Harrowing
images have revealed the true horrors of the US Civil War - which
claimed the lives of more than half a million in just four short
years.
The Civil War remains the bloodiest war in US history. Fought
between 1861 and 1865, it claimed 620,000 lives - nearly as many
American casualties as every other war fought by the United States
combined.
As horrific stories and shocking photographs of the
survivors who had been starved into living skeletons reached the north,
Wirz became one of the nation's most-hated men.
The photographs revealed the terrible treatment the prisoners had
suffered - something that wasn't seen again to the same extent until the
Nazi death camps in the Second World War.
One
picture titled 'A Harvest of Death', fallen soldiers are pictured
following the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863 and African-American men
are seen collecting the bones of soldiers killed in battle at Cold
Harbor, Virginia one year later in 1864.
In another particularly disturbing 1865 image, a skeletal survivor
of the confederate prisoner-of-war camp looks sadly into the camera
Called
Camp Sumter, it was the largest prison in the South where captured
Union soldiers were kept from February 1864 to April 1865, the end of
the Civil War.
Camp Sumter was built quickly after the prisoner-exchange system
between the Union and the Confederacy fell through in 1863. The system
broke down because the Confederacy refused to treat black soldiers as
equal to white soldiers.
Prisoners
were first brought to the camp in February 1864 even before it was
completed. Camp Sumter, which became known as Andersonville after the
railroad station near the prison, was built to hold 10,000 men but was
often overcrowded to four times its capacity.
At its height in August 1864, Camp Sumter held more than 33,000
PoWs on only 26 acres of open ground without shelter or clothing for the
inmates. Prisoners had only the clothes they were wearing when
captured. Wearing their tattered Union uniforms, the men were forced to
sleep in makeshift tents or holes dug in the ground.
Andersonville
had an inadequate supply of food and water and in the last 12 months of
the Civil War, 13,000 Union prisoners died there from disease and
starvation.
Infested with vermin and lice, the only source of
water was a tiny creek that ran through the grounds, but soon became
polluted with raw sewage. Eventually the banks of the creek eroded and
turned a large portion of the camp into a swamp
Around 56,000 soldiers died in prisons during the Civil War -
making up around 10 per cent of all the war's casualties. At Alton
prison in Illinois, more than 1,500 Rebels died in custody from disease.
But Camp Sumter was by far the most fatal with almost a third of its 45,000 Union soldiers dying in just 14 months.
Confederate Captain Henry Wirz, a native of Zurich, Switzerland,
was the commander of the Andersonville prison for the duration of the
camp's 14 months.
One month after the Confederates surrendered
at the Battle of Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865 - one of the
last battles of the Civil War - Wirz was arrested for the murders of the
soldiers who died during their imprisonment at Andersonville.
As
horrific stories and shocking photographs of the survivors who had been
starved into living skeletons reached the north, Wirz became one of the
nation's most-hated men.
The photographs revealed the terrible treatment the prisoners had
suffered - something that wasn't seen again to the same extent until the
Nazi death camps in the Second World War.
One
picture titled 'A Harvest of Death', fallen soldiers are pictured
following the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863 and African-American men
are seen collecting the bones of soldiers killed in battle at Cold
Harbor, Virginia one year later in 1864.
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