Tuesday Forgotten American Blogging: Henry Wirz

For this edition of Bastard Blogging, we turn to the famous Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia. A fitting choice for today's Forgotten American during Treason in Defense of Slavery Month is that camp's commander, Captain Henry Wirz.

Wirz was a Swiss immigrant who immigrated to the United States in the late 1840s, settling in Louisiana. When the Civil War began in 1861, Wirz enlisted as a private in the 4th Louisiana Infantry, but soon was assigned the job of guarding prisoners.

In February 1864, the Confederates opened a new prison camp for captured Union soldiers at Andersonville, Georgia. Places like Andersonville became necessary for the Confederacy after Union General Ulysses S. Grant voided the policy of prisoner exchanges after Confederate troops under the leadership of the odious Nathan Bedford Forrest murdered black Union troops after they surrendered. Grant simply figured that the South needed their troops more than the North needed theirs. Thus, both sides had to create prisoner camps.

Wirz commanded the stockade. Commentators who defend Wirz's actions at Andersonville point out that prison camp conditions were bad on both sides during the war. This is true enough. However, there is absolutely no evidence that Wirz did anything to help the prisoners. On the contrary, Wirz ordered his guards to abuse the prisoners and he withheld much of the prisoners already slim rations. Andersonville in general was a place of extreme overcrowding, filth, and death. At its height, the Confederacy placed 32,000 Union troops at Andersonville, far more than it could reasonably hold. Of the 45,000 men held there at one point, approximately 13,000, or 28% died.

John L. Ransom, brigade quartermaster of the Ninth Michigan Calvary, was a prisoner at Andersonville. He described Wirz: "Is not a very prepossessing looking chap. Is about thirty-five or forty years old, rather tall, and a little stoop shouldered; skin has a pale, white livered look, with thin lips. Has a sneering sort of countenance. Makes a fellow fell as if he would like to go up and boot him." Ransom's opinion of Wirz certainly didn't improve as conditions in Andersonville got worse: "Capt. Wirtz [sic] very domineering and abusive. Is afraid to come into camp any more. There are a thousand men in here who would willingly die if they could kill him first. Certainly the worst man I ever saw." In reading Ransom's diary, what makes him come across as a bastard is not so much the bad conditions in the prison, for that was a problem everywhere. It was that Wirz clearly did not care. It simply seems that he was glad to see Yankees die, and in the most inhuman way possible. Among many other things, Wirz allowed raiding parties to attack prisoners inside the barracks and steal everything they could from them. Wirz eventually stopped this and hanged six prisoners who were at the head of these problems, but only after several months of this happening with his knowledge and after a riot within the prison walls.

At the end of the Civil War in April 1865, Henry Wirz was captured by Union troops and sent north to Washington, D.C. In July 1865, Wirz was placed on trial by the United States government for conspiring to impair the lives of Union prisoners of war. The trial lasted two months and Wirz was found guilty of these charges as well as eleven counts of murder. He was hanged on November 10, 1865. Wirz claimed he was just following orders. Perhaps he was right. Henry Wirz was the only Confederate officer executed after the war. The lesson may be that the Union should have executed his superiors as well. Recent scholars such as R. Fred Ruhlman, in his book Captain Henry Wirz and Andersonville Prison have tried to portray Wirz in a more forgiving light. However, I think this is wrongheaded. Ruhlman blames Wirz' execution on "four years of bloody war, escalating policies of revenge and retribution, lingering sectional hatred, and the assassination of President Lincoln, coupled with the overzealous ambitions of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt." But although Ruhlman makes the kind of big claims about his objectivity that most historians avoid today, he faces some problems. This adjunct history professor at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga saw the University of Tennessee Press pull his book after he was found to have plagiarized most of it. But regardless of the plagiarism issue, which is irrelevant to the point at hand, Ruhlman is still wrong. What were those "escalating policies of revenge and retribution." No one else was executed after the War, even Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, who both clearly deserved to be hanged from the highest tree. "Lingering sectional hatred." Sure, the South hated the North. But where is the evidence for the opposite? With the exception of having to give up slaves, the South won the peace. They were able to do what they wanted to blacks for the next 100 years, forcing them into sharecropping, lynching them at will, and placing them under a strict system of segregation. Did the North step in to stop any of this? No. Did the North chase down Confederate officers and execute them because they were Southern traitorous bastards? No. What exactly is this anti-Southern sectional hatred that Ruhlman and so many other Southerners claim existed? Are they talking about William Tecumseh Sherman, arguably the most loathed historical figure in the American South today? If they are, they forget that Sherman is a hero who did a great deal to end the rebellion in defense of slavery and who worked hard to free slaves during his march to the sea. If the South hadn't committed treason to defend their ability to rape, kill, sell, and enslave African-Americans, they wouldn't have had this problem.

Today, the Andersonville prison is Andersonville National Historic Site. As documented in Tony Horwitz's 1998 book Confederates in the Attic, the battle to give the site to the Park Service saw Southern politicians in an uproar. They demanded that the story of the prison camp be watered down with more general discussions of prison camps and how they affected American soldiers. Thus we see this site, a place so strongly identified with the horrific treatment of Union soldiers trying to crush the pro-slavery rebellion, be turned into a general ra-ra pro-American soldier site with lots of stuff about Vietnam POWs, etc. While you can still learn a great deal about Andersonville at the site, the average visitor hears multiple narratives that severely undermine the power that the story of Henry Wirz and the Andersonville prison should tell us.