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Civil War America
Andersonville: The Last Depot
Between February 1864 and April 1865, 41,000 Union prisoners of war were taken to the stockade at Anderson Station, Georgia, where nearly 13,000 - one-third of them - died. Most contemporary accounts placed the blame for the tragedy squarely on the shoulders of the Confederates who administered the prison or on a conspiracy of higher-ranking officials. In this carefully researched and compelling revisionist account, William Marvel provides a comprehensive history of Andersonville Prison and conditions within it. Based on reliable primary sources - including diaries, Union and Confederate government documents, and letters - rather than exaggerated postwar recollections and such well-known but spurious "diaries" as that of John Ransom, Marvel's analysis exonerates camp commandant Henry Wirz and others from charges that they deliberately exterminated prisoners, a crime for which Wirz was executed after the war. According to Marvel, virulent disease and severe shortages of vegetables, medical supplies, and other necessities combined to create a crisis beyond Wirz's control. He also argues that the tragedy was aggravated by the Union decision to suspend prisoner exchanges, which meant that many men who might have returned home were instead left to sicken and die in captivity.
351 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1994
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172 people want to read
About the author
William Marvel
29 books15 followersWilliam Marvel grew up on Davis Hill in South Conway, New Hampshire where he still lives. He has been writing about nineteenth-century American history for more than three decades.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
August 28, 2022
Andersonville, the Confederacy’s notorious prisoner-of-war camp in southwest Georgia, was indeed “the last depot” for thousands of unfortunate Union soldiers during the American Civil War. Over 45,000 Union P.O.W.’s were held at Andersonville in 1864 and 1865, and almost 13,000 died there; and their sad story is chronicled by historian William Marvel in his 1994 book Andersonville: The Last Depot.
Marvel, a prolific Civil War historian, conscientiously sets forth the sufferings and rigors of imprisonment at the camp that its rebel founders called Camp Sumter, with careful attention to detail. When it comes to the notoriously inadequate and unhealthy food supply for prisoners at Andersonville, for instance, Marvel explains, in a chapter with the suitably Dantean title “All Hope Abandon,” that “In rural Georgia…grinding mills were not equipped with bolting cloth, so the meal was delivered with the cob ground up in it.” Because cornmeal being produced for thousands and thousands of prisoners could not be sifted one pound at a time, the way Southern women did in their kitchens, prisoners received their cornmeal cob and all, and “The shredded cob turned hard and sharp as the meal dried” (p. 53), contributing to the prevalence of gastrointestinal disease at Andersonville.
The camp also lacked adequate drinking water; the one creek that ran through the camp quickly became a place where prisoners relieved themselves. It became known as “The Swamp,” and men who drank from there invariably became ill. Unlucky prisoners who arrived at Andersonville when the camp was most crowded might find themselves “forced into a plot near the swamp, where the stench hung thickest” (p. 101). Along with inadequate food, a lack of drinkable water, a comparable lack of shelter (except for whatever the prisoners could rig up for themselves), and filthy conditions that facilitated the spread of disease, the lack of internal policing of the camp by rebel authorities allowed renegade Unionist “Raiders” to prey upon their fellow prisoners. Marvel puts appropriate emphasis on all the factors that made Andersonville a veritable hell on Earth.
Andersonville: The Last Depot breaks with earlier histories of Camp Sumter in focusing on the situation of African American Union soldiers held at the camp – though those soldiers themselves might well have taken issue with some aspects of Marvel’s characterization of their captivity. Marvel writes that African American prisoners from regiments like the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment (whose story is chronicled in the 1989 film Glory) faced “some petty cruelties…but for the most part the prison authorities treated their black prisoners little differently than they did the white ones” (155).
Marvel claims that camp commandant Captain Henry Wirz, who is depicted more sympathetically in this book than in other histories of Andersonville, “resisted turning over…alleged contrabands” to local slaveholders. He even states that the forced labor assigned to African American prisoners at Andersonville – “they were put to work on the lumber piles” – may have provided an “opportunity for exercise and extra rations” that “contributed to their impressive survival rate: despite a longer average incarceration than most prisoners, only a dozen black soldiers died at Andersonville out of a hundred who eventually landed there” (p. 155).
I found these claims dubious. Even if the survival rate for black prisoners was twice that for white prisoners, I can’t help observing that the small number of black prisoners might make those statistics suspect for purposes of comparative analysis. And knowing what we all know regarding how angrily many Confederates responded to seeing African American soldiers in uniform, I still believe that these soldiers themselves would have seen their situation at Andersonville very differently.
