Henry Wirz was the Swiss-born Confederate officer who commanded the prison stockade at Camp Sumter, the prisoner-of-war camp near Andersonville, Georgia, for most of its 14 months of operation. About 45,000 Union soldiers were held there, and nearly 13,000 died, according to the National Park Service, which manages the site; it attributes those deaths to disease, poor sanitation, malnutrition, overcrowding and exposure. After the war Wirz was arrested at the prison and taken to Washington. He was convicted by a military commission of conspiracy and of murder on multiple specifications, and hanged in Washington, D.C., on 10 November 1865; the verdict remains disputed.
The deaths at Andersonville are the background to the case, not the substance of the murder charge. The commission convicted Wirz of ten specific killings, each described in the charge sheet as the death of a Union soldier "whose name is unknown": men shot with a revolver, stamped on, held in stocks or chains, fired on by guards at his order, or attacked by dogs. Its conspiracy finding went further, holding him jointly responsible for the conditions that killed thousands. Both findings have been contested since the day he died. His lawyer, later Confederate writers and the United Daughters of the Confederacy called him a scapegoat, and in 1909 the Georgia division of that organization put up a monument to him a short walk from the prison. The judge advocate who prosecuted him, the Grand Army of the Republic and the former prisoners who testified defended the verdict for the rest of their lives. Modern historians and the National Park Service place him between those positions. This page sets out the record on each side.
According to the Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, the Swiss national historical dictionary, Hartmann Heinrich Wirz was born in Zurich on November 25, 1823, into a Reformed family with Zurich citizenship. The National Park Service gives his birth year as 1822. His father, Johann Caspar Wirz, was a master tailor who led the tailors' guild and sat on the city's Grand Council. His mother was Sophie Barbara Wirz, born Philipp.
He trained in commerce in Zurich and Turin between 1840 and 1842 and from 1842 worked in Zurich's municipal trading house. In 1845 he married Emilie Oschwald, a merchant's daughter. In 1847, the Swiss dictionary records, he was sentenced to four years in prison for fraud and embezzlement. He was released in 1848 and banished from the canton of Zurich for twelve years. The couple divorced in 1853.
After leaving Zurich, Wirz went first to Moscow and then, in 1849, to the United States. The National Park Service account of his career, based on newspapers, prisoner memoirs and an interview he gave after his trial, says he tried and failed to set up as a physician in New York City, then moved to Connecticut and to Northampton, Massachusetts, where he worked as a translator in small factories and then at a water-cure establishment. He went on to Kentucky, practicing homeopathic medicine and running water-cure establishments in Cadiz and Louisville until 1857. In 1854 he married Elisabeth Wolfe, born Savells.
In 1857 he moved to Louisiana to take charge of Cabin Teele, a plantation of about 2,200 acres owned by Levin R. Marshall in Madison Parish. There he continued to practice homeopathic medicine while overseeing the hundreds of enslaved people held on the plantation. The Park Service notes that this was his first experience of controlling large numbers of people. In a letter written on the day of his arrest in 1865, Wirz described himself as a native of Switzerland, before the war a citizen of Louisiana and "by profession a physician," and said he had lost all his property when Union forces besieged Vicksburg.
When the war began, Wirz enlisted in the 4th Battalion of Louisiana Infantry, raised in Madison Parish. After the battle of Bull Run in July 1861 the unit was sent to Richmond, and Wirz was put on guard duty at Howard's Factory Prison. A prisoner there wrote in 1862 that he thought himself "omnipresent and omniscient." He came to the notice of General John H. Winder, who ran the Richmond prisons, and in November 1861 the Richmond newspapers listed Sergeant Henry Wirz among the seven members of the city's prison board. One of the others was Captain George C. Gibbs, who would later serve at Andersonville and testify against him.
Late in 1861 he was sent to the prison at Tuscaloosa, Alabama, as assistant to Captain Elias Griswold. Prisoners there remembered him in mixed terms: some credited him with getting them shelter in an empty hotel, while one wrote of "a Sgt Wertz over us as big a tyrant as ever was." Back in Richmond in 1862 he joined Winder's staff and was promoted to captain from June 12, 1862, and within months he commanded the Belle Isle and Libby prisons. From September 1862 he traveled as far as Houston, Texas, on a search for missing records of Union prisoners, reporting to Robert Ould, the Confederate agent for prisoner exchange.
