The waymark coordinates are located at the stockade side of the visitor center at Andersonville NHS.
The name of Andersonville is synonymous with inhuman cruelty and unimaginable suffering. Although only operative for a year, fully 1/3 of prisoners at Andersonville died of exposure, dehydration, malnutrition, starvation, and disease.
Conditions at Andersonville were so horrifying that its Commandant, Confederate Captain Henry Wirz, was held and tried by a military tribunal for "murder in violation of the Laws of War. Wirz was convicted and hanged in Washington DC on 10 Nov 1865.
See the article by the NY Times of his trial and execution here: (
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"EXECUTION OF WIRZ.; Closing Scenes in the Life of the Andersonville Jailor. Farewell Interview with His Associate, J.H. Winder. Final Effort of His Counsel to Obtain Executive Clemency. Firm Demeanor of the Prisoner on the Scaffold. He Asserts His Innocence to the Last, and Meets His Fate with Fortitude. A Remarkable Attempt to Poison Him Just Brought to Light. A Bolus of Strychnine Conveyed to Him by His Wife.
Published: November 11, 1865
Special Dispatch to the New-York Times.
WASHINGTON, Friday, Nov. 10.
WIRZ was executed this morning at 10:30 o'clock. Nobody who saw him die to-day will think any the less of him. He disappointed all those who expected to see him quiver at the brink of death. He met his fate, not with bravado, or defiance, but with a quiet, cheerful indifference. Smiles even played upon his countenance until the black coat shut out from his eyes the sunlight and the world forever. His physical misery, whatever it may have been, was completely hidden in his last and successful effort to die bravely and without any exhibition of trepidation or fear, so his step was steady, his demeanor calm, his tongue silent, except as he offered up his last prayer, and all his bearing evinced more of the man than at any time since his first incarceration. The crowd said he was a braver man than PAYNE, or HERROLD, or ATZEROTH. Perhaps it was the bravery of a desperate man, who knows mercy is beyond his hope. Nevertheless, he met his fate with unblanched eye, unmoving feature, and a calm, deliberate prayer for all those whom he has deemed his persecutors. He seemed to have convinced himself of his own innocence, and his last principal conversation was full of protestations that he died unjustly, and that others were just as guilty as he.
. . .
The prisoner was charged and convicted of combining, confederating and conspiring with Jefferson Davis, J.A. Seddon, Howell Cobb, John H. Winder, Richard B. Winder, Isaiah White, W.S. Winder, W. Shelby Reed, R.R. Stevenson, S.P. Moore, _____ Kerr, late Hospital Steward at Andersonville; James Duncan, Wesley W. Turner, Benjamin Harris, and others whose names are unknown, and who were then engaged in armed rebellion against the United States, in maliciously, traitorously and in violation of the laws of war, to impair and injure the health and to destroy the lives, by subjecting to torture and great suffering, by confining in unhealthy and unwholesome quarters, by exposing to the inclemency of Winter, and to the dews and burning sun of Summer, by compelling the use of impure water, and by furnishing insufficient and unwholesome food, of large numbers of Federal prisoners, to wit: The number of about 45,000 held as prisoners of war at Andersonville, within the lines of the so-called Confederate States, on or before the 27th of March, 1864, and at divers times between that day and the 10th day of April, 1865, to the end that the armies of the United States might he weakened and impaired, and that the insurgents engaged in armed rebellion against the United States might be aided and comforted, etc., etc.
The order states that the prisoner was found guilty of the second charge, viz.: Murder, in violation of the laws and customs of war, and guilty of all the specifications, excepting the fourth, tenth and thirteenth, which three set forth that he killed a prisoner by shooting him with a revolver; that he ordered a sentinel to fire upon another with a revolver; and that he shot another with a revolver, so that he died. . . "
130 years later, the NY Times revisited Andersonville: (
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"Andersonville, A Symbol of Wartime Suffering and Brutality
By MEL GUSSOWMARCH 3, 1996
FOR sheer inhumanity, it would be difficult to match Andersonville. The hell hole of Civil War prisons, it was a name, said one 19th-century author, "which has been stamped so deeply by cruelty into the pages of American history." Lack of food and medical supplies, pollution, drastic overcrowding and the disregard of officials and guards turned his Confederate prison into an abattoir of misery and death. . .
From the arrival of the Union soldiers at the Georgia camp, through their long, torturous incarceration, the television film evokes an image related to that of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, although in this case prisoners were not subjected to mass extermination. Some were killed; many died because of severe neglect.
