Can anyone give me information on the Andersonville trial in 1865.?

Question

THIS IS NOT FOR HOMEWORK i LEFT SCHOOL
48 YEARS AGO.

Answer 1

In 1865, Captain Harry Wirz (Richard Basehart) is brought to trial to answer charges of murder and crimes against humanity pertaining to administration of the Andersonville Prison, where 13,700 P.O.W.'s met their death due to inadequate medical care, unchecked spread of dysentery, shoddy sanitation, and lack of proper food. While Wirz and his defense team contend the Captain was only following order and unable to prevent the tragedy, prosecutors counter with the argument that the chain of military command did not supercede his moral and ethical obligations to the men under his watch.

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Answer 2

Andersonville prison was frequently short of food, and even when this was sufficient in quantity, it was of a poor quality and poorly prepared on account of the lack of cooking utensils. The water supply, deemed ample when the prison was planned, became polluted under the congested conditions. During the summer of 1864, the prisoners suffered greatly from hunger, exposure, and disease, and in seven months about a third of them died from dysentery and were buried in mass graves, the usual procedure there. Many guards of Andersonville also died for the same reasons as the prisoners — however, it is highly debated whether these deaths were the same as the others or if they were from common factors in the American Civil War, such as trench foot. After the war Henry Wirz, the superintendent, was tried by a court-martial featuring chief JAG prosecutor Norton Parker Chipman, on charges of war crimes and on November 10, 1865, was hanged. Wirz was the only prominent Confederate to have his trial heard and concluded (even the prosecution for Jefferson Davis dropped their case).

Answer 3

Introduction to the Andersonville / Wirz Collection

On 10 November 1865 Captain Henry Wirz of the Confederate army was hanged at Old Capitol Prison in Washington - the solitary defendant in the first war crimes trial in American history. In 1864-65 Wirz was commander of the stockade (or prison interior) at the Confederate prisoner of war camp at Andersonville, Sumter County, Georgia. Over the period from February 1864 to May 1865 some 45,000 Union prisoners were held at Andersonville, of whom around 13,000, or 29 per cent, died. Conditions were, in almost every respect, appalling: the prison was badly overcrowded, food, shelter, and medical attention were inadequate, the water supply was foul. Long before the end of the war sensational accounts of the horrors of Andersonville began to appear in the Northern press, sparking the popular conviction that the Southern government was deliberately and systematically mistreating Union prisoners. In fact, the poor conditions at Andersonville and other Southern prisons were due to bad long range planning, mismanagement, and (above all) a lack of resources - not to any malign purpose.

Wirz was brought to trial because Northern outrage over the prison issue demanded a scapegoat, and because as commander of the stockade he was well known to the prisoners and figured prominently in their recollections. His most notable superior at Andersonville, General John H. Winder, had died in February. In early May, while still at the prison, Wirz was arrested by Federal troops and after a period of confinement at Macon, Georgia, was taken to Nashville and then to Washington to stand trial before a military commission. He was charged with conspiracy "to impair and injure the health and destroy the lives . . . of large numbers of federal prisoners," and with murder; ex-prisoners swore he himself had shot or otherwise killed men in his charge. Historians today generally agree that: 1) while Wirz was ill-tempered and in some respects incompetent, he was guilty of neither of these charges; 2) the testimony gathered by the prosecution was in some instances exaggerated or wholly fabricated; and 3) the trial itself was conducted in an irregular and highly prejudicial manner. On 24 October, after two months of highly publicized proceedings, Wirz was found guilty of conspiracy and of eleven counts of murder.

Answer 4

I don't know why some "people" come here and criticise honest questions with such a tired and dying "mind". There is no point me answering this question as it has been well fielded by some of those above.

Answer 5

Apparently they can. I would have just told you to Google as that is probably what they did. Don't know why people do others' work for them.