I was equally doubtful regarding Marvel’s sympathetic portrayal of Captain Wirz – who, as a commissioned officer, could have resigned his commission if the condition of the prisoners at Andersonville had gone against his conscience. Wirz was tried and convicted of war crimes, and hanged at Washington’s Old Capitol Prison, after the war’s end – the only commissioned officer on either side to face such a fate. Marvel describes Wirz, on his way to the gallows, as a “frail Swiss immigrant” (p. xi); I can only say in response that prisoners at Andersonville were likely to be much more frail by the end of their imprisonment there.
As Union forces made deeper and deeper inroads into the Confederacy, the beleaguered rebel authorities began closing down Andersonville and transferring its prisoners to other prisons that were deemed “safer” from Union liberators. Marvel emphasizes that the slow decommissioning of Camp Sumter did not spell much relief for the camp’s unfortunate inmates, as they found themselves in “stockades some of them would find far worse than Andersonville….[T]he new pens at Millen [Georgia] and at Florence, South Carolina, quickly deteriorated below the summer standards at Camp Sumter, and guards grew increasingly testy, killing men just for coming too close to the dead line, or for the crime of asking a question” (p. 202).
Looking back on the Andersonville experience in the American mind, Marvel writes that Unionist survivors of Andersonville, “almost without exception…appear to have exaggerated their tribulations at that place”, and laments that “These men did not…have to embellish their accounts to produce a picture of immense suffering…without any malice” (pp. ix-x). Here, again, I found myself taking issue with Marvel.
I acknowledge, of course, that there are false or exaggerated accounts of Andersonville, as there are for every aspect of the American Civil War; but Marvel lost me when he questioned the veracity and reliability of John Ransom’s book Andersonville Diary (1881), claiming that “Ransom’s published diary, the original of which he later claimed to have lost in a fire, contains so many inconsistencies as to raise a serious doubt whether any original ever existed; few of the messmates whose deaths he records, for instance, appear on any of the death or burial registers, although the dead from that period were nearly all identified” (p. 257).
For me, by contrast, John Ransom’s Andersonville Diary has the ring of truth. The details of Andersonville that Ransom recounts feel drawn-from-life, not fabricated to gratify the tastes of a “bloody shirt” audience hungry for horrors. In recounting his Camp Sumter experience, Ransom fair-mindedly takes pains to identify good and bad people from both sides at Andersonville. As to the question of Ransom’s unknown messmates, any soldier can tell you that nicknames are rife in any camp; and Marvel himself acknowledges that not all the dead of Andersonville – those whose graves extend out in one long row after another at the Andersonville National Historic Site of today – were able to be identified. I believe John Ransom.
Andersonville: The Last Depot, for all the ways in which I found myself taking issue with it, is a compelling historical work. It is well-illustrated with a helpful map of the camp, and with photographs of Andersonville then and now. Anyone who finishes this book is likely to agree with Marvel’s suggestion, at the book’s beginning, that Andersonville, for its prisoners, was “undoubtedly the most unpleasant experience of the Civil War” (p. ix). Marvel’s book provides a helpful introduction to one of the most tragic chapters in the vast historical saga of the American Civil War.
Marvel, a prolific Civil War historian, conscientiously sets forth the sufferings and rigors of imprisonment at the camp that its rebel founders called Camp Sumter, with careful attention to detail. When it comes to the notoriously inadequate and unhealthy food supply for prisoners at Andersonville, for instance, Marvel explains, in a chapter with the suitably Dantean title “All Hope Abandon,” that “In rural Georgia…grinding mills were not equipped with bolting cloth, so the meal was delivered with the cob ground up in it.” Because cornmeal being produced for thousands and thousands of prisoners could not be sifted one pound at a time, the way Southern women did in their kitchens, prisoners received their cornmeal cob and all, and “The shredded cob turned hard and sharp as the meal dried” (p. 53), contributing to the prevalence of gastrointestinal disease at Andersonville.
The camp also lacked adequate drinking water; the one creek that ran through the camp quickly became a place where prisoners relieved themselves. It became known as “The Swamp,” and men who drank from there invariably became ill. Unlucky prisoners who arrived at Andersonville when the camp was most crowded might find themselves “forced into a plot near the swamp, where the stench hung thickest” (p. 101). Along with inadequate food, a lack of drinkable water, a comparable lack of shelter (except for whatever the prisoners could rig up for themselves), and filthy conditions that facilitated the spread of disease, the lack of internal policing of the camp by rebel authorities allowed renegade Unionist “Raiders” to prey upon their fellow prisoners. Marvel puts appropriate emphasis on all the factors that made Andersonville a veritable hell on Earth.
