Henry Wirz
Camp Sumter was commanded by Captain Heinrich Wirz – known as Henry Wirz – a Swiss-born former physician’s assistant who had worked as a plantation overseer and physician, caring for the health of his employer’s slaves, in Louisiana just before the war. He gained combat experience and a wound at the Battle of Seven Pines and later served as an emissary to Europe while an aide to General John Winder, who was in charge of prisoners of war. When the camp at Andersonville was established Wirz was assigned to command.
In fairness to Wirz, he immediately recognized the dire nature of the situation within Camp Sumter and petitioned his own government for aid in the form of food, medicines and other basic supplies. When the Confederate government denied his requests, Wirz, on his own initiative, selected five Union officers from the Camp rolls and sent them under a flag of truce to Union authorities, bearing with them a petition for aid written by the incarcerated prisoners.
The petition, received by the Union in July 1864, described the conditions of the camp and implored a resumption of the exchange program, which would set the prisoners free. Given the large number of Confederates held by the Union following the Gettysburg and Vicksburg campaigns, such an exchange, or any other aid, was deemed to be aiding the enemy. Grant denied the petition (at Lincoln’s direct request), rightly judging that the South needed the returned prisoners more than the North, although he deplored the conditions as described.
Wirz became to history a villain along the lines of the commandants of Japanese or Nazi prisoner of war camps, a symbol of monstrous cruelty to the victorious North, despite 145 witnesses (out of 160) testifying that they had never seen any act of cruelty performed by the camp commander. Others testified to his outright humanity, and the point was made at his trial for war crimes that the Union Naval blockade had been equally responsible, if not more so, for denying medical supplies and other materials to the prisoners in the camp. Nonetheless, Wirz was convicted of war crimes and executed for the same, one of the earlier examples of such a fate being imposed upon a vanquished enemy.