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Andersonville Prison

Originally aired on May 17, 1996 - In part 90 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson profiles the unfortunate Commandant of the Andersonville prison, Captain Henry Wirtz.

#90 – Andersonville Prison (The Injustice of Henry Wirz)

Psychology, bigotry, a thirst for revenge, all are foundations of war. No one became more victimized by those emotions than Captain Henry Wirz, the commandant of Andersonville prison.

Heinrich Hermann Wirz was born November 23, 1823, in Zurich, Switzerland. His father was a tailor. Although the son later claimed to have obtained a medical degree, there is no verification of this. In 1849, after being jailed for debts and divorced from a wife and two children, Wirz immigrated to America. He married a widow from Kentucky and settled in Louisiana.

He was in the first wave of Confederate enlistees and became a sergeant in a Louisiana infantry unit. At the 1862 battle of Seven Pines, Wirz received a severe wound in the wrist. The injury left his right arm useless and Wirz in constant pain. He then accepted assignment to the military prison system. Its commander General John H. Winder, so admired Wirz’s skills in organization and discipline that he elevated the former sergeant to captain.

For much of 1863, Wirz was Jefferson Davis’ envoy on a diplomatic mission to Paris and Berlin. The thirty-year-old officer had been back in the Confederacy only a month when, in March, 1864, Wirz was ordered to take command of the uncompleted military prison at Andersonville, Georgia. The captain at once became a victim of circumstances.

Wirz sought hard to put Andersonville in reasonable order. Yet his authority was limited and his superiors in Richmond were indifferent to his pleas for more of everything. As the prison population swelled, inmates came to blame Wirz for every suffering. No prisoner likes his jailor, but there was more in the case of Wirz.

His Swiss accent was pronounced and seemed to grow thicker with his frequent explosions of anger. Hence, this crippled foreigner, with martinet-like insistence on detail, engendered every prejudice among the prisoners in his charge. Before the war ended, Wirz bore the labels “inhuman wretch”, “the infamous captain”, and “the Andersonville savage”.

Ex-prisoners would levy against him an almost endless list of alleged atrocities. In those manufactured accounts, Wirz emerges as the Devil incarnate. For example, a Massachusetts inmate described Wirz as “a most savage looking man, and…as brutal as his looks would seem to indicate”.

By war’s end, Wirz and his superior, John Winder, were regarded in the North as the two most notorious Confederate prison officials. Winder escaped punishment when he died in February, 1865, of a heart attack. Wirz alone was left to weather Northern screams for vengeance.

He was captured at Andersonville while still seeking to ease the sufferings of his captives. Federals took him to Washington. In August, 1865, Wirz went before a military tribunal on charges of murder and mistreatment of prisoners.

The proceedings made a mockery of justice. A procession of witnesses gave perjured testimony, evidence was manipulated, defense counsel was denied one motion after another, defense witnesses were either not permitted to speak or else shouted down by the judges. Through it all, Wirz insisted that he had merely been a soldier obeying orders in a situation of absolute want.

The outcome of the hearing was a foregone conclusion. The court found Wirz guilty of all charges. On the morning of November 10, 1865, calmly and with resignation, Henry Wirz mounted the scaffold and went to his death.

Hollywood’s interpretation of Wirz is considerably at odds with the judgment of historians. Much is not all of the guilt heaped upon Wirz was misguided; yet he is remembered as the only Southerner executed for war crimes after the contest ended. A people thirsty for blood and indifferent to justice killed Henry Wirz.

A final point completes this story. On the site where Wirz was hanged now stands the United States Supreme Court building.

Dr. James I. "Bud" Robertson, Jr., is a noted scholar on the American Civil War and Alumni Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Virginia Tech.