Andersonville: The Last Depot breaks with earlier histories of Camp Sumter in focusing on the situation of African American Union soldiers held at the camp – though those soldiers themselves might well have taken issue with some aspects of Marvel’s characterization of their captivity. Marvel writes that African American prisoners from regiments like the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment (whose story is chronicled in the 1989 film Glory) faced “some petty cruelties…but for the most part the prison authorities treated their black prisoners little differently than they did the white ones” (155).
Marvel claims that camp commandant Captain Henry Wirz, who is depicted more sympathetically in this book than in other histories of Andersonville, “resisted turning over…alleged contrabands” to local slaveholders. He even states that the forced labor assigned to African American prisoners at Andersonville – “they were put to work on the lumber piles” – may have provided an “opportunity for exercise and extra rations” that “contributed to their impressive survival rate: despite a longer average incarceration than most prisoners, only a dozen black soldiers died at Andersonville out of a hundred who eventually landed there” (p. 155).
I found these claims dubious. Even if the survival rate for black prisoners was twice that for white prisoners, I can’t help observing that the small number of black prisoners might make those statistics suspect for purposes of comparative analysis. And knowing what we all know regarding how angrily many Confederates responded to seeing African American soldiers in uniform, I still believe that these soldiers themselves would have seen their situation at Andersonville very differently.
I was equally doubtful regarding Marvel’s sympathetic portrayal of Captain Wirz – who, as a commissioned officer, could have resigned his commission if the condition of the prisoners at Andersonville had gone against his conscience. Wirz was tried and convicted of war crimes, and hanged at Washington’s Old Capitol Prison, after the war’s end – the only commissioned officer on either side to face such a fate. Marvel describes Wirz, on his way to the gallows, as a “frail Swiss immigrant” (p. xi); I can only say in response that prisoners at Andersonville were likely to be much more frail by the end of their imprisonment there.
As Union forces made deeper and deeper inroads into the Confederacy, the beleaguered rebel authorities began closing down Andersonville and transferring its prisoners to other prisons that were deemed “safer” from Union liberators. Marvel emphasizes that the slow decommissioning of Camp Sumter did not spell much relief for the camp’s unfortunate inmates, as they found themselves in “stockades some of them would find far worse than Andersonville….[T]he new pens at Millen [Georgia] and at Florence, South Carolina, quickly deteriorated below the summer standards at Camp Sumter, and guards grew increasingly testy, killing men just for coming too close to the dead line, or for the crime of asking a question” (p. 202).
Looking back on the Andersonville experience in the American mind, Marvel writes that Unionist survivors of Andersonville, “almost without exception…appear to have exaggerated their tribulations at that place”, and laments that “These men did not…have to embellish their accounts to produce a picture of immense suffering…without any malice” (pp. ix-x). Here, again, I found myself taking issue with Marvel.
I acknowledge, of course, that there are false or exaggerated accounts of Andersonville, as there are for every aspect of the American Civil War; but Marvel lost me when he questioned the veracity and reliability of John Ransom’s book Andersonville Diary (1881), claiming that “Ransom’s published diary, the original of which he later claimed to have lost in a fire, contains so many inconsistencies as to raise a serious doubt whether any original ever existed; few of the messmates whose deaths he records, for instance, appear on any of the death or burial registers, although the dead from that period were nearly all identified” (p. 257).
For me, by contrast, John Ransom’s Andersonville Diary has the ring of truth. The details of Andersonville that Ransom recounts feel drawn-from-life, not fabricated to gratify the tastes of a “bloody shirt” audience hungry for horrors. In recounting his Camp Sumter experience, Ransom fair-mindedly takes pains to identify good and bad people from both sides at Andersonville. As to the question of Ransom’s unknown messmates, any soldier can tell you that nicknames are rife in any camp; and Marvel himself acknowledges that not all the dead of Andersonville – those whose graves extend out in one long row after another at the Andersonville National Historic Site of today – were able to be identified. I believe John Ransom.