His wound is less certain than later accounts suggest. Wirz said he was wounded in the right arm at the battle of Seven Pines in 1862, and the Swiss dictionary records a wound to the right forearm there. The National Park Service says his service records are unclear, that he was not yet an officer when that battle was fought, and that all that is certain is a deep injury to his right arm, sustained in the summer or fall of 1862. In March 1863 he applied for a medical furlough to Europe. It was meant to last four months and was extended. He returned in February 1864 and reported to Winder, who sent him to the new prison in Georgia with a letter calling him "an old prison officer, a very reliable man and capable of governing prisons."
The site near Andersonville station in Sumter County was chosen in late 1863, after the Confederate government decided to move Union prisoners away from Richmond. The prison was a pine-log stockade 15 feet high, at first about 16 and a half acres, enlarged in June 1864 to about 26 and a half acres. The first prisoners arrived in late February 1864. The stockade was designed for 10,000 men. By June 1864 it held more than 26,000, and in August 1864 about 32,000 to 33,000 (Park Service pages give both figures), its peak.
Wirz formally took command of the prison interior on March 27, 1864. His duties covered roll calls, security and the issue of rations and supplies inside the stockade. He did not command the post. A separate officer did, the guard regiments had their own officers who outranked him, and the quartermaster's office and the hospital operated independently. The Park Service account says Wirz could request guards or rations but had no direct power to obtain them, although he could order them withheld, and that his letters to Richmond show his frustration with this division of authority. Winder himself came to Andersonville in the summer of 1864, which, the Park Service writes, added a brigadier general to the confusion without resolving it.
Wirz ordered the "dead line," a rail or line of stakes about 19 feet inside the wall that prisoners were forbidden to cross; guards in the sentry posts above could shoot anyone who did. He instituted a daily head count. He also made efforts that his defenders later stressed. Douglas O. Linder, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, notes in his account of the trial that Wirz tried to dam and divide the creek running through the stockade into areas for drinking, bathing and sanitation, sought medicine, food and clothing, and ordered the enlargement of the stockade, with little success given the condition of the South.
The Park Service describes his manner with prisoners as inconsistent: helpful and sympathetic on some days, and on others given to what one prisoner called a "spasmodic rage." It says he used threats as a tool of control, withheld food from individuals and groups, and used plantation hounds and iron shackles against escapers. Rumors that he murdered prisoners were common, it writes, and threats to kill them more common still, threats "that sometimes were fulfilled."
The prisoners died mostly of disease. A Confederate pathologist, Dr. Joseph Jones, studied the prison for three weeks from mid-September 1864 for the Confederate Surgeon General. As summarized by Linder, his report described open waste, contaminated water, a hospital with "defective" hygiene and dead bodies left lying, and it attributed the death rate mainly to dysentery, scurvy and gangrene caused by poor rations, lack of medicine and unsanitary water. Jones also wrote that conditions were in large part the result of "the distressed conditions in the southern states," and he later objected that his report, meant to help humanity, had been used in a criminal prosecution. The worst month was August 1864, when, by Linder's count, 2,997 prisoners died, 207 of them on a single day. Linder gives the total of prisoners who died at the camp as 12,912; the Park Service says nearly 13,000.
After Union forces took Atlanta on September 2, 1864, most prisoners were moved to other camps. Nearly 17,000 left in the week of September 7 to 13, and by mid-November fewer than 200 remained in the stockade, with under 2,000 in the hospital. The camp continued on a smaller scale until it closed in the spring of 1865. Dorence Atwater, a prisoner assigned to record the dead, kept a copy of the death register. In July and August 1865 an army expedition, accompanied by Clara Barton, used his list and captured Confederate records to mark the graves, and only 460 of them had to be labeled as unknown. The cemetery became Andersonville National Cemetery.
Who was responsible for these deaths was argued at the trial and has been argued since. The argument runs along several strands.
The exchange system. Under the Dix-Hill Cartel of July 1862, captured soldiers were exchanged by rank. The National Park Service says the cartel broke down over the Confederacy's refusal to treat Black Union soldiers as anything but slaves, and that the Union then found it to its advantage not to exchange prisoners. Linder writes that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton halted exchanges in late October 1863, citing Confederate violations and the treatment of Black soldiers and their officers, and quotes General Ulysses S. Grant asking why the Union should release an active soldier to fight against it. On August 10, 1864, Ould offered to release Union prisoners if the United States sent transport, and on August 24 Union General Benjamin Butler told the Confederacy that exchanges would not resume while it refused to include Black soldiers. Exchanges resumed in March 1865.
Confederate supply and policy. A Park Service article on the prison states that the Confederate government "chose not to provide the prisoners with adequate housing, food, clothing, and medical care" in order to concentrate resources on its army. Jones's report pointed to the collapsing Southern economy. Wirz's defenders pointed to the Union blockade, which made medicine scarce, and to Union destruction of crops and railroads.
The Park Service rejects one common defense, that General William T. Sherman's march through Georgia cut off the prisoners' food. That march began on November 15, 1864, when the prison held fewer than 2,000 men and the death count already stood at about 12,100; virtually all the deaths came before Sherman destroyed anything in central Georgia.
Wirz's own part. The Park Service writes that whether Wirz violated the laws of war of his time "is not subject to debate," since those laws required that prisoners have access to the supplies available to the armies in the field, and members of his own staff, including Gibbs, testified that he did not meet that obligation. The same agency, in another article, says flatly that the conspiracy he was charged with "never existed," and that anger in the North "demanded appeasement." The two statements are not in conflict: the first concerns his conduct, the second the charge that he took part in a plan to kill prisoners.
Wirz was still at Andersonville when the war ended. He was arrested there on May 7, 1865, by Captain Henry E. Noyes of Major General James H. Wilson's staff. The same day he wrote to Wilson asking for a safe conduct or a guard for himself and his family. He said no one could justly blame him for things beyond his power, that he should not be held responsible for short rations, overcrowding or the lack of clothing and shelter, and that he had been "only the medium, or, I may better say, the tool in the hands of my superiors." He wrote that he intended to return to Europe with his family. On May 17 Wilson reported that he had sent Wirz under guard to General Thomas, with the prison's records, and asked that he be tried in Washington, where the evidence could be gathered most readily. By the end of May, Wirz was in the Old Capitol Prison.
He waited there for nearly three months. According to Linder, the post commander, Colonel George C. Gibbs, wrote to Union authorities on May 12 that Wirz, not he, had direct control of the prisoners. In late August Wirz sent a letter to the New York News denying that he had mistreated prisoners and blaming conditions beyond his control. The Northern press had already made him a figure of hatred.
A special military commission sat in the Court of Claims room of the U.S. Capitol. Its president was Major General Lew Wallace, later the author of Ben-Hur. The other members, as listed in the convening order of August 23, 1865, were Brevet Major Generals Gershom Mott, John W. Geary and Lorenzo Thomas, Brigadier Generals Francis Fessenden and Edward S. Bragg, Brevet Brigadier General John F. Ballier, Brevet Colonel T. Allcock and Lieutenant Colonel J. H. Stibbs. Colonel Norton P. Chipman was judge advocate, assisted by Major A. A. Hosmer.
The commission first met on August 21, 1865. A contemporary pamphlet account says the charges read that day named Robert E. Lee, James A. Seddon and Lucius B. Northrop among Wirz's alleged co-conspirators, and that his counsel complained the charges had reached Wirz only the previous afternoon. A new War Department order of August 23 (Special Orders No. 453) convened the commission afresh, and the charges were redrafted to drop those names. Wirz's lawyers later argued that he was being tried twice on the same charges; the plea was overruled.
The charges as finally laid had two parts. Charge I accused him of conspiring with John H. Winder, Richard B. Winder, Isaiah H. White, W. S. Winder, R. R. Stevenson "and others unknown" to injure the health and destroy the lives of Union prisoners, "to the end that the armies of the United States might be weakened and impaired." Its long specification blamed him for overcrowding, lack of shelter, bad food and water, the dead line, the stocks, the chain gang, the dogs and impure vaccine, and attached large estimated death tolls to each. Linder calls those totals "at best" a wild guess. Charge II accused him of murder in violation of the laws and customs of war and set out 13 specifications, each describing a single death of a prisoner whose name was unknown.
Wirz's defense was unsettled from the start. On August 23 his first lawyers, Judge Hughes and Mr. Peck, withdrew, and the commission adjourned with the judge advocate formally responsible for the prisoner's interests. On August 24 Louis Schade and O. S. Baker, having taken the loyalty oath, were admitted as counsel. Their request for an eight-day postponement was refused. Wirz pleaded not guilty after his lawyers' pleas in bar were overruled: that he was covered by the surrender terms General Joseph E. Johnston had made with Sherman on April 26, 1865; that Captain Noyes had promised him safe conduct; that a military commission had no jurisdiction; and that the charges were too vague. According to the 1865 pamphlet account, Baker and Schade withdrew in frustration on August 28 and returned at Wirz's request.
