Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 46 - Andersonville Prison

Episode Date: April 15, 2019

On this episode Joe and Nick celebrate Confederate History Month by diving into crimes perpetrated by the Confederate States of America at Andersonville Prison. A POW camp that killed 25% of POWs during the war. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/home buy a shirt! https://teespring.com/stores/lions-led-by-donkeys-store Follow us on Twitter @lions_by Sources: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/andersonville-prison https://allthatsinteresting.com/andersonville-prison http://www.civilwarmed.org/andersonville-medicine/

When Johnny Comes Marching Home The boys will shout, the ladies, they will all turn out And we'll all feel gay when Johnny comes marching home And we'll all feel gay when Johnny comes marching home Get ready for the jubilee, hurrah, hurrah You'll hear the heroes wink and scream, hurrah, hurrah For the Lord of Reef is ready now to place upon his loyal cow Hello and welcome to yet another episode of the Lions Led by Donkeys. Nick's here again. Two whole episodes in a row. Fuck yeah.

Someone mark that in a fucking calendar because I can't remember the last time that happened. I'm really hoping it stays like that. It won't. It won't. Do you know what time it is? What time is that? Modelo time.

We're drinking Modelo because we have no old crew and it's slightly colder than room temperature. It's not good. We've had worse like the Hague episode we did. What did we drink then? and it's slightly colder than room temperature, it's not good. It's not good. It's all right. We've had worse like the Hague episode we did. What did we drink then? Room temperature Newcastle. Oh, right.

We're trying to get in the mood. Yeah. We're trying to be as British as we could. So for everybody who is not aware, Nick, I don't know if you're aware of this, April is Confederate History Month. I am. And that is more than just a really dumb Twitter hashtag that pretty much anybody with a functioning brain likes to dunk on constantly. It is actually a legislative, it's a law in seven fucking US states.

It's a real month? It's a thing. There's even a Confederateederate memorial day in some of these places yes which i i assume um in these confederate memorial day marches uh it's going to be confederate veterans and then like right behind them is going to be john walker lind and then the americans who volunteered to fight for isis um so like i said it's enshrined in seven whole fucking states um and in case you thought this is like a like a so a lot of people argue about confederate statues um but they leave out that small fact that most confederate statues are actually relatively recent like the last

couple decades really um yeah yeah absolutely um most people put them in um effectively telling black people to shut the fuck up like long story short there's gonna be a lot of people disagree with me on that but i don't care um this is kind of the same thing um this only became a thing as recently as like 1999 wow um so for instance georgia made a holiday in 2009 texas in 1999 and virginia in 2010 for a second time there was a gap a second time a second time uh alabama made a holiday in 2010 and they at least actually had the decency to put like a little asterisk and point out that yes slavery had something to do with the war and slavery is bad so for the first time in my life i'll say good for you alabama

spell alabama a fuck um so all of these states chose to honor traitors and the history of those traitors who fought for a nation that nobody ever recognized. Say what you will about the Taliban, but at least a couple people actually recognize them as the government of a country. So, Taliban won. CSA zero. Oh, fuck. Nick just opened a Modelo with his teeth. That worked.

Jesus Christ. How else was I supposed to do it on our desk good news our uh our podcast that has a dental plan so that's good uh i have free so i'm all right it's free fitty so in honor of confederate history month because we are a history podcast uh we'll be talking about one of the greatest crimes during the Civil War. Andersonville Prison. Andersonville Prison. So the prison, which would be only open for a 14 months would kill so many people that came through its gates. It's kill death ratio belongs more to Nazi death camp than any POW camp.

I was going to say 14 months. Oh, that's not bad. 14 months. That is literally less than one of my deployments. Then you threw on the deaths. Yeah, it's bad. Is it a working camp? No.

It is purely a POW camp, which is a fairly new concept at the time. Okay. As we've talked about before in past episodes and maybe in off-the-cuff remarks, back in the day, most prisoners

were just exchanged because everybody wants their soldiers back. Right. Or in the day of the nights, people just got ransomed because they're worth money. Now, it's not quite the case. And there's a reason for that which we'll get to so the construction of andersonville prison who which actual name was camp sumter but we'll call it by its more well-known name andersonville began in 1864 the decision to

build this large prison camp in the area was uh because there's multiple battles near Richmond, Virginia at the time, which produced thousands and thousands and thousands of Union prisoners and the Confederates had no fucking idea what to do with them all. These were pretty large battles that I'm sure some people have heard of. Battles like the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Courthouse, Cold Harbor,

just to name a few. Virginia saw some shit during the Civil War, which kind of explains why it's so fucked up now, I guess. Do they have statues? Oh, absolutely. Oh, I knew it. It gets worse than that. All of which is how we'll end our episode, because

our episodes cannot end on a good note. They never do. No. So at one point, there's actually so many POWs in Richmond that one in every five people in the city was a Union POW. What? Yeah. Jesus.

The Sun's skyrocketing number of prisoners was also due to the war's prisoner exchange system completely collapsing, mostly on the fault of the South. The South refused to return black soldiers or their white officers. The South had a nasty habit of just shooting black soldiers uh who surrendered uh which you can imagine pissed off the union did it it did okay was it just due to numbers now take this for what it's known because historically lincoln was a racist as most people most white men were racists during the civil war I mean even abolitionists didn't most abolitionists did not see blacks and whites as equals they just thought slavery was bad because Jesus wouldn't like it like it was against their religion like they're like yes they're subhuman but it doesn't mean we should treat them like this which i mean not woke but yeah this situation will take what we can get and this

could have been a pr coup for if pr was a thing back then because lincoln said quote the law of nation permits no distinction of color and the treatment of prisoners of war if the confederacy executes a union soldier the union will retaliate in kind if the confederacy enslaves a union soldier which they did, a Confederate prisoner would be placed on hard labor. Now, this could have been to spur more recruitment among black Americans, or it could be because maybe Lincoln realized letting some Union soldiers get shot

and others is not a good idea. I can see the PR thing. I can see Lincoln with a PR. I mean, the Emancipation proclamation only freed slaves in the states that were in rebellion yeah so remember abe we need to do this we'll get five percent increase let's go like he's he wasn't an abolitionist as much as he was a pragmatist like he knew it was a good idea um now if you remember in the 1800s, especially in the genteel South, as people like to put it, the quote-unquote honorable people of the South. And mostly in the old days, this is how wars fought.

War is supposed to be honorable, and it's supposed to be a sign of manhood. So this had, like equating the military service with manhood, as some people do, especially back then. So, the South treated black POWs the same. So, if they were forced to treat black POWs the same as white POWs, that would be tantamount to treating them as people. Therefore, implicitly accepting the Emancipation Proclamation. That's not my opinion. That's the opinion of a historian who I researched for this. It makes sense to me,

which is why I included it. Because, now, as we'll talk about, white Union POWs did not have a good time either, but they at least made it to a prison camp. Most black POWs did not. They were shot.

Which is the execution style? Normally, just, yeah. Or beaten to death or put back into slavery um it was actually enshrined into confederate law that no black pows would be treated as pows yeah they have a month they have a month in seven whole states yeah and it's not like a month of like reflection and like how did we end up here and oh dear god we fought a war over owning people as property it's no my great great grandfather was a good person you know what if you surround yourself with assholes it's a good chance you're an asshole definitely yeah dude um really

the best thing you could hope for as a black union pow was that they just put you back in slavery and then you just hope the north won so you'd be free again which is like the worst possible best case scenario it really is and i still i don't know why it always comes up in my head is uh i don't know if you've ever seen keen peel yes have you seen the skit with harriet tubman no so there's a skit where she uh uh goes to one of the uh uh slave areas whatnot she says all right follow me and she starts fucking parkouring like out of there and it says harriet tubman in loving memory the first free runner and i was like god damn it and all i picture now is just parkouring out of the South.

So if they do put her on money, you're going to be like, God damn, it's the first parkour one. Because all I see now is just her parkouring. Way to go, Key and Peele. You've ruined Nick's mind. All I can see is parkouring now. That's all right. Now, whenever I think about the plot to kill Hitler, I just think of Tom Cruise. Oh, we need to watch that movie. God damn it.

Yeah, we will. So, the prison that they built was little more than an open-air cage. At first, it would cover 16 acres of land. Eventually, that would be bumped up to 26 because of population. And it was enclosed with a 15

foot high stockade wall. They built it around a small stream which, in theory, like, oh, cool, they got fresh water. Yeah. We won't have to supply it. Yeah, it doesn't work out quite that well, which we'll talk about. They polluted themselves. I feel like they would do something like that. There's more to it.

So high up on the walls, there's guard towers where armed soldiers would be stationed each about 30 yards apart from the other, just underneath those towers and extending a full 19 feet back into the camp was known as the deadline. Now the deadline, the deadline was a D mark was demarcated with a small fence. And anybody who attempted to cross that fence was immediately shot. That's the gun line.

Yeah, it is the gun line. That's the gun line, boss. Great movie. Obviously, that was made into movies and this is not a special aspect of Andersonville. A lot of people, when they talk about Andersonville, they're like, oh, but they had the deadline. Union POW camps also had a deadline.

It was how they controlled people yeah maybe they didn't use it as judiciously as andersonville did because their stories um because union pws wrote a lot of notes about andersonville and some of them said because these guys are were in a bad place and the confederate soldiers would throw like hardtack biscuits across the deadline and see who was willing to risk it. Wow. And this isn't like if you cross the deadline and you made it back across without getting shot, you're good to go. I made it back.

I'm great. Yeah. Shield. You'd still get fucking capped. So, I mean, there's numerous stories of awful shit like that happening. I don't know why, but I feel like if I was there, I'd definitely cross the line. A lot of people did. And there is no confirmed accounts of anybody

escaping, so your odds aren't in your favor. So there was a whole bunch of smaller prisons before Andersonville was finished, and they were pretty bad as well. They were dank cellars, shitty prisons. They were as bad as prisons in the 1800s cellars shitty prisons like the were they were as bad

as prisons in 1800s could probably be um so when 100 union prisoners escaped from the richmond area confederate brass decided they just could not wait for andersonville to be completed for construction uh and they immediately ordered prisoners to start being transported to the camp so one problem at this point there's actually no fucking buildings built for the prisoners there's no barracks there's no whatever their version of a tier would be it's not constructed the only thing built is admin buildings and lodging for the camp staff what admin do they have at Andersonville they have a camp commander his sub commanders officers in charge of the guard shit like that

okay so there's nothing there it like it like I said it's an open air pen so they would just like just have to lay in the dirt structures would actually so the plan would be we're gonna move POWs in there and we'll catch up.

We'll build the buildings. Guess what never happened? Not a single barracks was ever built for the prisoners. So when the first 400 prisoners were brought on the 9th of February, 1864, they found an open field surrounded by a wall and little else. The POWs were forced to make makeshift tents stitched together by blankets and lean twos built out of scraps and woods and, uh,

and little bits of sticks left behind a little shanty town kind of, um, because any of their actual good supplies, because at this point in the war, the Confederates always have a supply problem from the beginning of the war to the end of the war. So whenever they capture a large amounts of POWs, the POWs might make it to the camp,

but their supplies do not. Their tents, their blankets, backpack, everything's fucking taken from them to be pressed right back into service. So these guys don't have shit. And thankfully, since Andersonville was built with, what else, slave labor, the slaves left all sorts of bits and pieces of wood left behind because they're not professional construction workers.

You use slave labor, you get slave labor product. So they were able to build something out of that. I'd build a dope ass fucking house. You think that? I feel like I'm handy enough. I'm pretty handy. So you would think like, well, we understand this camp isn't really a camp quite yet. So we're not going to bring tons of people here.

Hundreds of POWs arrived every single day by train. I would house them. In what? That house that I built. Nick's house. I'm pretty handy, as I say. I mean, I think I'm handy handy but I'm probably like really shit I mean handy enough to put a lean-to

together some sticks I'd already probably have fucking died just get collapsed on you oh fuck does anybody need a book written kill him kill the nerd is he Armenian no the genocide

hasn't happened yet I'm still good no but they they know they know the one turkish confederate president shoot that man so by may of the same year only four months later remember we start with 400 the camp now had 10 000 prisoners oh fuck and just so happened that 10,000 was its peak capacity. That's more zeros than 400. The trains did not stop coming. Trains? Hundreds of prisoners.

That May, a Sergeant Major from the 16th Regiment of Connecticut Volunteers, a guy named Robert Kellogg, arrived at the camp. Not that Kellogg. Dude. Did he come up with cereal after the war? No, no. Okay. a guy named Robert Kellogg arrived at the camp not that Kellogg dude did he come up with cereal after the war? no no okay

you know I don't know but probably not he's not that Kellogg you don't know though so Sergeant Major Kellogg when he arrived at the camp said

he saw quote as we entered the place a spectacle met our eyes that froze our blood with horror and made our hearts fail within us And then they asked for cereal afterwards and all thought that he could be uh bring them out alive such a terrible place in the center of the hole was a swamp occupying three or four acres the narrowed limits and a part of his marshy place had been used as the prisoners as a sink and excrement covered the ground the scent arising from which was suffocating the ground allotted to our 90 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 fearful surroundings was more than we care to think just then end quote which brings us to the camp's conditions don't

sound too good not good yeah just off that little bit almost immediately the confederate government was overwhelmed with the amount of people in their custody uh by the stage of the war uh for not just southern civilians but for the confederate army where we're suffering bad from lack just of food plain old food let alone clothing and everything else um they were not set up for war it turns out probably shouldn't have started it um at this point the prison i mean you have to think like if you're at the hierarchy of where the confederate supplies end up where do prisoners add up maybe they probably are honestly below slaves because the prisoners aren't doing anything for the war effort.

What are they doing? Are they just sitting there? Yeah, they're just there for sitting. Well, I mean, you have 10,000 people in custody. You let them go back to the north, then the north has 10,000 more soldiers. Yeah. So they're just going to sit there until the war is over or until the exchanges pick back up,

which so far they have not. So by this time of the war, a daily ration for a prisoner was a teaspoon of salt, three teaspoons of beans and a half pint of unsifted cord meal. What? Yep. Daily. Daily. Just one. Just one.

It's to get for the whole fucking day. First of all, salt. Daily. Just one. Just one. You get for a whole fucking day. First of all, salt. Salt. Alright. I guess if you're starving, salt helps. Three teaspoons of beans. Of beans. And how much of cornmeal? Half pint. Why do you get more cornmeal?

Because you can make like a pancake out of it. Well, in theory. Because they couldn't. With what? So, normally you need these things to cook. Exactly. So, firewood was not allowed inside the camp, even though they were surrounded by the woods. Nor were they allowed to use any

utensils. This meant that it was nearly impossible for the POWs to actually eat the food that they were given. So, they just held their hand out and they just got thrown all into their hand? I mean, I guess you could just eat raw cornmeal i mean i guess you could eat boots if you have to doesn't mean it's a good fucking idea that's true um i wonder if it would depend on the boot if it was good uh civil war boots oh yeah one major problem with that diet that i just listed to you what is missing from it besides

everything i was just about to say vitamin c okay what happens if you don't get vitamin c oh you get fucking scurvy yeah you get scurvy real fucking bad uh so scurvy makes you bleed out of your mouth lose your teeth and eventually die for people who are not aware yeah uh it also caused a very special kind of terrible known as scorbutic dysentery which made you literally shit blood until you die yeah that sounds and talking about dysentery you are a food service specialist right you get dysentery from fecal matter yeah polluting your food which brings us to the stream so oh fuck that's fucked up so that stream now imagine tens of thousands of people we're we're north of 10 000 people at this point in a space of around six football fields all using what amounts to a fucking babbling brook for all their water needs.

Drinking, cooking, cleaning, washing themselves. It's bad, right? Yeah. Now imagine you have to take a shit. You've been in the field. I've been in the field. There's no toilets anywhere, so you dig a hole. Has any soldier who's ever been in the field has dug a hole to take a shit in? It's part and parcel of

soldiering is you shit the ground eventually at some point in your career. I've met people who haven't. Well, whatever. This is the Civil War. They've all done it. That's true. But now, there's 20,000 people in this space. You're running out of places to dig. Now, everybody

has horrible, bloody diarrhea. So, they're shitting constantly. Which is why Kellogg called the camp a swamp it had literally been turned into a diseased shit-filled swamp oh it's a shit swamp everything is a shit swamp to include their water did it rain this weekend no that's just their shit they're just wallowing around their piss and shit oh man that's terrible their shit. They're just wallowing around in their piss and shit. Oh, man, that's terrible. This caused an epidemic of typhoid fever and a very rare hookworm disease that swept through the camp and killed everybody. Fuck.

