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Andersonville Civil War Prison
Item 8 of 12
This is a contributing entry for Andersonville Civil War Prison and only appears as part of that tour.Learn More.
The open field just east of Star Fort is the grounds on which the camp hospital stood. A makeshift hospital made up of sheds and tents, the hospital had inadequate medical supplies to treat the number of sick and dying prisoners. Many prisoners chose to remain within the stockade to die among companions instead of strangers. The position of the hospital uphill of the stockade also contributed to waste runoff that polluted the small stream, the primary source of water inside the camp.

Andersonville Prison, Ga., August 17, 1864. Issuing rations, view from main gate

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

Andersonville Prison, Georgia. Bird's eye view - gathering roots to boil coffee Thirty-three thousand prisoners in bastile /

Photograph, History, Rectangle, Paper

Andersonville Prison, Ga., August 17, 1864. South view of stockade

Slope, History, Rectangle, Fence

[Emaciated prisoner of war from Belle Isle, Richmond, Private William M. Smith of Co. D of 8th Kentucky Volunteers, at the U.S. General Hospital, Div. 1, Annapolis]

Though not a prisoner from Andersonville, these images were often attributed to Andersonville prison to show the devastating effects on soldiers in the camp.

Emaciated Prisoner with a Doctor

These photos were often labeled as Andersonville prisoners and used as propaganda to deride Confederate treatment of prisoners at the site.

Front Page Harper's Weekly, June 18, 1864

Often attributed to Andersonville today, these lithographs, made from photographs of recently released prisoners, were printed on the front page of the June 18, 1864 issue of Harper's Weekly and accompanied by an article on the treatment of prisoners in Richmond

As the camp was originally planned to hold only 10,000 prisoners, the overwhelming swell in population to more than 30,000 taxed the resources of the Confederacy. Men imprisoned in Camp Sumter had less and less space in which to lie down, less food, and less clean water. Exposure to insects and disease rapidly increased sick rates, leading to greater demand for treatment at the camp’s field hospital.[1] Scurvy remained a large issue as well, afflicting great numbers of prisoners. Prison memoirs described the scene in gruesome terms, such as in the writing of Augustus Hamlin:

“We must consider at length the details of this enclosure, with its hungry, emaciate, filthy mass of humanity, whence arose a stench of death so powerful as to be perceived at the distance of a league—the burning sky, the array of instruments of torture, the manifest design of cruelty.”[2]

Austin Flint, an American Physician who reported on the state of disease within Camp Sumter at Andersonville, noted the especially harsh conditions. First, he described the hospital. About five acres, the hospital field had been left with select trees to “furnish pleasant shade to patients,” and sick soldiers washed their clothes in a stream which was a “semi-fluid mass of human excrement, offal, and filth of all kinds.”[3] Flies covered the faces of sleeping patients, spreading gangrene and measles among other diseases. Prisoners themselves worked as hospital staff, adding to the bad hygiene and poor care of the sick. The sick were observed to be “literally incrusted with dirt and covered with vermin.”[4] Hospital conditions contributed to massive death rates among prisoners. Men inside the camp feared being admitted to the hospital as it typically meant a death sentence not a speedy recovery. From their vantage point inside the stockade walls by the overwhelmed creek bed, soldiers may have heard cries of the suffering from the hospital and feared the worst for their lives and their comrades’ lives.

[1] Robert Davis, “Andersonville Prison,” in The Civil War in Georgia ed. John C. Inscoe (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 142.

[2] Augustus C. Hamlin, Martyria; or, Andersonville Prison (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1866), 32. Project Gutenberg, accessed December 15, 2020.

[3] Austin Flint, “The Confederate Military prison Hospital at Andersonville, Georgia: Contributions Relating to the Causes and Prevention of Disease,” (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1867) excerpted in Life and Limb: Perspectives on the American Civil War ed. David Seed, Stephen C. Kenny, and Chris Williams (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 59.

[4] Austin Flint, “The Confederate Military prison Hospital,” 60-61.

Image Sources(Click to expand)

Riddle, A. J. (Andrew Jackson), 1828-1897, photographer,

Riddle, A. J. (Andrew Jackson), 1828-1897, photographer; Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

photographed 1864, [printed between 1880 and 1889], Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print

https://www.nps.gov/media/photo/gallery-item.htm?pg=1341849&id=267F34C1-1DD8-B71C-07DB5FD7C829B5C5&gid=25001AB0-1DD8-B71C-079A07B44D6707A4

https://www.nps.gov/media/photo/gallery-item.htm?pg=1341849&id=267F34C1-1DD8-B71C-07DB5FD7C829B5C5&gid=25001AB0-1DD8-B71C-079A07B44D6707A4