Andersonville: The Last Depot, for all the ways in which I found myself taking issue with it, is a compelling historical work. It is well-illustrated with a helpful map of the camp, and with photographs of Andersonville then and now. Anyone who finishes this book is likely to agree with Marvel’s suggestion, at the book’s beginning, that Andersonville, for its prisoners, was “undoubtedly the most unpleasant experience of the Civil War” (p. ix). Marvel’s book provides a helpful introduction to one of the most tragic chapters in the vast historical saga of the American Civil War.
November 26, 2010
Ok so this is really 3 1/2 for me. The research is amazing and the writing is good, and I even agree that Wirz was the scapegoat for this massive Confederate fail; however, he is not without guilt and the constant excuse making for this tragedy coupled with the dismissal of first person reports of cruelty disgusted me.
June 15, 2009
I have read several books on Andersonville and feel this is the best that is out there that I have read. It was re-published in 2008 with great fanfare among Civil War enthusiasts and historians. What Marvel accomplishes is a thoughtful, fact supported discussion concerning one of the most controversial Civil War P.O.W. camps in America., He also makes a strong argument in defense of Capt. Henry Wirtz who was the administrator of the prison and ultimately hanged as a war criminal(the only soldier from either side to suffer such a fate)in 1865. A good read with some compelling photographs take during the height of the camp's activity. If you are interested in the Civil War, and this aspect of the war, this book is a must read. This book has extensive notes and bibliography.
August 16, 2022
Really enjoyed the book.
July 11, 2024
Very historically detailed outlining all the challenges of managing a confederate prison.
December 26, 2025
A slightly different slant than the book written 40 years earlier.
December 27, 2025
MacKinley Kantor’s historical fiction Andersonville closely mirrors this well documented account. I suggest reading them together. I read the fiction first.
February 26, 2017
Good to read in conjunction with Mackinlay Kantor's great novel, Andersonville. The novel gives a vivid sense of the suffering humanity of all those involved with, or incarcerated in, the prison. The work of non-fiction then shows that one's natural emotional response to the novel - anger and blame - may not do full justice to the captors.
February 10, 2014
I liked the perspective Marvel took; unemotional and objective presentation of facts forces the reader to formulate his own opinions. Having viewed the events in the prison through the eyes of some of its inhabitants gave a new validity to these cold, hard facts. The representation of men from different backgrounds, motives, morals, and objectives gave me insight to their humanity, and even their inhumanity. I found it interesting that even though the circumstances that brought each man to Andersonville might have been different, their eventual outcomes were frighteningly similar.
Even though I was aware of some of the difficulties Wirz faced in administering Andersonville, I never realized that he faced so many obstacles. Even before the first prisoners arrived, Wirz faced a constant battle of politics, prejudice, insubordination, and his own health issues in order to provide even the most minimal living conditions for the men imprisoned there. The circumstances with which he was presented appeared insurmountable. It appears that the man did the best he could with what he was allowed. I was fascinated to discover that the man would retain some semblance of humanity considering the frustration he must have felt.
I was also unaware of the impact of the change in the exchange program. Even though the intentions behind the changes may have been founded in good faith, the outcome was horrific.
Even though I was aware of some of the difficulties Wirz faced in administering Andersonville, I never realized that he faced so many obstacles. Even before the first prisoners arrived, Wirz faced a constant battle of politics, prejudice, insubordination, and his own health issues in order to provide even the most minimal living conditions for the men imprisoned there. The circumstances with which he was presented appeared insurmountable. It appears that the man did the best he could with what he was allowed. I was fascinated to discover that the man would retain some semblance of humanity considering the frustration he must have felt.
I was also unaware of the impact of the change in the exchange program. Even though the intentions behind the changes may have been founded in good faith, the outcome was horrific.
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August 4, 2011Great book on the history and stories surrounding the Andersonville Prison. Marvel does a great job of telling the stories of the people as well as the events that drove what those people did, both inside and outside the wire. Recommended.
September 3, 2014
Very well written historical synopsis of Confederate prison camps. The author is somewhat sympathetic to Wirtz and the extreme difficulty of feeding and caring for Union prisoners. My electronic copy had no images or maps hence, the four stars.
March 8, 2012
Well written and informative for those interested in the Civil War. This book also reinfroced my opinion that the excution of Captain Witz was not warranted.
July 8, 2015
More details after tour at Andersonville. This book give more interesting and excatly numbers of prisoners with small stories of witnesses who faced horror in prison during the Civil War.
March 13, 2016
An informative, thoroughly researched, well-written, and balanced historical account of the infamous Confederate prison camp.
July 1, 2020
Well written. Well researched. Objective.
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September 11, 2009CW9737Mar
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews