Wirz was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1822 to a middle class family. He obtained medical degrees in Paris and Berlin, immigrating to the United States in the late 1840s. He worked throughout New England as a water-cure specialist. Moving for a short period to Kentucky, he finally settled in Louisiana. When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, Wirz enlisted in the 4th Louisiana Infantry. He suffered a wound to his right wrist in the Battle of Seven Pines. This injury invalided him out of front line service. He was promoted to captain on June 12, 1862, and given command of the military prison in Richmond and later Tuscaloosa. Wirz then spent a year in Europe on a mission to obtain arms and munitions. In 1864 he came back home and on March 27 he was made as commandant of the new Andersonville Prison Camp.
Until the summer of 1863, the Union and Confederate armies kept prisoners of war to a minimum with regular trades of prisoners. But when U.S. authorities ended prisoner exchanges, the number of Union prisoners in Richmond swelled to an unmanageable size. These exchanges ended because the Confederacy refused to exchange captured black federal prisoners. The Andersonville prison was hastily constructed to accommodate this overflow. The prison design encompassed roughly 16 acres which was large enough to hold 10,000 prisoners in a tent city. The prison was to be rectangular in shape with a small creek flowing roughly through the center of the compound for fresh water.
Prisoners numbering in excess of 30,000 soon poured in, overcrowding the facility. These men were forced to build their own shelter, scrounge for whatever food they could find, and drink from the now hopelessly contaminated water supply. Men soon died of starvation and disease. The guard staff was both ill trained and under equipped, their principal duty being to maintain the 'gun line' that no prisoner was allowed to cross without being shot. Of the 49,485 soldiers sent to Andersonville during 1864 and 1865, more than 13,000 died there. During the 15 months during which Andersonville was operated, it became synonymous with the atrocities federal soldiers experienced as prisoners of war.
On May 7, 1865, at the end of the Civil War, Captain Wirz was the only remaining member of the Confederate staff at the prison and therefore was held responsible for all the actions there as default. Arrested and placed in a union prison, Wirz was sent in front of a military tribunal headed by General Lew Wallace (the author of Ben Hur). The prison camp commander's defense was that he simply followed his orders and that he had even complained to his superiors about the shortages of food and medicine at his facility. He was convicted on all counts and sentenced to a public execution.
On the morning of November 10, 1865, Henry Wirz awoke in his cell at the Old Capitol in Washington Dc and wrote a last letter to his wife and child. The former commander of Andersonville was then led to the gallows with a black robe draped over his shoulders. He was hung from the neck slowly for nearly two minutes until dead.
Wirz's trial would serve for better or worse ass the model for the modern War Crimes tribunals held after world war two and other conflicts to try war criminals.
The camp itself was largely forgotten over time. The plot of ground near the prison where nearly 13,000 Union soldiers had been buried is administered by the United States government as a National Cemetery. The prison reverted to private hands and was planted in cotton and other crops until the land was acquired by civil war veterans groups in 1891.
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