U.S. Sanitary Commission, Prison at Andersonville, Ga. (1864)

This map, created by the United States Sanitary Commission in 1864, depicts the horrific Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia. Officially named Fort Sumter, the prison was built by the Confederates at the beginning of 1864 to house captured Union soldiers. It was built as an open air stockade with pine log walls that were 15 feet tall or higher. The first prisoners were brought to the prison in February of 1864 and, within the following months, about 400 prisoners were brought in daily. The stockade was designed to hold 10,000 men, but by June of 1864, there were 26,000 prisoners confined in the stockade, with numbers reaching 33,000 at one point. The living conditions inside the Andersonville Prison were abysmal. Of the 45,000 Union soldiers that entered its gates over the 14 months it was in operation, almost 13,000 died. Many soldiers died due to overcrowding, lack of food, poor sanitation, spread of diseases, and otherwise brutal conditions. This map helps capture the brutality of the prison. On the right side of the map, the so-called dead line is highlighted, a line set back from the stockade walls that any prisoner crossing would immediately be shot and killed. It also shows the cannons outside the walls of the four corners of prison, and the position of Captain Wertz, who was the commanding officer of the prison. Wertz was later charged with war crimes and hanged in Washington D.C in 1865. The prison was located a little over a hundred miles from Atlanta, so when William Tecumseh Sherman’s army took over Atlanta in September, 1864, the Confederates relocated many prisoners to various prisons across the South. After the war, when the prison was no longer in operation, former prisoners returned to identify and mark the graves of the soldiers that had died there. Of the nearly 13,000 deceased, only 460 graves remained marked unknown.