Of the 45,000 Union soldiers who were imprisoned there during 1864 and 1865, 12,912 lost their lives, more than in eight Civil War battles. Although there were of course other prisons (in the North as well as the South), Andersonville became the most horrific example.
After the war, books offered first-person accounts from survivors. Later there were works of history, fiction and theater, especially in the 1950's, with MacKinlay Kantor's novel "Andersonville," which won a Pulitzer Prize. and Saul Levitt's Broadway play "The Andersonville Trial."
From the Civil War Trust website: (
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"Andersonville Prison
Andersonville, Georgia
Andersonville, or Camp Sumter as it was known officially, held more prisoners at any given time than any of the other Confederate military prisons. It was built in early 1864 after Confederate officials decided to move the large number of Federal prisoners in and around Richmond to a place of greater security and more abundant food. During the 14 months it existed, more than 45,000 Union soldiers were confined here. Of these, almost 13,000 died from disease, poor sanitation, malnutrition, overcrowding, or exposure to the elements.
The prison pen was surrounded by a stockade of hewed pine logs that varied in height from 15 to 17 feet. The pen was enlarged in late June 1864 to enclose 26 1/2 acres. Sentry boxes—called “pigeon roosts” by the prisoners—stood at 90-foot intervals along the top of the stockade and there were two entrances on the west side. Inside, about 19 feet from the wall, was the “deadline,” which prisoners were forbidden to cross. The “deadline” was intended to prevent prisoners from climbing over the stockade or from tunneling under it. It was marked by a simple post and rail fence and guards had orders to shoot any prisoner who crossed the fence, or even reached over it. A branch of Sweetwater Creek, called Stockade Branch, flowed through the prison yard and was the only source of water for most of the prison.
Prisoners at Andersonville
The deadline that kept prisoners back from the walls of the stockade was marked by a simple fence. Prisoners who crossed the line were shot by sentries who sat in “pigeon roosts” located every 90 feet along the wall. The man in this image was shot reaching under the fence as he tried to obtain fresher water than was available downstream. (Andersonville National Historic Site)
In an emergency, eight small earthen forts around the outside of the prison could hold artillery to put down disturbances within the compound and to defend against Union cavalry attacks.
The first prisoners were brought to Andersonville in late February 1864. During the next few months, approximately 400 more arrived each day. By the end of June, 26,000 men were penned in an area originally meant for only 10,000 prisoners. The largest number held at any one time was more than 33,000 in August 1864. The Confederate government could not provide adequate housing, food, clothing or medical care to their Federal captives because of deteriorating economic conditions in the South, a poor transportation system, and the desperate need of the Confederate army for food and supplies.
These conditions, along with a breakdown of the prisoner exchange system between the North and the South, created much suffering and a high mortality rate. “There is so much filth about the camp that it is terrible trying to live here,” one prisoner, Michigan cavalryman John Ransom, confided to his diary. “With sunken eyes, blackened countenances from pitch pine smoke, rags, and disease, the men look sickening. The air reeks with nastiness.” Still another recalled, “Since the day I was born, I never saw such misery.”
When General William T. Sherman’s Union forces occupied Atlanta, Georgia on September 2, 1864, bringing Federal cavalry columns within easy striking distance of Andersonville, Confederate authorities moved most of the prisoners to other camps in South Carolina and coastal Georgia. From then until April 1865, Andersonville was operated in a smaller capacity. When the War ended, Captain Henry Wirz, the prison’s commandant, was arrested and charged with conspiring with high Confederate officials to “impair and injure the health and destroy the lives…of Federal prisoners” and “murder in violation of the laws of war.” Such a conspiracy never existed, but public anger and indignation throughout the North over the conditions at Andersonville demanded appeasement. Tried and found guilty by a military tribunal, Wirz was hanged in Washington, D.C., on November 10, 1865. Wirz was the only person executed for war crimes during the Civil War.
Andersonville prison ceased to exist when the War ended in April 1865. Some former prisoners remained in Federal service, but most returned to the civilian occupations they had before the War. During July and August 1865, Clara Barton, along with a detachment of laborers and soldiers, and former prisoner Dorence Atwater, came to Andersonville cemetery to identify and mark the graves of the Union dead. As a prisoner at Andersonville, Atwater had been assigned to record the names of deceased Union soldiers for Confederate prison officials. Fearing loss of the death records at war's end, Atwater made his own copy of the register in hopes of notifying the relatives of the more than 12,000 dead interred at Andersonville. Thanks to Atwater’s list and the Confederate death records captured at the end of the War, only 460 of the Andersonville graves had to be marked “Unknown U.S. soldier.”"