American Civil War prison camps

• 1. Introduction

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  American Civil War prison camps held over 400,000 captured soldiers between 1861 and 1865, run by both the Union and the Confederacy. The numbers alone are staggering: more than 56,000 men died behind those walls, accounting for nearly 10% of all Civil War fatalities. At Andersonville, Georgia, 13,000 of the 45,000 Union prisoners confined there perished, a death rate of 28%. Historian Lorien Foote has written that "the suffering of prisoners did more to inhibit postwar reconciliation than any other episode of the war." How did a system meant to manage captured soldiers spiral into one of the war's deadliest theaters? And what collapsed the exchange agreements that were supposed to keep men out of those camps in the first place?

• 2. The Parole System

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  Before prison camps became killing grounds, a more humane arrangement governed captured soldiers. Both the Union and Confederate governments relied on the traditional European system of parole and exchange. A prisoner who accepted parole gave his word not to fight again until his name was formally matched, or "exchanged," against a soldier held on the opposing side. Once that exchange was recorded, both men could rejoin their units.

  While awaiting that paperwork, prisoners spent time in permanent camps, but the stays were meant to be brief. The arrangement kept prison populations lean through the first two years of the war. Authorities were required under the later Dix-Hill Cartel to parole any prisoners not formally exchanged within ten days of capture. That cartel, negotiated in July 1862 by Union Maj. Gen. John A. Dix and Confederate Maj. Gen. D. H. Hill, set out a detailed scale of equivalents: a navy captain or army colonel was worth fifteen privates or ordinary seamen in any exchange, while soldiers of equal rank were swapped man for man.

  The agreement also covered non-combatants, including civilians accused of disloyalty and military employees. Each government appointed an agent specifically to oversee the mechanics. For roughly a year the system held, and prison camps on both sides were largely empty by mid-1862. The path to that agreement, however, had not been smooth: earlier talks in February and March of 1862, between Union Maj. Gen. John E. Wool and Confederate Brig. Gen. Howell Cobb, had stalled over which side would pay for transporting prisoners.

• 3. When Exchanges Collapsed

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  The exchange system broke down in 1863 over a question of racial equality. The Confederacy refused to treat captured Black Union soldiers the same as white ones, arguing that such men were probably former enslaved people who rightfully belonged to their masters rather than to the Union Army. That position made any fair, reciprocal exchange impossible.

  The collapse hit the South harder. The Confederacy was already suffering a severe manpower shortage, and it needed those soldiers back far more urgently than the North did. Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant recognized this asymmetry. Noticing what he called the "prisoner gap" - Union camps held significantly more Confederate prisoners than Confederate camps held Union men - Grant concluded that keeping those men locked up gave him a concrete military advantage. He opposed large-scale exchanges until the war's final stages.

  Around 5,600 Confederate prisoners chose a different path entirely. They agreed to join the Union Army. Known as "galvanized Yankees," these men were stationed in the West, posted against Native American adversaries rather than their former Confederate comrades. Exchanges finally resumed in early 1865, just before the war ended. The Confederacy sent 17,000 prisoners north while receiving 24,000 men in return. The relief came too late for many. On the 23rd of April 1865, after the war had officially ended, the riverboat Sultana was carrying 1,900 former prisoners north on the Mississippi River when its boilers exploded, killing roughly 1,500 of them.

• 4. Death Rates and Conditions

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  Records show 211,411 Union soldiers were captured during the war; of those, 30,218 died in captivity. Of the 462,684 Confederate soldiers captured, 25,976 died. The death rate in Northern prisons was just over 5.6%; in Southern prisons it was 14.29%, more than twice as high.

  Many Southern prisons sat in regions with high rates of disease and were chronically short of medicine, doctors, food, and ice. Northern opinion frequently held that the Confederacy was deliberately weakening and killing Union prisoners. That belief produced a grim political response: public pressure pushed for Northern prisons to be made equally harsh, even though supply shortages were not a problem in the North.

  Camp Douglas in Chicago, sometimes called "The North's Andersonville," recorded a death rate of roughly 15% over four years. During a single cold winter month, 10% of its Confederate prisoners died. Of the 26,060 men interned there, roughly 4,000 died from starvation, execution, or exposure. Elmira Prison in New York, originally established as Camp Rathbun for military training, was converted to a prison in 1864 with capacity for about 12,000 men. Before it closed in 1865, 2,963 prisoners died there. Its 25% death rate nearly matched that of Andersonville.

• 5. Andersonville and Its Reach

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  Camp Sumter, near Andersonville, Georgia, became the name most associated with Civil War prison horror. Over 14 months, 13,000 of the 45,000 Union soldiers held there died - a death rate of 28%. The site is now home to the National POW Museum.

  The Confederacy attempted to ease Andersonville's overcrowding by constructing Camp Lawton near the town of Millen, Georgia, in the summer of 1864. The new facility was built near the Lawton Depot and was designed to be larger. Around 10,000 prisoners were transferred there between October and late November of 1864. Camp Lawton now operates as Magnolia Springs, a state park.

  There were 32 major Confederate prisons in total, with 16 of them in the Deep South states of Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina. Existing training camps were frequently converted to hold prisoners, and entirely new facilities had to be built as the prisoner population swelled. Libby Prison and Castle Thunder both operated in Richmond, Virginia. The Confederate prison at Danville, Virginia, was not a single facility but six separate tobacco warehouses in which Union soldiers were confined between 1863 and 1865. Only one of those warehouses, Prison Number 6, still stands at 300 Lynn Street. Henry Wirz, the commander at Andersonville, was executed for war crimes after the conflict ended.

• 6. The Northern Camp Network

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  Camp Chase in Columbus, Ohio, opened in May 1861, originally built to hold 4,000 men. By the war's end, up to 10,000 prisoners were crammed into a facility that had been expanded to a stated capacity of 7,000. A Confederate Soldier Memorial to the dead at Camp Chase was dedicated in 1909.

  Johnson's Island sat in Lake Erie near Sandusky, Ohio, and Rock Island Prison occupied a government-owned island in the Mississippi River at Rock Island, Illinois. Fort Delaware stood at Delaware City; Fort Warren held prisoners near Boston, Massachusetts. Point Lookout operated in Saint Mary's County, Maryland, and the Old Capitol Prison processed detainees in Washington, DC.

  Davids Island in New York City housed Fort Slocum, which served from July 1863 to October 1863 as a temporary hospital for Confederate soldiers wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg. Camp Morton operated in Indianapolis, Indiana. The Gratiot Street Prison held inmates in St. Louis, Missouri. Gen. Grant's awareness that Northern prisons drained the Southern economy and war effort was not incidental to strategy. He understood that the North's larger population gave it the capacity to absorb the burden of holding prisoners far better than the Confederacy could.

  MacKinlay Kantor's 1956 novel Andersonville, which drew on the history of the prison system, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.