At this point, they... So the guards, how are their living conditions? They're not good either. The camp guards, they're living around this diseased cesspool and they're eating slightly better and they're not sleeping in their own shit. They get four teaspoons

of beans. That's right. I'll even spot you another pint of fucking cornmeal. You know what? It's really weird to measure cornmeal in a pint. It is. It's not beer. Let me get a pint of It is. It's not beer. Let me get a pint of your finest. Yeah. And like

so say you find a puddle of semi-clean water and you want to wash yourself. Guess what? You don't have any fucking clothes because the Confederates don't give you any new clothes ever. Oh man. So whatever you showed up with on your back is the only uniform you've been wearing for

months if not years at this point. Right. Meeting some of these guys, like, for instance, the longest Union POW was in Confederate custody for over 600 days. Fuck. Yeah. Clothes were literally rotting off people's backs. And it was cold. They have to sleep outside.

Winter happens. Remember, this camp opened in fucking february oh that sucks so as soon as someone dropped dead people are stole everything off of them people know like they didn't even wait for them to get cold before they stole everything clean off and then chucked his body into a pit speaking of now we in the u.s army now we have defined rules that we have to technically follow in the case you're in a pow camp you follow rank you follow regulation everything like that um not to mention generally thinking we would like to believe we are surrounded by civilized people who would not devolve into a diseased horde of humans if we were put in a hardship that kind of thin grasp on society really got put to the test at andersonville uh pow camps like i said were new

people weren't really sure what to do with them or you know how to run them right modern ideas like military police to run the camps and keep prisoners safe simply did not exist uh so the confederates would just shove these dudes into this into this open pit and just leave them alone no supervision now imagine a small city of the desperately poor and hungry numbering in about 33 000 at this point with no law enforcement. What's the space that Andersonville? About six football fields. That's not a lot for 33,000.

No. That's like some Tokyo level population count. That's horseshit. Now factor in disease, starvation, lack of shelter, all without any kind of anybody keeping the peace and you start to see the Confederates kind of sort of crammed apocalyptic dystopia.

Historians note that the concept of society fell apart. People with friends or with, so whole units would get thrown to the camp. But because you don't have sergeants and officers keeping everybody in line some people if you didn't like them they kind of got cast out statistically speaking

almost 100% of the time if you did not have any friends and you were a loner you did not survive Andersonville flat out you died only people who formed some kind of bond or a group dynamic would survive but that did not mean there was not predators there Only people who formed some kind of bond or a group dynamic would survive.

But that did not mean there was not predators there. One of those groups call themselves the Raiders. The Raiders. The Raiders of Andersonville. They literally called themselves. Wow, that sounds really familiar. Holy shit. So Raiders decided, yes, our existence sucks, but we can make it better by preying on our fellow prisoners. The raiders worked in small groups, and they would terrorize their fellow prisoners.

They would trick new prisoners who showed up into giving them what little they had, thinking they were friends. And if that didn't work, they would just fucking rob them. If you fought them off, you would be beaten or killed. Jesus. They would scope out prisoners who might have valuable stashed away, whether it be like a necklace, a wedding band, something. A utensil.

Anything. Anything of worth. And they would steal it and sell it to the guards that try to get food. If you fought back, you would die. Though, sometimes you'd put up enough resistance, people started to note that if you really really fought hard they'd leave you alone like one guy brained a raider with a fucking shovel and he got

left alone where do you get a shovel which brings me to the weapons the raiders had axes and knives what how what they probably bought them from the guards how Now remember, think of how thin that little string of existence is. What little has to be taken away from someone before they're going to die? Sometimes it could mean just missing a meal or taking a shelter or a blanket. Because of the conditions in Annerseville, stealing from someone, as nobody really had much of anything, could very well mean they die right um eventually this happened enough where prisoners got together they formed their own defense units and they dubbed themselves the regulators oh fuck yeah dude these these started

