Andersonville Prison and Captain Henry Wirz
For no reason at all, I'm going to share some more American Civil War history today. I am also too lazy to go dig through my books so you are getting Wikipedia as the source.
Andersonville is a place in Georgia, but during the US Civil War (not the current redux, the og) it was the site of a POW camp for Union prisoners. It also became infamous for its conditions and for the eventual trial (and execution) of its commander, Captain Henry Wirz. You can visit and tour the prison museum today, although I am sure this regime will try to erase its history too.
So, during the Civil War (part one), the South became busted. Broke. Which isn't entirely accurate--there were rich people who had money, but they were not interested in funding shit. They didn't even fund their own armies well. Southern forces by the end of the war were often wearing rags and extremely underfed. I'm not justifying anything, I'm just explaining that what money they had was definitely not going to go to feeding and caring for Union prisoners. It wasn't even going to their own soldiers. (It went into rich peoples' pockets. Does this sound familiar?)
Nonetheless, they still had captured soldiers to deal with. This was still kind of a new concept in warfare if you weren't, like, ransoming rich assholes. (Historians have a lot of thoughts about the development of "modern" warfare and the US Civil War was a hot mess of new ways to hurt each other.) The Union, only recently, had sort of some ideals about how POWs should be fed and housed*. The Confederacy did not.
*Did they follow through on those ideals? Not all the time, no. Not even most of the time. (They believed the Confederate prisoners were weakening Union soldiers on purpose and vowed to do the same to their prisoners.) The death rates at all POW camps on both sides were roughly the same, although, while certain Northern POW camps had high fatality rates (largely due to the cold weather which Southern prisoners were not used to and were not given proper clothing or shelter from anyway) but none quite reached Andersonville's numbers.
But Andersonville was freed by the victors. And that is often how we decide which deaths matter.
But let's get into the horrendous conditions at Andersonville: Severe overcrowding. (It often held 4 times the capacity of people it was built to hold, with about 5ft of room for reach prisoner. As a reminder, the prisoners were adult men.) Severe lack of sanitation facilities. (Imagine the famous poop cruise but it's a fort full of prisoners who are already being fed rotten and bug-infested food, at a time when the connection between clean water and disease was not fully understood, and also you are prisoners in an overcrowded prison so no one can really move, and plumbing is not really a thing). Then you had the extreme malnourishment with all the resulting vitamin deficiencies.
So prisoners were dying of lack of care, lack of food, lack of adequate protection from the weather, and from shitting themselves diseases. (Also, which I just learned today, from parasites. Yay.) They also had no legal protections or oversight, so some prisoners preyed on other prisoners.
It was bad. The estimate is that about 15000 people died of the roughly 45000 there over the years it operated.
And I do want to point that Wirz did know it was awful. He was fully aware, tough he claimed he tried to do his best. Others claim the opposite. But by most accounts, he was not given enough funds to feed them all--although prison guards were reportedly not underfed. Also the Union stopped doing prisoner exchanges after a while (because the Confederacy was being a dick about the Black troops.), so Wirz was stuck with the prisoners and had no way to offload any of them. Some testimonies claim he personally killed at least one prisoner. Others testified on his behalf that he hadn't done anything like that.
He was supposed to keep records for both governments, and he did, but the secret records kept by a union soldier (see below) were what actually came out.
A young Union prisoner, Dorence Atwater, was chosen to record the names and numbers of the dead at Andersonville, for use by the Confederacy and the federal government after the war ended. He believed, correctly, the federal government would never see the list. Therefore, he sat next to Henry Wirz, who was in charge of the prison pen, and secretly kept his own list among other papers. When Atwater was released, he put the list in his bag and took it through the lines without being caught. It was published by the New York Tribune when Horace Greeley, the paper's owner, learned the federal government had refused the list and given Atwater much grief. Atwater believed that the commanding officer Wirz had been trying to ensure that Union prisoners would be rendered unfit to fight if they survived the prison.[21] (from wikipedia)
The Union Army captured Andersonville in 1865 and reported emaciated prisoners and described it as "hellish."
Now, the Union failed in so many ways after the war, but it's interesting that they did take the time to form a military tribunal for Captain Wirz, and that he was one of the very few executed for war crimes during the Civil War. (The actual charge I think was conspiracy but also failing to adhere to customs of war. Something like that.) There are some people who say Wirz did what he could, and there are others, including former prisoners, who accused Wirz of specific acts of cruelty.
All of which culminated in his being found guilty and hanged. (His hanging, incidentally, did not break his neck, and he writhed and struggled for several minutes.Yuck.)
After the war, the prison was in the care of a veterans' organization and then a women's group, who with women from several states, erected memorials to the dead. There is also a historical cemetery for the Union soldiers who died there.
