Common soldiers 297
Prisoners of war
In a strange way, both Grant's Vicksburg
campaign and the recruitment of black
soldiers negatively influenced conditions in
Civil War prison camps. Neither the Union
nor the Confederacy had prepared well for
the massive influx of prisoners that occurred
in the last two years of the war. In the first
year, only a small number of soldiers were
captured. Numbers escalated in the second
year of fighting, and both governments
threw up prison camps until they could
exchange them. In 1863, however, this
exchange broke down. Confederates refused
to treat black soldiers and their white officers
as prisoners of war, insisting that former
slaves return into bondage and their officers
be prosecuted for inciting servile
insurrection. The unwillingness of
Confederates to include black troops in any
exchange program dissolved the cartel.
Confederates, moreover, declared the paroles
issued by Grant to Rebel soldiers at Vicksburg
invalid and placed quite a number of these
parolees back in the ranks without
exchanging them properly. In protest, the
Federal Government refused to swap
prisoners, and for much of the next two
years, the number of prisoners on both sides
mounted.
Since no one anticipated the breakdown of
the cartel, the huge influx of captives from
the 1863 and 1864 campaigns caught them
unprepared. The Confederates, for example,
erected Andersonville because they feared the
Union army might overrun the camp on the
James River in Virginia. They chose the
Andersonville location for its isolation.
Originally laid out on 16 acres (6.5ha) for
10,000 prisoners, they eventually expanded
it to 26 acres (10.5ha). Ultimately,
Andersonville served as the home for 45,000
Union soldiers, with a peak number at
As Sherman's troops passed through Millen, Georgia, the
soldiers discovered an abandoned prisoner-of-war camp
called Camp Lawton. Prisoners had to burrow into the
ground for shelter, and they had to remain inside a 'dead
line.' which was still visible. If prisoners crossed over the
line, they were shot. The sight outraged Sherman's army,
which also discovered a similar prison camp outside
Columbia, South Carolina. (Author's collection)