as squads platoons and then later whole companies of soldiers who band together. They even have like little call words that if they got attacked and all, like, skee! Everybody would show up and beat the fuck out of the Raiders. Help! That's not the word. Send up the bat signal! Fuck! We didn't change our safe word this

week. Pineapples! Pineapples! Not only did these regulators beat the fuck out of the raiders and send them running on a lot of occasions they eventually created a full on court with judges and juries with holy shit this is like hearts war with full approval

of the camp's commander it's like hearts war because the camp's commander wasn't doing shit about anything. He's like, yeah, sure, whatever, make your own corn, I don't give a fuck. Eating a whole bowl of beans like an asshole. I'm gonna have six teaspoons, you Yankee bitch.

Oh, don't worry, he gets his. Oh, does he? Oh, yes. Nice. So, as you can imagine any judge and jury, they also acted as a executioner and they started lynching the raiders like fucking crazy how they literally built gallows and strung them up in the middle of the camp hey uh i know this whole like lynched mob is really cool and all, but I don't have a shelter still.

Yeah. We had to use it for the gallows. Yeah, I see you got a whole bunch of wood to hang the bill over there. Can I have a roof? Yeah. Shut up, Chet. Or you're next. Or you're also a raider.

Now, I mean, I say they kind of act as executioners, and they did. And a lot of people argue that the Raiders didn't get a fair trial, but also there's tons of evidence because the Raiders are really well fed. Where are you getting your food, dude? Assholes. Andersonville was so fucking bad that one of the Raiders got drug off to the gallows. A guy named Delaney is the only thing his name is written down. And he was quoted as saying,

fuck it, I'd rather die than live here. You're doing me a favor. I enjoy this. Yeah, fuck it, lynch me. This shit sucks. So by August that same year, a full 33,000 prisoners had been shoved into Andersonville. If Andersonville had been a city and an actual municipality,

it would have been the fifth largest city in the entire Confederacy. Holy shit. Disease, violence, and just living had killed so many people to this point, and prisoners were dropping dead at a rate of about one per 11 minutes. Holy fuck. So 90% of all prisoners weighed below 100 pounds. Life was described by Sergeant Samuel Corthal of the 4th Massachusetts Cavalry as,

quote, the camp was covered with vermin all over. You cannot sit down anywhere. You might go and pick the lice all off you, then sit down for half a moment and get up and be covered with them again. In between these two hills

it was very swampy all black mud where the filth was emptied and it was all alive where there was a regular buzz all the time and it was covered with large white maggots.

You're literally living in a maggot pit yeah thankful uh thankfully for the surviving prisoners who had not managed to keel over and die or be murdered at this point by their fellow prisoner union general tecumseh sherman captured atlanta in september of 1864 forcing the confederates to evacuate most of the camp um they spread the prisoners out they kept that it would definitely there's definitely was not 33 000 people there and life was still miserable but it got markedly better and it was finally liberated in may of the next year so and only 14 months of operation 45 000 union prisoners were held within Andersonville prison.

Holy fuck. 13,000 died. Or a full 28% of people who walked through the gates of the prison never left. Wow. Andersonville only held 10% of all of those POWs on either side of the Civil War combined. But they killed double that amount. Yeah. They held about 10%. They killed about 20% of all POWs of the war.

Jesus. Now, when the war was over, Camp Commander Captain Henry Wurz, or Wurz, was actually... So, funny story here. He was actually a so funny story here he was actually a swiss immigrant really his birth name heinrich hartmann verts what uh i guess if the name like that running a death camp just comes naturally yeah dude blood yeah he was uh arrested by union forces

oh he gets it right so a military tribunal took place between august 23rd and october 18th 1865 and he was charged with quote to injure the health and destroy the lives of soldiers in the military service of the united states then held and being prisoners of war within the lines of the so-called confederate states and in the military prisons thereof to the end that the armies of the United States might be weakened or impaired in violation of the laws of war and quote to impair and injure the health and destroy the lives by subjugating to torture and great suffering by confining and unhealthy and unwholesome quarters by exposing them to the inclement sea of weather and the

dews and burning suns of summer by compelling the use of impure water and by furnishing insufficient and unwholesome food of large numbers of federal prisoners the law of customs and war and they made all that up like no these were actually against the law at the time yeah I feel like it and you know there's not saying he didn't I mean

he is a moral outrage for sure and there's actually a kind of a urban legend, a historical falsehood, that Henry Wurz was the only person ever charged with war crimes during the Civil War, and that is not true. There's a couple people. Most of them were Confederate guerrillas. Okay.

