The history of Oglethorpe

A prison built for 10,000 held 33,000 men

Andersonville National Historic Site is now a National Park Service memorial, holding a reconstructed stockade, a national cemetery, and a museum built to honor American prisoners of war from every conflict. The open field inside the old prison boundary is where the horror happened. Confederate officials picked this ground in late 1863, after W. Sidney Winder reported it had rail access, fresh water, and almost no local population to object. Construction began in January 1864, but it moved too slowly. The first 600 Union prisoners arrived on February 24, 1864. Lumber costs had stopped construction before their arrival, so men dug pits in the dirt for shelter.

Captain Henry Wirz, a Swiss-born officer, took command of the stockade itself that March. He did not control supplies, construction, or overall planning. That fell to Brigadier General John H. Winder. Prisoners poured in at 400 a day through the spring. By June the camp, built for 10,000 men, held 26,000. Prisoners widened the stockade to 26.5 acres, but it was never enough. A gang called the Raiders began robbing and killing fellow prisoners for food and clothing. Other prisoners organized their own police, called the Regulators, to stop them. Six Raider leaders were hanged inside the camp that summer.

By August 1864, the population peaked near 33,000, more than three times the camp's design. Over 100 men died every day from scurvy, dysentery, and starvation. The only water source doubled as the camp's latrine. When Sherman's army took Atlanta that September, the Confederacy emptied most of the camp into other prisons. It closed for good in April 1865, after fourteen months that killed nearly 13,000 of the roughly 45,000 men held there.

Clara Barton named the dead from a secret list

After the camp closed, the Confederate death records at Andersonville went north with a prisoner named Dorence Atwater, who had secretly copied them by hand. That July, Clara Barton led an Army expedition back to the site to identify and mark the graves. Using Atwater's list, they named close to 12,000 of the dead. The burial ground became the Andersonville National Cemetery that same year. By 1868, it held more than 13,800 Union soldiers, gathered from hospitals, battlefields, and camps across the region.

The stockade's commander hanged for war crimes

Captain Henry Wirz stood trial in Washington, D. C. That August, the first war crimes trial by a military tribunal in American history. He was charged with conspiracy and murder for the conditions inside the stockade he had commanded. On November 10, 1865, he was hanged, the only Confederate officer executed for war crimes after the Civil War.

Union veterans bought the ground to preserve it

The ground reverted to private owners once the war ended. It stayed in private hands for fifteen years, until December 1890, when the Georgia branch of the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veterans' group, bought the property outright. In 1910, the Woman's Relief Corps handed the site to the federal government, and the War Department took over its upkeep.

The site became a memorial to all prisoners of war

The site joined the National Register of Historic Places on October 16, 1970. Congress made it a National Historic Site the following June, setting aside 515 acres as a memorial not just to the men who died here, but to every American ever held as a prisoner of war. In 1998, the National Prisoner of War Museum opened on the grounds, widening the story from the Civil War to every American conflict since.

A fence called the dead line brought instant death

The worst of what happened inside the stockade survives in the words of men who lived through it. John McElroy, John Ransom, and Robert Sneden all kept accounts of the starvation, the daily death count, and the fights over a dead man's clothes. Inside the wall stood a plain fence, set about 19 feet in from the stockade logs, that prisoners called the dead line. A man who touched it was shot on sight by guards posted in elevated lookouts nicknamed pigeon roosts. Enslaved and impressed Black laborers built the stockade itself, and among the prisoners held inside it were Black Union soldiers and the white officers who had commanded them.

A short drive southwest of the town of Oglethorpe stands a very different kind of prison. Macon State Prison, built in 1993 and opened the following year, now holds some of Georgia's highest-security inmates, a grim echo of this ground's original purpose a century and a half earlier.