Henry Wirz
Henry Wirz was a Swiss-born physician and Confederate officer best known for his role as commandant of the Andersonville prison during the American Civil War. Born in 1823, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1849 and eventually settled in Louisiana, where he worked as a doctor for enslaved people. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Wirz enlisted in the Confederate Army and was later promoted to captain, assuming command of Andersonville prison in early 1864. The prison became notorious for its overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, leading to the deaths of approximately 13,000 of the 45,000 prisoners held there.
Following the war, Wirz was arrested and tried for war crimes, with the prosecution arguing that he intentionally created inhumane conditions for Union prisoners. The trial attracted significant public attention, resulting in a guilty verdict on multiple counts, including individual acts of murder. Wirz was sentenced to death and executed by hanging on November 10, 1865. His trial and execution have been viewed through various lenses, with some historians arguing that he served as a scapegoat for wider systemic failures in the Confederate prison system.
Henry Wirz
- Born: November 25, 1823
- Birthplace: Zurich, Switzerland
- Died: November 10, 1865
- Place of death: Washington, D.C.
Swiss American commandant of Andersonville prison during the Civil War
Major offenses: Murder and violation of the laws and customs of war
Active: March 27, 1863-April 17, 1865
Locale: Andersonville, Sumter County, Georgia
Sentence: Death by hanging
Early Life
Hartmann Heinrich Wirz (vuhrts) was born in Switzerland in 1823; his father, Hans, was a tailor by trade. As a young man, Wirz dreamed of becoming a physician, but Hans objected, insisting that his son enter the growing mercantile trade. Wirz married in 1845, but the marriage ended in divorce after he ran into trouble with the law a few years later. After the Swiss government banished him, Wirz emigrated to the United States in 1849. In the United States, Wirz first worked as a weaver in Lawrence, Massachusetts, but eventually relocated to Kentucky, where he sought employment as a doctor’s assistant. Wirz settled in the small town of Cadiz to practice medicine and met a widow named Elizabeth Wolfe. They were married on May 28, 1854. By the late 1850’s, the couple had moved to Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana, where Wirz was hired as a doctor for the slaves on the Marshall Plantation.
When the Civil War broke out, Wirz enlisted as a private in the Fourth Louisiana Regiment, and he moved in the summer of 1861 to guard prisoners around the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. Wirz received a severe wound just above his right wrist during the Battle of Seven Pines. This debilitating injury changed the course of Wirz’s military career, and with the help of Brigadier General John H. Winder, the commander in charge of overseeing Richmond’s prison population, Wirz received a promotion to sergeant and was placed in charge of the Tuscaloosa, Alabama, prison. The position lasted less than a year. Wirz underwent another change in duty by December, 1862, when Southern officials sent him overseas to carry dispatches to Confederate commissioners in Europe. After spending two years abroad, Wirz returned in February, 1864, and received a promotion to captain. Winder then ordered him to assume command of the interior stockade at Andersonville near Macon, Georgia.
Criminal Career
Wirz inherited a chaotic situation after taking command. The guard force at Andersonville was a group consisting of Georgia Reserves and teenagers. Prison officials depended on a crude wooden fence 15 feet within the stockade, known as the “deadline,” to stop prisoners. If prisoners approached the deadline, guards warned them to leave the area; if the men refused the order, the sentries would shoot them.
Overcrowding caused mortality rates to skyrocket within the stockade as the prison population grew dramatically over a six-month period. When the camp began operations in March, 1864, the prison camp contained seventy-five hundred men; by August, Andersonville confined approximately thirty-two thousand men on twenty-six acres of land. Congestion also affected sanitation within the stockade. A small creek five feet in width bisected the prison, and it eventually became a breeding ground for infectious diseases. The poor quality of rations contributed to sickness within the compound as well. Of the forty-five thousand men confined at Andersonville during its fourteen months of operation, it is estimated that thirteen thousand died from disease, malnutrition, and exposure.
By mid-April, 1865, a Union column captured Columbus, and three weeks later, the liberation of Andersonville took place. Wirz was placed under arrest for conspiring to deliberately impair the lives of Union prisoners of war.
Legal Action and Outcome
Wirz awaited trial by military commission in Old Capitol Prison. A military commission derived its authority from the international laws of war and special executive or congressional legislation that tried nonmilitary offenses. By the conclusion of the war, Union forces occupied most of the South, and officials viewed the section as a de facto belligerent nation. Wirz was a member of the Confederate Army, so military rules that governed Union soldiers could not be applied to him.
The Wirz commission consisted of nine men: Major General Lewis “Lew” Wallace, best remembered for his 1880 novel, Ben-Hur, became the president of the commission. The prosecuting attorney depicted Wirz as a brutal fiend who maliciously intended to destroy the prisoners by subjecting them to inhumane conditions. The defense counsel, to the contrary, claimed that Wirz was a victim of circumstance because the camp’s situation worsened beyond his control, experiencing costly delays and shortages in supplies.
The trial riveted Americans and made newspaper headlines for its two-month duration. In a unanimous decision, commission members found Wirz guilty of deliberately impairing the lives of prisoners and of eleven of thirteen counts of individual acts of murder. He was sentenced to death by hanging. Wirz went to the gallows on November 10, 1865, at 10:30 a.m.
Impact
As commandant of Andersonville, Henry Wirz was connected to the horrendous conditions of the prison and thus charged with war crimes committed during the Civil War. Wirz constituted a convenient scapegoat because he was the victim of a hostile Northern press that reported conditions at Andersonville months before Wirz was charged and brought to trial. Wirz was also a victim of circumstance. Winder, his superior, had died a few months before the end of the war and could not testify to Wirz’s actions as commandant. Lastly, he was the victim of a system that relied on contemporary military law. Moreover, the Wirz trial served as a showcase for Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt to get former high-ranking members of the Confederacy before military commissions. Holt felt that Jefferson Davis, the declared president of the Confederacy during the war, in particular, should answer for his war crimes, and he believed the Wirz trial would implicate the former Confederate president.
Bibliography
Futch, Ovid. History of Andersonville Prison. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1968. Scholarly treatment of conditions at Andersonville; argues that mismanagement by Southern officials caused supply shortages that devastated the efficient administration of the prison.
Hesseltine, William Best. Civil War Prisons: A Study in War Psychology. Columbus: University of Ohio Press, 1930. Classic work by a historian regarding military prisons located in the North and South.
Laska, Lewis L., and James M. Smith. “Hell and the Devil: Andersonville and the Military Trial of Henry Wirz, C.S.A, 1865.” Military Law Review 68 (Spring, 1975): 77-132. The authors explain the difference between courts-martial and military commissions. They contend that Wirz was a scapegoat because of a variety of legal, political, and social factors.
Marvel, William. Andersonville: The Last Depot. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Marvel asserts that Wirz confronted bias and a prejudicial court from the onset of his trial. The author contends that Norton Parker Chipman, judge advocate, manipulated Wirz and impeded the defense at every opportunity.