Wirz spent much of the trial lying on a couch in the courtroom, his right arm inflamed and ulcerated. Linder notes that the rules of a military commission favored the prosecution. The judges were Union officers fresh from war against the defendant's side, a two-thirds majority was enough for a death sentence, hearsay was generally admitted, and evidence about the end of prisoner exchanges and about conditions in Northern prisons was excluded as irrelevant. He adds that this did not make it a sham, and that Chipman called the commission members "unimpeachable."
The trial ran from late August to late October 1865. Holt's review counts 148 witnesses for both sides examined before the testimony closed. The Park Service gives nearly 150, Wirz's final statement 160, and Linder's account 167, which suggests different methods of counting recalled and rebuttal witnesses.
The first phase dealt with conditions. Former prisoners, Confederate officers and surgeons, guards and local civilians described the stockade, the creek, the hospital and the dead. Extracts from Jones's report were read. One of the most important witnesses was Dr. John C. Bates, a Confederate acting assistant surgeon at the prison hospital from September 1864 to March 1865, whose account of the hospital Wirz later called "terrible but truthful." Ambrose Spencer, a local resident, testified that food was available in the district.
The second phase dealt with the deaths charged in Charge II. Holt's review grouped them into four classes: deaths from dogs, deaths from the stocks and chain gang, prisoners shot by guards on Wirz's direct orders, and prisoners killed by his own hand. Several witnesses told of escapers run down by the hounds kept at the prison. Others described men dying after days in the stocks or in chain gangs; one witness told of a man found dead with a heavy iron ball still attached to his leg. Witnesses told of prisoners shot at the dead line. O. S. Belcher testified that a disabled prisoner on a crutch, known as "Chickamauga," begged a guard to shoot him and that Wirz ordered the guard to fire when the guard refused. Holt's review adds that the order was accompanied by a threat to shoot the guard if he did not obey.
Prisoners also testified to things Wirz said. Holt's review, sent to the President, summarizes the evidence as showing that Wirz boasted he was destroying more Union soldiers than the Confederate generals in the field. Linder records witnesses quoting him as "doing more than General Lee."
The killing described in most detail was that of William Stewart, a private in the 9th Minnesota Infantry. George W. Gray, of the 7th Indiana Cavalry, testified on September 22, 1865, that in September 1864 he and Stewart had gone out of the stockade under guard to carry a dead body to the dead house. On the way back Wirz rode up and asked by what authority they were there. Stewart said they had proper authority, and Wirz drew a revolver and shot him in the chest, killing him. A guard took 20 or 30 dollars from the body, which Wirz pocketed before riding off and ordering Gray back to prison. On cross-examination Gray admitted that he had been talking to the guard about a bribe and intended to escape if he could, and he could not give the day of the month.
Holt told the President that nothing in the record cast doubt on Gray's truthfulness, and that the commission had apparently seen nothing in his manner to raise the question. The commission amended specification 3, which had originally alleged a shooting on June 13, 1864, to read September, and found Wirz guilty of it.
On September 12, 1865, a witness who gave his name as Felix de la Baume testified that on July 8, 1864, he arrived at Andersonville with several hundred other prisoners and saw Wirz fire two shots at men who had run to the creek for water to help a comrade having a fit, mortally wounding one in the chest. He also described an iron collar on a prisoner and the bucking and gagging of others, and produced drawings of the scenes. Holt's review names his testimony, and that of George Conway, who described Wirz shooting a man reaching for a cup under the dead line on or about July 11, as the evidence for specification 1, adding that it could not be known which the commission relied on.
After the execution, de la Baume's identity was challenged. The Washington Evening Star reported on November 27, 1865, as quoted by the Park Service, that the witness had been dismissed from a post in the Interior Department after it was shown that he was a deserter from the 7th New York (Steuben) Regiment whose real name was Felix Oeser (the paper spelled it Oessel). Wirz's lawyer, Louis Schade, wrote in 1867 that de la Baume had been given a recommendation by the commission and an Interior Department clerkship on October 11, before the testimony closed, and had been dismissed on November 21, eleven days after the execution. In 1921 Mildred Rutherford, historian of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, wrote that he had disappeared after the discovery.
The National Park Service, in an article that treats the story as partly myth, sets out what the records show. A man calling himself Felix de la Baume enlisted in the 39th New York Infantry, the Garibaldi Guard, in November 1863, was captured in Virginia in 1864 and released in April 1865. The Andersonville hospital register lists a "de la Baun" of the 39th New York admitted on April 13, 1865, and Bates testified that he remembered him. A Felix Oesser had enlisted in the 7th New York in 1861 and deserted in February 1862, and the Park Service concludes the two were the same man. So the desertion story is true, but the claim that he was never at Andersonville is not: he was a founding officer of the Andersonville Survivors Association, lived in Chicago, and died there in May 1890. The Park Service also disputes the idea that he was the star witness. Chipman's closing argument retold his testimony as one of several, and Wirz's own final statement did not single it out for rebuttal. The Park Service adds that none of this proves or disproves the honesty of his testimony or anything about Wirz.