And there remains controversy connected to Andersonville and Captain Wirz. Did Wirz intentionally want people under his control to suffer and die? Did he start out with good intentions and the situation quickly grew beyond his control? Was he deliberately and intentionally cruel? Or did he grow cruel or numb over time? (And why did he pay that price and yet so many others did not?)
He could have resigned his commission. (Yes, he would have likely faced backlash for this, but he could have.) He could have looked at the hell of war, and the hell of his POW camp, and asked himself what it was all for? Was this worth his soul? Would this make anyone in the future proud?
And so, incidentally, could the Northern POW camp commanders, and the commanders of other Confederate camps. (And members of the IDF, and anyone who worked for a residential school, and prison guards in general, any plantation overseer, and so on.)
They also did not. (Well maybe a few did, somewhere, but I'm not looking it up. The majority of them didn't, at least.) They all convinced themselves they were doing the right thing. They were helping their cause, their country. They were denying other human beings food, housing, medical care, clothing, and dignity--to the point of death and turning them into walking skeletons--and each of them were likely convinced they were good people, doing the right thing.
Do you get why I'm bringing this up now? Andersonville Prison is notorious because it was a living nightmare, but the North had its own living nightmares, as many places do. And each nightmare was near a town or a city where people were told that the starving prisoners deserved what they got (because reasons).
(And before anyone comes at me about the Confederates owning slaves, a) most of the poor men fighting did not, though they were fighting to preserve it because white supremacy is a hell of a drug, but so is nationalism and patriotism and b) the point is that how you treat people at your mercy says more about you than it does about them.)
Some people did try to offer aid to prisoners on both sides, btw. Often clergy, sometimes local women's groups. The dead were often cared for and buried by Black people, free and enslaved, who kept records of the names and locations of the dead, which is why historians have them.
The people running ICE detention centers right now in America, much like guards and nurses and workers in such camps all around the world, might start out with good intentions, or they might start out intending to make what money they can and damn the suffering of others. They might grow numb over time or they might have always liked cruelty. But it doesn't matter in the end.
Intentions are outweighed by actions.
They are there now. They witness or commit everything from mistreatment, to atrocities, to murder through violence or negligence, and they witness or commit these every single day. And they keep going into work. And they say nothing. And they harden their hearts against the idea that they should do anything else. They attack lawyers and politicians attempting to provide oversight. They arrest clergy who want to attend to those inside the prison. They shoot and kill people protesting what they are doing to other human beings.
I don't believe in capital punishment. I don't think it's effective as a deterrent, it's applied unjustly, and once you give a state that sort of power over human life, you put yourself at risk of becoming a victim. (The guillotine was eventually turned on the poor, guys. It wasn't a weapon against only the rich for very long.)
But I do think there needs to be reckoning, with ICE "agents" playing Call of Duty with people's lives, with soldiers who have been told that allowing children to suffer is the best way to support "country" or "homeland," with regular people clocking into work at facilities where children are so traumatized by being ripped from their parents and denied care that they are reportedly harming and soiling themselves.
Because they could stop. At any time. There might be consequences: social, political, economic. But they could stop. They could just walk away if they don't want to be whistleblowers. But they don't, even as the rest of us are rightly horrified.
Whether or not they face charges, though I expect the lower-level people will, because lower-level people generally do, ICE agents, workers at ICE facilities, pilots flying illegal deportation flights, hotel executives supporting this barbarism, should be remembered for what they are choosing to do, every single day.
Right now, some members of MAGA, which is already only about a third of the population, are trying to wriggle out of any responsibility for the deaths of US citizens. And as the conditions in the ICE concentration camps come out, they are going to try to wriggle out of responsibility for that too and claim they didn't know. Prison guards and nurses are going to say they were just trying to help and had limited resources, despite what survivors will say and what we can see with our own eyes. Corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic and Hilton and Amazon and Home Depot are going to claim that they had no idea conditions were so bad.
But they do, and for many of them, they don't care and never cared. And for many of the rest, they've decided not to care because it's easier for them.
And that is the scary thing. And that's what their legacy will be.
Which many of them know now, btw, and they are probably going to get more violent to try to keep that hidden. It's also why they are trying to remove any bits of the history of this country where such atrocities were committed by people like them, and also denying the history of other countries where such atrocities were committed. So don't let them do that.
I don't know how to wrap this up. Andersonville came to mind last night when I saw the leaked footage from an overcrowded ICE facility where grown men were packed onto a cement floor like sardines, without even blankets. When reports came in that despite the freezing weather across the country, ICE guards in Texas were not turning on the heat for detainees. When video played the sound of children screaming at the ICE facility in Dilley, Texas.
That is what ICE will be known for, and what anyone who works for ICE or profits from ICE will be known for. No one is going to care what their intentions were when they started. And it probably won't be the billionaires at GEO Group who will face the consequences. It will be the ICE agents on the street and leading the detention centers, and the people who staff those camps.
