ANDERSONVILLE

village in Sumter county, southwest-central Georgia, U.S., that was the site of a Confederate military prison from February 1864 until May 1865 during the American Civil War. Andersonville was the South's largest prison for captured Union soldiers and was notorious for its unhealthy conditions and high death rate. In the summer of 1863 the U.S. federal authorities ended an agreement under which Union and Confederate captives were exchanged; the resultant increased number of Union prisoners of war confined in the capital city of Richmond, Va., constituted a danger to the Confederacy and seriously pressed upon the food supply. In November 1863, Confederate authorities selected the Andersonville site, through which ran a stream, and began to construct a stockade of 16.5 acres (6.7 hectares). Prisoners began to arrive in February 1864, before the prison was completed and before adequate supplies had been received, and by May their number amounted to about 12,000. In June the stockade was enlarged so as to include 26 acres (10.5 hectares), but the congestion was only temporarily relieved, and in August the number of prisoners exceeded 32,000. No shelter had been provided for the inmates: the first arrivals made rude sheds from the debris of the stockade; the others made tents of blankets and other available pieces of cloth or dug pits in the ground. Owing to the slender resources of the Confederacy, the prison was frequently short of food, and even when food was sufficient in quantity, it was of a poor quality and poorly prepared because of the lack of cooking utensils. The water supply, deemed ample when the prison was planned, became polluted under the congested conditions. The medical staff was inadequate and poorly provisioned. During the summer of 1864 the prisoners suffered greatly from hunger, exposure, and disease, and in seven months about a third of them died. In the autumn of 1864, after the capture of Atlanta, all the prisoners who could be moved were sent to Millen, Ga., and Florence, S.C. At Millen better arrangements prevailed, and when, after General W.T. Sherman began his march to the sea, the prisoners were returned to Andersonville, the conditions there were somewhat improved. During the war 49,485 prisoners were received at the Andersonville prison, and of these nearly 13,000 died from disease, malnutrition, and other causes. Conditions in Andersonville were utilized as propaganda material in the North, where Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton ordered retaliation on Confederates held in Union prisons. After the war, Captain Henry Wirz, commander of the prison, was tried by a military commission and on Nov. 10, 1865, was hanged. The Andersonville National Cemeteryconsisting of 84 acres (34 hectares) with the prison sitecontains the graves of 12,912 Union prisoners of war who died at Andersonville, as well as a few thousand graves of other military persons interred there since 1865. The National Prisoner of War Memorial Museum, honouring American soldiers captured in all the country's wars, opened in Andersonville in 1998. Pop. (1990) 277.