Camp Sumter

Camp Sumter was a Confederate POW camp located near Andersonville, Georgia during the final months of the American Civil War.

Depiction of Camp Sumter by John L. Ransom

The camp was overseen by Captain Henry Wirz, who was executed after the war for war crimes. It was overcrowded to four times its capacity, with an inadequate water supply, inadequate food and unsanitary conditions. Of the approximately 45,000 Union prisoners held at Camp Sumter during the war, nearly 13,000 died.

Description of Camp Sumter

Camp Sumter survivor

Robert H. Kellogg, sergeant major in the 16th Regiment Connecticut Volunteers, described his entering the camp on May 2, 1864:

As we entered the place, a spectacle met our eyes that almost froze our blood with horror, and made our hearts fail within us. Before us were forms that had once been active and erect;—stalwart men, now nothing but mere walking skeletons, covered with filth and vermin. Many of our men, in the heat and intensity of their feeling, exclaimed with earnestness. "Can this be hell?" "God protect us!" and all thought that he alone could bring them out alive from so terrible a place. In the center of the whole was a swamp, occupying about three or four acres of the narrowed limits, and a part of this marshy place had been used by the prisoners as a sink, and excrement covered the ground, the scent arising from which was suffocating. The ground allotted to our ninety was near the edge of this plague-spot, and how we were to live through the warm summer weather in the midst of such fearful surroundings, was more than we cared to think of just then.

The Dead Line

A fence known as "the dead line" was erected about 19 ft (5.8 m) inside the stockade wall. It demarcated a no-man's land that kept prisoners away from the wall, made from logs about 16 ft (4.9 m) high and stakes driven into the ground. Anyone even touching this "dead line" was shot without warning.

The Dead Line