I’ve been to Andersonville, the infamous POW camp for Union soldiers, and learned of the horrible conditions there (overcrowding, starvation, disease, etc.). However, this Wikipedia article seems to suggest that conditions there were the result of short-sightedness and the realities of war, rather than a deliberate attempt to mistreat/starve/whatever the POWs there.
Anyway, is the Andersonville example representative of the fate of Civil War POWs everywhere? Were prisoners tortured for information or for sport? Or were they generally treated with respect?
From what I have read, and I don’t have a cite, the Union prisoners were treated about as well as the Confederate soldiers. The Union blockades had prevented medications, etc. from getting through, so soldiers from both sides suffered.
Prisoners weren’t generally treated well during the Civil War, but conditions varied by location. Part of the problem was that they ended up holding more people than they were supposed to. Salisbury Prison, in North Carolina, for example, was designed to hold 2000 men, but held as many as 10,000. Belle Island in Richmond was supposed to hold 3000, and held 6000. On the Union side, Elmira was intended to hold 5000, and held 10,000, Point Lookout was supposed to hold 10,000, but held 20,000.
Overcrowding brought disease, and and also starvation, helped by the fact that prisons on both sides were given the least priority by the respective Departments of War.
I don’t know much on this topic, but I do recall that the large camp for Confederate POWs on George’s Island in Boston Harbor was famous for its humane treatment of prisoners. Only a few died of natural causes (although as you can see a few were executed if they were deemed to deserve it), and men in poor health were even released early. It’s also famous for being the place where the Union troops who had to whip the place into shape during the early days of the war composed the famous song “John Brown’s body”.
I’ve been there; the Boston Harbor ferries all drop people off there to use the beach or visit Fort Warren and it can be pretty crowded–it gets very cold and/or hot and is pretty windy, but all in all a decent place as far as such camps go. Hospital, semi-private rooms for VIP prisoners, chapel, etc.
Early in the war, POWs were exchanged fairly rapidly. Soldiers were exchanged one-for-one if equal ranks, and there were conversion rates for x number of privates for one major, for example.
When Grant took over the Army of the Potomac, he put an end to this, feeling there was no point in sending rebels back to fight him again. (The North had more manpower, so could afford it).
Prisoners were treated about the same on both sides. The South had severe shortages of food, and POWs (as is often the case) got short shrift. Andersonville was notoriously bad, but the Union camp in Elmira was also very unpleasant.
I can’t give you chapter and verse on this, but it is probably fair to say that given the medical knowledge of the time and the other exigencies of the situation both sides treated POWs just about a well as they could reasonably be expected to. The deaths in prison camps was pretty horrific but there seem to be few cases of deliberate cruelty. Maybe Andersonville was a notable exception since there is some indication that the commander, Wertz, did go out of his way to make life for his prisoners hard and to avoid fixing obvious problems. The is some indication that Wertz was somewhat deranged.
The real problem occurred later in the war when prisoner exchanges were discontinued. The pretext for stopping exchanges was that the Confederate government insisted on treating captured Negro soldiers as escaped slaves, not as prisoners of war. The underlying reason was a realization that the South would be hurt by a suspension of prisoner exchanges much more than the North would be just because of the smaller pool of man power in the Southern States. With the suspension of exchanges the number of prisoners who had to be fed, clothed and housed just exceeded the South’s limited capacity to care for them. The South had enough trouble feeding its active army in the winter of 1864 that it should be not surprise that its POWs suffered. It was certainly nothing compared with German treatment of POWs, especially Slavic POWs, in WWII. That was deliberate. In the Civil War it was incompetence and limited resources much more that deliberate policy.
As to the other question, unknown. It is not believed that soldiers on either side were ever deliberately tortured, but given the relative lack of medical personnel, equipment, and checmicals, it may certainly have seemed like it. A few massacres of prisoners or surrendering soldiers did take place, but were quite rare.
I would pretty much agree with what has been said here already. Two of my ancestors were POWs in Confederate camps. My great-great-grandfather died in Andersonville. He was captured at Petersburg in late June 1864 and by October he was dead of scurvy. Andersonville was worse than other places in part because prisoner exchanges had halted and because so late in the war the South had exhausted most of its resources. My great-great-great-grandfather (different side of the family) was captured early in the war, in December 1861, and held for seven months in the Salisbury POW camp in NC, where he contracted tuberculosis. He was released in a prisoner-of-war exchange but invalided out shortly thereafter. Overcrowded conditions and probably inadequate housing during the winter probably contributed to his illness, but the conditions weren’t nearly as severe as Andersonville.
The fact that only Henry Wirz was executed after the war would indicate that, even at the time, Andersonville was recognized as being different from other POW camps.
I agree with just about all that has been written already. I’d also add that Johnson’s Island, a prison for Confederate officers near Sandusky, Ohio (a few hours’ car drive west of Cleveland) had an exceptionally low mortality rate, despite being subject to freezing winter winds off Lake Erie. Compared to Andersonville or Libby Prison in Richmond, it was a picnic. Very few escapes, too, despite a hair-brained Confederate Secret Service plan to seize a US warship on the Great Lakes and free all of the prisoners.
There’s a big archeological dig going on there now, which I’ve helped with, and they’re learning a lot about life in the prison. Fascinating stuff.