Civil War Prisons

People are often astounded by the numbers of men who died as casualties of the Civil War. The bloodiest war to ever take place on American soil, over 600,000 men perished during the Civil War.

What many people do not realize is that nearly 60,000 of these casualties did not happen in battle – they happened in the prisons where the Federal government and the Confederacy housed prisoners of war. The deadly conditions in these prisons were responsible for more deaths than occurred on the battlefield at Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle of the war.

From the outset of the war, the matter of prisoners taken weighed heavily on both armies. While the Federal army had several facilities – forts, jails, prisons – that could accommodate prisoners of war, the Confederacy has few such facilities, and as a result, most of their prisons were hastily arranged stockades where prisoners were housed in tents behind barbed wire.

The ramshackle nature of prisons both North and South made for deplorable conditions for prisoners. Both armies, unequipped to handle the sheer number of men captured and imprisoned, ran prisons that killed men not by violence but by disease and privation. The Southern prison camps were infamous for the disease due to poor sanitation and starvation that killed many of their prisoners. Regardless of their legendary conditions, it is unlikely that the Southern prison camps were designed to be cesspools of disease and starvation; rather, as the numbers of prisoners grew beyond the ability of these prison camps to house them, and the blockades cut off transportation of foodstuffs, the conditions in these prisons deteriorated exponentially.

Conditions in most Northern war prisons were little better than those in the Southern prisons. Like their Southern counterparts, most of the Northern prisons were unequipped to deal with the large numbers of prisoners being housed therein. Disease ran rampant in the Northern prisons, as well; in fact, it is estimated that 25% of prisoners at the Federal Elmira prison in New York perished, while 29% in the Confederate Andersonville prison in Georgia perished.

Of the Southern war prisons, Andersonville is most infamous. Housing around 33,000 men during its peak of use – making it one of the largest cities in the South – inmates were held in makeshift facilities on 26 acres of land that had been reduced to mud by the influx of prisoners. No sewer or sanitation facilities were present, and disease and starvation claimed nearly 13,000 of the men who were housed at Andersonville by the end of the war.

Elmira, nicknamed “Hellmira” by the Confederates held there, was one of the most notorious Northern war prisons. Although the site was only used for several months during the war, a little over 12,000 Confederate soldiers were held there, and of these, almost 3000 perished, either from malnutrition, exposure to the freezing winter weather, or from disease due to the poor sanitation conditions.

Both the Federal government and the Confederate government, unable to accommodate the large numbers of prisoners of war they captured, inadvertently killed thousands of men, making the Civil War-era prison camps as deadly as any battlefield.