The defense called former prisoners who had worked as clerks in Wirz's office, Catholic priests who had ministered in the stockade, and Confederate officers. Before the trial Wirz drew up a list of witnesses and what he hoped they would prove: that Winder and others commanded the prison and he acted under their orders, that he had tried to get better rations, that the authorities in Richmond had not supplied funds for shelter, and that he had been kind to prisoners at Richmond, Tuscaloosa and Andersonville.
Several Confederate officials he wanted were not heard. Holt wrote that every witness requested by the defense was subpoenaed except "certain rebel functionaries," and that the judge advocate had offered to admit their expected testimony if counsel filed an affidavit stating it, an offer the defense did not take up. Of 106 defense witnesses subpoenaed, 68 reported and 39 were discharged by Wirz's counsel without testifying. The record shows that Chipman had revoked some of the subpoenas himself, and that on the last day of evidence he offered again to admit what those witnesses would have said. Schade wrote in 1867 that one defense witness, James Duncan, was arrested in open court before he could testify, which he said intimidated others. The Park Service records that Duncan, who worked in the quartermaster's office at Andersonville, was later convicted of manslaughter by a military tribunal for withholding rations from prisoners.
The defense argued that Wirz had been sick and away from the prison for much of August 1864 and parts of July and September. Holt dismissed the claim as too general and noted that papers with Wirz's signature showed him at work in those months. A medical witness, Dr. C. M. Ford, testified in late October that Wirz's right arm was then swollen and ulcerated and could not strike a heavy blow without injury to himself, though he could say nothing about its condition in 1864.
Baker told the commission he could not prepare a closing argument in the time allowed, having read 17 of the 75 parts of the transcript. According to Holt, the commission offered an adjournment of ten and then twelve days, and Baker, calling that insufficient, said he would submit the case without argument. On October 18, a statement in Wirz's name was read to the court, prepared with the help of one of the official reporters, Mr. Hays, at the judge advocate's suggestion. It argued that no witness had testified to any conspiracy, that the stockade had been laid out while he was in Europe and its supply was in other hands, and that the murder charges named no victims. It called William Stewart a "creation" of Gray's imagination, said no such name appeared in the prison records, and argued that Gray and the "Chickamauga" witness described him riding a horse when he always rode an old gray mare. On "Chickamauga," Wirz said his order to the guard had been meant as a threat. Chipman's closing argument followed on October 20 and 21.
The commission found Wirz guilty on Charge I after amending it. As amended, the finding named as his co-conspirators Jefferson Davis, James A. Seddon, Howell Cobb, John H. Winder, Richard B. Winder, Isaiah H. White, W. S. Winder, W. Shelby Reed, R. R. Stevenson, S. P. Moore, a hospital steward named Kerr, James Duncan, Wesley W. Turner, Benjamin Harris "and others unknown," and raised the number of prisoners affected to about 45,000.
On Charge II it found him guilty on specifications 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11 and 12 and not guilty on specifications 4, 10 and 13. Several were amended as they were found: specification 3 was moved from June to September; specifications 5, 6, 7 and 11 had their dates changed; and in specification 11 the word "bloodhounds" was replaced by "dogs" and the words alleging that Wirz incited and urged them were struck out. The sentence was that Wirz be hanged by the neck until dead, two-thirds of the members concurring. Wallace and Chipman signed it. The commission added a separate finding that dogs had caused the deaths of three further prisoners in 1864, which it said did not enter into the sentence.
Secondary sources disagree on the count. Linder's account gives 10 of 13, which matches the printed record. Other accounts say 11 of 13 or that Wirz was convicted "on all counts," and the Albany Herald in 2015 wrote that he was convicted of murdering 13 soldiers. The official findings printed by the War Department in 1868 show ten guilty findings, and Holt's review refers to "nine other distinct allegations of murder" besides the dog death in specification 11.
On October 31, 1865, Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt sent his review to President Andrew Johnson. He wrote that the conspiracy had been "clearly made out," that "criminal history presents no parallel" to it, and that the proof under the second charge showed prisoners given to dogs, confined in stocks and chains until they died, and shot at Wirz's bidding or by his own hand. He added that the prison records listed more than 13,000 dead and that, on medical testimony, nearly 10,000 of those deaths "must be charged" to Wirz and his associates. He described the trial as conducted "with patience and impartiality" and recommended that the sentence be carried out.
