Prison Camps In The Civil War Essay

The first shipment of prisoners to reach Andersonville came from Libby Prison in Virginia on February 24, 1864 (Hackmann 1). From that day on, 400 men showed up each day. At the end of June, 26,000 men were held captive, and by August, the total had risen to 33,000, making that the largest population of men held at one time. Originally meant to detain only 10,000 men, a solution needed to be found. (2 “Andersonville” 1) The Confederates made the decision to expand the stockade to twenty-six acres, but that did not help the declining conditions (Hackmann 1). Henry Devillez remembers arriving on June 18, 1864, and states, “. . . we [Naviaux, Devillez, and both Rogier brothers] beheld misery on all sides. Sickness and death by hundreds was the program every day.” Over time the creek banks gave way and resulted in the whole compound becoming a swamp infested with maggots and lice. The pests would

Andersonville was a Confederate prison built in 1864 at Andersonville, Georgia. It was designed to hold Union prisoners of war during the Civil War. It was official named was Camp Sumter, however it’s better known as Andersonville. It was built from the ground up by local slave labor. At the time it was 10 ½ acres long and designed to hold about 10,000 men. The camp was enclosed out of 15 to 17 inch hewed pine logs. Along the walls were guard towers (referred to as pigeon roosts by the inmates) placed every 90 feet around the stockade walls.

Prison life in Andersonville was considerably worse than the average prison which is why it is considered the worst of the Civil War prison camps. Other prison camps of the time although were a rough life, had better infrastructure, supplies and cleanliness. For example in Salisbury, North Carolina was one of the first Confederate civil War prison camps. Its first prisoners enjoyed playing baseball in their free time. Although the prison did experience overcrowding like all prison war camps, it still had much better supply flow into its walls. Alton, Illinois Federal prison was one of the first Union prison camps. This camp did experience a lack of supplies and disease but had enough space that prisoners did not have to live in the elements. Andersonville had a large flaw in it making that made it a much worse prison camp to stay in rather than these other two. That flaw was that Andersonville was made in great haste and wasn’t even finished before it was in use. (Civil War Prison Camps

Historian Watson interviewed a survivor of the Walnut Street Jail some years after the War's end. The veteran, Jacob Ritter, recalled that prisoners were fed nothing for days on end and were regularly targets of beatings by the British guards. The prison was freezing as broken window panes allowed snow and cold to be the only blankets available to the captives. Ice, lice, and mice shared the cells. Desperate prisoners dined on grass roots, scraps of leather, and "pieces of a rotten pump." Rats were a delicacy. Upward of a dozen prisoners died daily. They were hauled across the street and slung in unmarked trenches like carcasses from an abattoir.

,and the huts were absolutely terrible.Usually the camp was at a food shortage and the soldiers

The Confederacy established Andersonville, that most infamous of Civil War prisons, in late February, 1864. It built a stockade in west central Georgia to accommodate approximately 10,000 prisoners of war. As the fighting moved ever deeper into the South in the last year of the war, the expanded stockade at one point held nearly 33,000 Union soldiers. The termination by the North of the prisoner of war exchanges which had existed previously and the continually depleting resources of the Confederacy left these prisoners stranded in miserable conditions.

Even though the prison was improving its conditions, they did not think about expanding even more. The purpose of the prison was to rehabilitate inmates through solitary confinement and with the overcrowding, it was impossible. With the overcrowding, prisoners began to fight each other and caused violent outbreaks. Soon it became unhealthy, dirty, and unsafe for inmates. In the end, the jail failed due to poor architecture and lack of staying organized. About 30 to 40 inmates were being placed in one room where they would all have to seep on the floor. It failed to focus on their goal which was to keep prisoners separately so that they could self-reflect. Later, the Eastern Pennsylvania Prison was built to replace the Walnut Street Jail. A prison in which also put their inmates in solitary

Some prisoners were stripped of all their possessions and beaten by the officers, "...they first disarmed me, then plundered me... they abused me by bruising my flesh with the butts of there [guns]... the next thing was I almost starved to death by them...". Some high ranking prisoners such as Majors or Captains were held in dungeons for 10 months. While the prisoners onboard the British ships may have been mistreated, it is false to assume that British prisoners were treated with hospitality. The Continental Congress was also caught off-guard with the amount of prisoners from the Convention army. After the Battle of Trenton there were hundreds of Hessian prisoners and after the Convention army surrendered the number increased by 6,000. Even though the prisoners were intended to be treated with mercy, in reality this was not always the case. There were multiple instances of appalling cruelty especially in certain states. Since the Continental Congress was unprepared to house all of the prisoners, they instead took them through a journey through America, “took them down to Virginia, then up to Maryland, into Pennsylvania again, and finally back to Rutland. Almost every step of the way they contended with meagre rations, shortages of fuel, inadequate accommodations, and physical violence." In addition, some prisoners were dumped unto unexpecting towns. These towns had to feed thousands of prisoners without any warning. Therefore,

Dartmoor may have had its fancies but it still was a prison, a very harsh prison at that. Two hundred and seventy American’s died there due to floggings, illness, food poisoning, exposure, infection,

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

Camp life for Gruenewald and the others in the interment camps in California was hot, with bad food, and absolutely no privacy. Their showers were in one

Robert H. Kellogg, who was a sergeant major, described his entry as a prisoner into the camp on May 2nd, 1864: “As we entered the place, a spectacle met our eyes that almost froze our blood with horror, and made our hearts fail within us. Before us were forms that had once been active and erect; stalwart men, now nothing but mere walking skeletons, covered with filth and intensity of their feeling, exclaimed with earnestness. "Can this be hell?" "God protect us!" and all thought that He alone could bring them out alive from so terrible a place. In the center of the whole was a swamp, occupying about three or four acres of the narrowed limits, and a part of this marshy place had been used by the prisoners as a sink, and excrement covered the ground, the scent arising from which was suffocating. The ground allotted to our ninety was near the edge of this plague-spot, and how we were to live through the warm summer weather in the midst of such fearful surroundings, was more than we cared to think of just then.”

Andersonville was originally designed to hold 10,000 inmates, but ended up holding 45,000. And the cruel punishments resulting in 12,920 union soldier deaths. There were terrible living conditions, including no beds , hardly enough food to keep the inmates alive, and disease spread like wildfire.

The prisoners had no privacy. Overcrowding also lead to death and disease, which often ultimately resulted in death. One of the biggest death rates came from overcrowding. From 1862 until 1865 30,000 men occupied Belle Isle. Belle Isle, a 54 square acre piece of land, comes to about the area of going from my house to my neighbors who live four doors down from my house.

By what i researched and what i saw on the internet i understood that the attica prison was a big riot that was