But not many. This dude was just a captain in the confederate army so not many people like him yeah i imagine 158 witnesses testified against him the witnesses admitted they never saw words kill anybody uh but he certainly ordered his soldiers to shoot plenty of people um he also joined in beating them and pistol whipping them with his sidearm there's even accounts of him ordering dogs to attack helpless prisoners fuck uh there's actually a a weird element to this one of the guys who took the stand was definitely not actually a union soldier this is just a random dude hey he doesn't even go here it was like it was a guy who claimed that he was related to the french aristocracy and joined the union

army but like nobody in the witness stand remembered him and there was no actual evidence that he was ever in the army which means ready for it stolen valor no i just get the whole mean girls in the back of my head he doesn't even go here I want to know like what kind of vetting do they do these witnesses were you in the Union Army yeah sure alright come on in I wonder if he was just walking down where they're holding the trial

and they're like all witnesses come forward he's like alright fuck it I could witness something which gets a little bit more interesting now a lot of people don't think this is Wurz's fault. And so there's evidence that Wurz sent messages to Confederate higher command saying, please, for the love of God, give me more rations. People are dying.

But there's also people who said that the overall Confederate plan for their POW camps was to weaken these people so much that if a prisoner exchange did start back up, they would be useless to the Union Army. Right. And there's a good reason to believe that. For instance, if you look up pretty much any picture of Andersonville Prison, which I will do for Nick here, you get a picture that looks like it is out of place historically. And that is because they look like Holocaust survivors. And that's something that you just don't see. For instance, what does this look like to you? Jesus. Yeah. Explain what i just showed you uh honestly and i should remind you these men are alive yeah

it's not far off looking like a holocaust it's really not they don't look like holocaust survivors as much as they look like the bodies that they the nazis had piled up. Like, and to get to that point, the Nazis did that on purpose. Now, I'm willing to give Wurz enough of a gimme to be like, he probably was just following orders. And there wasn't a set conduct at the time. So he's breaking laws that didn't exist. Right.

But if you measure him against, I don't know, human fucking decency, Right. it's bad. Yeah. Wurz was found guilty and sentenced to hang.

Nice. While waiting for a sentence to be carried out, Wurz wrote a letter to President Andrew Jackson begging for clemency. Letter was never even opened. So did they use the gallows

from the camp? I wish. No, he died at a federal prison in Washington, D.C. Ah. So, the night before his execution, his attorney came to him and told him that a high member of the U.S. Cabinet told the attorney,

in good faith, that if Wuer said he had been ordered to treat the prisoners like shit by Confederate President Jefferson Davis, his sentence would be commuted. Now, Wurz hung for his crimes, but Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, was never punished for shit, which is questionable. It goes into Reconstruction, and in my opinion, Reconstruction should have been fucking brutal. They should have literally strangled the Confederate ideas out of the South, in my opinion. And I know that's probably controversial, but I don't give a fuck. I mean, they should have made the flag illegal.

They should have made any kind of statues to Confederate people illegal. They should have strung up Robert E. Lee. They should have strung up Presidentbert e lee they should have strung up uh president jefferson davis still support this and nobody will ever prove that otherwise to me um but words refused he said no why he said quote i will never betray president davis nor anybody which is a bit rich coming from a confederate veteran yeah pot meet kettle so words hung on November 10th

1865 in Washington DC but wait there's more the hangman fucked up his neck didn't break so the crowd of around 200 people watched as words writhithe and fought against the rope as he slowly strangled to death go fuck yourself so what is that uh it has to do with

the rope either being too short too long it has to do with where the knot is placed is yes so when you are hung by a professional hangman uh the knot or the coil of rope has to be positioned correctly for the long drop method or to be positioned correctly for the long drop method or the short drop method for the matter to work and break your neck immediately there's multiple cases of this not working uh and because a lot of people were being executed in the united states during this time it is much more likely to think that the hangman who was a federal soldier fucked it up on purpose. I'd like to believe that.