Johnson approved the findings and sentence on November 3, 1865, and ordered the execution for Friday, November 10, between 6 a.m. and noon. The order was published as General Court-Martial Orders No. 607 on November 6, which also dissolved the commission. Major General C. C. Augur, commanding the Department of Washington, was charged with carrying it out. According to Linder, Wirz wrote to Johnson asking him to decide quickly: "Give me death or liberty. The one I do not fear; the other I crave."
Schade made a further claim in a public letter dated April 4, 1867, reprinted in Pennsylvania's Valley Spirit that month. He wrote that on the evening before the execution, someone came to him and to Wirz's priest, Father Boyle, saying that a high Cabinet officer wished to assure Wirz that his sentence would be commuted if he implicated Jefferson Davis in the atrocities at Andersonville. Schade said he told Wirz the next morning in Boyle's presence, and that Wirz replied that he knew nothing about Davis, that Davis had no connection with what was done at Andersonville, and that he would not betray him or anyone else to save his life. This account rests on Schade, who was Wirz's advocate; no one else is known to have confirmed it.
Wirz was hanged in the yard of the Old Capitol Prison, across from the U.S. Capitol. A hostile pamphlet published in Philadelphia in 1865 describes the scene: about a hundred civilian spectators, a battalion of soldiers drawn up around the gallows, people on the roofs of nearby houses, and Wirz walking to the scaffold between two priests, Father Boyle and Father Wiget, his right arm in a sling. An officer read the charges, findings and sentence aloud. Asked if he had anything to say, he answered that he had nothing to say to the public. American Heritage, in a 1990 retrospective, records the troops present chanting "Remember Andersonville," and quotes Wirz as telling the officer in charge that he knew what orders were and was being hanged for obeying them.
Augur reported to the Adjutant General the next day that the sentence had been carried out between 10 and 11 a.m. on November 10 and that the body had been buried in the Arsenal grounds beside George Atzerodt, one of the Lincoln assassination conspirators hanged in July. Greg Bailey, writing in The New Republic in 2015, says the drop did not break his neck. The National Archives holds Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper engraving of the execution, published on November 25, 1865, and the Library of Congress holds Alexander Gardner's photographs of the hanging. Wirz's remains were later moved to Mount Olivet Cemetery in Washington, where the Park Service says he is buried.
He was not, as is often said, the only Confederate tried or executed for war crimes. The Park Service counts nearly 1,000 military tribunals of Confederates and guerrillas for violations of the laws of war, some ending in acquittal. Major John Gee, a commandant of the Salisbury prison in North Carolina, faced similar charges and was acquitted in 1866. Champ Ferguson was hanged in 1865 for killing captured Union soldiers. President Johnson's 1866 proclamation that the rebellion was over brought the tribunals to an end, and none of the higher officials named in the findings against Wirz was tried.
The fight over Wirz began immediately. In the North, an 1865 pamphlet titled The Demon of Andersonville presented him as a devil in Jefferson Davis's service, and Harper's Weekly printed an illustration, based on testimony, of Wirz stamping on a prisoner. In the South, writers associated with the prison defended him. The Park Service names Surgeon R. Randolph Stevenson and Lieutenant Samuel Davis among former Confederates who published books in his defense. Schade's 1867 letter argued that about 145 of the 160 witnesses had said Wirz never killed a prisoner, that the dozen or so who said he did had sworn falsely, and that the Union's refusal to exchange prisoners and its blockade of medicine were to blame for the deaths. In 1890 Jefferson Davis published his own account of the Confederate prisons that blamed the Union.
Some former prisoners took Wirz's side. James Madison Page, a former lieutenant in the 6th Michigan Cavalry who was held at Andersonville, published The True Story of Andersonville Prison: A Defense of Major Henry Wirz in 1908, writing that he was confident of Wirz's innocence. Far more former prisoners wrote memoirs that described him as a cruel tyrant. The Park Service says these competing accounts produced myths on both sides: claims that Wirz personally killed hundreds of men, and claims that the trial rested on one perjured star witness.
