor on 16 acres, later expanded to 26 acres, and was formally called “Camp Sumter” by the Confederacy. Andersonville was designed to imprison up to 10,000 “overflow” prisoners from elsewhere, but its inmate population climbed to 3 times that amount leave to about 33,000 prisoners by the end of the summer of 1864. Furthermore, its physical design was fatally flawed to begin with. In addition to the absence of any system for waste disposal within the camp, a creek flowing through the camp delivered upstream waste from the military camp where Andersonville guards were stationed. By the end of the war, 13,000 Andersonville prisoners (30 percent of the camp’s population) had died from a variety of diseases such as

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