There's actually a lot of evidence that the, uh, the hangman for the Nuremberg trials, who was a United States army soldier fucked it up on purpose. I can really see that. I, yeah, I mean, if you're going to do your job,

do your job the best you can. But if like, there's going gonna be a guy who ran a death camp at the end rope maybe move the knot three inches to the left and let him strangle I don't know he's gonna die anyway yeah there's a possibility it would have happened

um like I said none of our stories can end on a good note like a confederate dangling at the end of a rope oh that wasn't no that would be a good note so the sons of confederate dangling at the end of a rope oh that wasn't no that'd be a good note uh so the sons of confederate veterans and the united daughters of the confederacy fucked up i managed to get enough donations to build a monument to henry words built smack dab in the middle of

andersonville why what's their reasoning because fuck them that's why uh they believe that he was uh his good name was tarnished and if you look up the monument it literally just kind of looks like a dick really yes it's just a brown dick which is ironic because he's a horrible racist a brown dick which is ironic because he's a horrible racist I'm gonna look this up and so every year those two groups hold

a memorial service for the dead bastard and in 1977 they awarded Wurz the confederate medal of honor a medal that isn't real they definitely just made up alright this is donations for the medal of honor what do we got we're so racist we're gonna invent a medal to give to people who ran a death camp for a racist cause

okay i lied i lied i will give everybody something to go out in a good note there is a union pow by the name of dorrance atwater who is one of the longest in captivity in the Union Army, who made it his duty that he gave to himself to record every prisoner who came into Andersonville and every prisoner who died. Wow. Because of his hard work, out of the tens of thousands of people he watched die, out of the tens of thousands of people he watched die there were only 460 who had to have their graves marked unknown soldier wow yeah that's actually really cool that's how he would do that

yeah and he uh he did crazy i don't even know how he managed it and like so another thing to point out how much of an asshole words is is uh atwater went to him while he was at the camp and said, hey, send these dispatches to the Union. These people should know that their families should know that their loved ones had died or whatever. And he was like, no. Henry Wurz, go fuck yourself. I'm glad you strangled slowly.

Yeah, fuck him. Happy Confederate history month everybody! When can we take down the statue? You know, another thing that pisses me off because you may know a small base named after John Bell Hood. We were both stationed

at it. A Confederate leader. That shit needs to be renamed. That fucking post might as well be renamed fucking after malik hassan fuck hood fuck the confederacy fuck every base named after them fuck all their statues and fuck every state that still has the confederate flag in their state flag you racist pieces of shit what he said and i guess we're closing on a good note. Yeah, that was a good note.

You know, and I was, I talked a little bit about how I was shy of doing a civil war episode before. And I ended up doing one with a guest while you were gone. And a lot of people liked it and he really enjoyed it. So I'm like, you know what?

Maybe I won't be so gun shy about the civil war. I'm not going to go cover the fucking battle at Gettysburg anytime soon, but I'm more comfortable talking about it. Cause no one's going to yell at me and say that I, I talked about a union jacket button being incorrect. God damn it. With your fucking cosplay people. Um,

I know. So thank you everybody for tuning in this week. You could follow us on Twitter at lines underscore by, you know, where you can find us. You probably already follow us on Twitter at lines underscore by, you know, where you can find us. You probably already follow us anyway. If you want to support the show, support us on Patreon.

Even a dollar can not only get you all of our bonus content. It'll get you into the commune discord. We now have with hell of a way to die. And it is kind of the fucking Thunderdome in there. And it's wild. I highly recommend you stop by. You have to wear clothes unless you're in Andersonville. Please donate if you can.

I am really tired of getting rained on in the Joe's backyard. One day we'll take you to a zoo, sir. One day. One day I'll get four tablespoons. Yeah, not yet. Still got to lose some weight. That's a really bad lead into clothes. Our clothes have nothing to do with horrible slave labor camps.

But if you need a shirt, why not make it one of ours? I make them. My fingers hurt. All right, guys. We'll see you next week. Later.