On October 25, 1905, the Georgia Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, meeting in Macon, resolved that Wirz had been "judicially murdered under false charges" and that the organization should place a memorial to him at Andersonville stating that the federal government was "solely responsible" for conditions there. Chipman later quoted the resolution from the Confederate Veteran of October 1906. The monument, a granite obelisk, was dedicated on May 12, 1909, in the town of Andersonville, about a mile from the prison site. Its inscriptions say it was raised to rescue Wirz's name "from the stigma attached to it by embittered prejudice" and call him "the victim of a misdirected popular clamor." Other faces carry a quotation from Grant in August 1864, "It is hard on our men held in Southern prisons not to exchange them," and words from Jefferson Davis.
Union veterans protested. Chipman wrote that the movement evoked a protest across the North and condemnation in parts of the South, and that the Grand Army of the Republic took it up at its national encampments. At the GAR's 1910 encampment in Atlantic City, its commander asked Chipman, then living in Sacramento, to publish the evidence. He did so in The Tragedy of Andersonville (1911), offered "in vindication of the verdict." The site of the prison itself had been bought by the GAR's Georgia department in 1890 and passed to the Woman's Relief Corps, which gave it to the nation in 1910. It became a national historic site in 1970.
The monument still stands, and the Park Service mentions it in its own accounts of the prison. Supporters of Wirz have held memorial services there for decades. In 2015 the Albany Herald reported a sesquicentennial ceremony organized by a committee chaired by James Gaston, an officer of a Sons of Confederate Veterans camp in Americus, with wreaths laid at the monument, a 21-gun salute and a planned address by Heinrich Wirz, a retired Swiss Army colonel and great-nephew of the commandant, who campaigns to clear his relative's name. Bailey, writing the same year, called the monument "a distortion of history."
Modern scholarship has moved away from both 19th-century positions without settling the question.
William Marvel's Andersonville: The Last Depot (University of North Carolina Press, 1994) is the most detailed modern study of the prison. Its opening, quoted in a 1996 review in Southern Cultures, argues that those who wrote about the prison "appear to have exaggerated their tribulations." In a passage on the execution quoted by the History News Network, Marvel describes spectators who "hung like vultures in the treetops" and presents Wirz's life as "offered up to appease the public hysteria."
Benjamin G. Cloyd, in Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory (LSU Press, 2010), studies how the prisons have been remembered rather than retrying the case. His publisher's summary says he traces how the Wirz trial, prison memoirs and monuments kept the charges of deliberate cruelty alive, and how a later view that blamed both sides equally and treated prison suffering as an inevitable result of modern war allowed Americans to avoid examining who was responsible. In a 2011 piece for LSU Press, Cloyd described giving the Memorial Day address at Andersonville National Cemetery, after which a member of the Sons of Union Veterans shouted at him that "Henry Wirz murdered people with his bare hands," and Heinrich Wirz asked him whether a presidential pardon was possible. Cloyd's answer was no.
Douglas O. Linder concludes that Wirz cannot be blamed for every death at Andersonville but that the trial "left little doubt" he was a cruel man who sometimes ordered prisoners shot, sometimes shot them himself, or left the work to his dogs, and that the truth lies between "a demon or a martyr-hero." Kevin D. Stringer, writing in Armchair General in 2013, argues the opposite emphasis: that some prosecution witnesses perjured themselves, that Wirz was denied due process, and that a majority of historians and legal scholars agree. The Swiss historical dictionary says Southerners regard him as a martyr and Northerners as a war criminal, and that historians still disagree about how much responsibility he bore. The Park Service, which runs the prison site, says Wirz could blame poor logistics and overcrowding on his superiors, but "could not escape his own orders and actions."
The trial is also cited in discussions of military law. Both the prosecution and the defense argued that Wirz had followed orders, the Park Service notes: the prosecution to reach higher officials, Wirz to shift blame upward. The defense failed, as it has in most military tribunals since, and later writers have linked the case to the war crimes trials of the 20th century.
Proven by the official record: the composition of the commission; the charges; the findings of guilty on Charge I and on specifications 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11 and 12 of Charge II, and not guilty on 4, 10 and 13; the sentence; Holt's review; Johnson's approval of November 3, 1865; and the execution and burial reported by General Augur.
Still disputed: whether the killings charged actually happened as described, and whether Wirz was responsible for them. No victim in the specifications is named. Wirz denied every killing, his lawyer called the eyewitnesses false, and Holt and the commission accepted them. The verdict was final and was carried out; it has never been set aside, and no pardon has been granted.
The number of witnesses who said they saw Wirz kill anyone. Schade's figure, that about 145 of 160 witnesses said Wirz never killed a prisoner, is an advocate's claim and is repeated by later defenders. The record shows the defense also called many witnesses, and that only a minority of all witnesses testified to specific killings, which is not the same as testimony that none occurred.
