After surviving the Andersonville Prison Camp, this is what a union soldier looked like. Andersonville Prison was a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp




Harrowing images have revealed the true horrors of the US Civil War - which claimed the lives of more than half a million in just four short years.  
The Civil War remains the bloodiest war in US history. Fought between 1861 and 1865, it claimed 620,000 lives - nearly as many American casualties as every other war fought by the United States combined. 
As horrific stories and shocking photographs of the survivors who had been starved into living skeletons reached the north, Wirz became one of the nation's most-hated men. 
The photographs revealed the terrible treatment the prisoners had suffered - something that wasn't seen again to the same extent until the Nazi death camps in the Second World War.


One picture titled 'A Harvest of Death', fallen soldiers are pictured following the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863 and African-American men are seen collecting the bones of soldiers killed in battle at Cold Harbor, Virginia one year later in 1864.
In another particularly disturbing 1865 image, a skeletal survivor of the confederate prisoner-of-war camp looks sadly into the camera


Called Camp Sumter, it was the largest prison in the South where captured Union soldiers were kept from February 1864 to April 1865, the end of the Civil War.

Camp Sumter was built quickly after the prisoner-exchange system between the Union and the Confederacy fell through in 1863. The system broke down because the Confederacy refused to treat black soldiers as equal to white soldiers. 


Prisoners were first brought to the camp in February 1864 even before it was completed. Camp Sumter, which became known as Andersonville after the railroad station near the prison, was built to hold 10,000 men but was often overcrowded to four times its capacity.
At its height in August 1864, Camp Sumter held more than 33,000 PoWs on only 26 acres of open ground without shelter or clothing for the inmates. Prisoners had only the clothes they were wearing when captured. Wearing their tattered Union uniforms, the men were forced to sleep in makeshift tents or holes dug in the ground.


Andersonville had an inadequate supply of food and water and in the last 12 months of the Civil War, 13,000 Union prisoners died there from disease and starvation. 
Infested with vermin and lice, the only source of water was a tiny creek that ran through the grounds, but soon became polluted with raw sewage. Eventually the banks of the creek eroded and turned a large portion of the camp into a swamp

Around 56,000 soldiers died in prisons during the Civil War - making up around 10 per cent of all the war's casualties. At Alton prison in Illinois, more than 1,500 Rebels died in custody from disease.
But Camp Sumter was by far the most fatal with almost a third of its 45,000 Union soldiers dying in just 14 months.

.
Confederate Captain Henry Wirz, a native of Zurich, Switzerland, was the commander of the Andersonville prison for the duration of the camp's 14 months.
One month after the Confederates surrendered at the Battle of Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865 - one of the last battles of the Civil War - Wirz was arrested for the murders of the soldiers who died during their imprisonment at Andersonville.
As horrific stories and shocking photographs of the survivors who had been starved into living skeletons reached the north, Wirz became one of the nation's most-hated men. 
The photographs revealed the terrible treatment the prisoners had suffered - something that wasn't seen again to the same extent until the Nazi death camps in the Second World War.


One picture titled 'A Harvest of Death', fallen soldiers are pictured following the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863 and African-American men are seen collecting the bones of soldiers killed in battle at Cold Harbor, Virginia one year later in 1864.
In another particularly disturbing 1865 image, a skeletal survivor of the confederate prisoner-of-war camp looks sadly into the camera

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