Felix de la Baume. True: he had deserted from another regiment under the name Oeser and was dismissed from a federal job after the trial. Not supported by the records cited by the Park Service: that he was never at Andersonville, that he vanished, or that the conviction rested on his testimony.
The offer to spare Wirz if he implicated Jefferson Davis. Reported only by Schade, in 1867; not independently confirmed.
The original charges. Some accounts say the first charge sheet named Davis and Lee; the 1865 pamphlet account names Lee, Seddon and Northrop in the version read on August 21. Davis was named in the commission's final findings, not in the charges on which Wirz was arraigned on August 23.
Birth year (1822 in Park Service pages; 1823 in the Swiss national dictionary and German biographical index), the details of his arm wound, the exact number of witnesses (148 to 167), the peak population (32,000 or 33,000) and the total deaths (12,912 or nearly 13,000) vary between sources.
The "only Confederate executed for war crimes" claim is incorrect; the Park Service count of tribunals shows otherwise.
November 25, 1823 (1822 in NPS pages): Hartmann Heinrich Wirz is born in Zurich.
1840 to 1842: commercial training in Zurich and Turin.
1845: marries Emilie Oschwald.
1847: sentenced in Zurich to four years for fraud and embezzlement; released 1848 and banished from the canton for twelve years.
1849: after a stay in Moscow, emigrates to the United States.
1849 to 1857: works in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Kentucky; homeopathic practice and water cures in Cadiz and Louisville.
1853: divorce from his first wife; 1854: marries Elisabeth Wolfe, born Savells.
1857: moves to Louisiana to manage the Cabin Teele plantation.
1861: enlists in the 4th Battalion of Louisiana Infantry; guard duty at Howard's Factory Prison, Richmond; joins the Richmond prison board in November; sent to Tuscaloosa.
June 12, 1862: promoted captain on General John H. Winder's staff; later commands Belle Isle and Libby prisons.
1862: injury to his right arm (circumstances disputed).
September 1862 to spring 1863: travels as far as Texas searching for prisoner records.
March 1863: medical furlough to Europe.
February 1864: returns; first prisoners arrive at Camp Sumter.
March 27, 1864: takes command of the prison stockade.
May to September 1864: dates of the acts charged in most of the specifications.
August 1864: peak population of about 32,000 to 33,000; 2,997 deaths that month.
September 1864: mass transfers begin after the fall of Atlanta; George Gray later dates the shooting of William Stewart to this month.
February 15, 1865: date of the stocks case in specification 6 (as amended).
March 1865: prisoner exchanges resume.
May 7, 1865: Wirz arrested at Andersonville by Captain Henry E. Noyes; writes to General James H. Wilson calling himself a tool of his superiors.
Late May 1865: confined in the Old Capitol Prison, Washington.
August 21, 1865: military commission first meets.
August 23, 1865: commission reconvened under Special Orders No. 453; Wirz arraigned on revised charges.
August 24, 1865: Louis Schade and O. S. Baker admitted as counsel; Wirz pleads not guilty.
September 12, 1865: Felix de la Baume testifies.
September 22, 1865: George W. Gray testifies about William Stewart.
October 18, 1865: Wirz's statement read to the commission.
October 20 and 21, 1865: Chipman's closing argument.
October 24, 1865: medical testimony on Wirz's arm; findings and sentence follow.
October 31, 1865: Holt's review recommends execution.
November 3, 1865: President Johnson approves the findings and sentence.
November 6, 1865: General Court-Martial Orders No. 607 published.
November 10, 1865: Wirz hanged at the Old Capitol Prison and buried in the Arsenal grounds.
November 21, 1865: according to Schade, de la Baume dismissed from the Interior Department; the Evening Star reports it on November 27.
April 4, 1867: Schade publishes his letter defending Wirz.
December 1867: the War Department sends the trial summary to Congress; printed as House Executive Document No. 23 (1868).
1890: Jefferson Davis publishes his account of the war prisons.
October 25, 1905: Georgia Division, United Daughters of the Confederacy, resolves to build a monument.
1908: James Madison Page publishes his defense of Wirz.
May 12, 1909: Wirz monument dedicated at Andersonville.
1910 to 1911: Grand Army of the Republic asks Chipman to publish the evidence; The Tragedy of Andersonville appears.
October 1970: Andersonville designated a national historic site.
1994: William Marvel's Andersonville: The Last Depot published.
2010: Benjamin G. Cloyd's Haunted by Atrocity published.
November 2015: sesquicentennial memorial service at the Wirz monument.