Capt. Henry Wirz (CSA)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Wirz

Heinrich Hartmann Wirz better known as Henry Wirz (November 25, 1823 – November 10, 1865) was a Confederate officer tried and executed in the aftermath of the American Civil War for conspiracy and murder relating to his command of Camp Sumter, the Confederate prisoner of war camp near Andersonville, Georgia.

Medical career and family

Born in Zürich, Switzerland, Wirz attended the University of Zurich but there is no evidence he obtained a degree. Wirz practiced medicine for a time before he emigrated to the U.S. in 1849, when many Forty-Eighters were fleeing the failed Revolutions of 1848 in the German states and elsewhere, or the Swiss Sonderbund war. Wirz, who had married in 1845 and had two children, was imprisoned briefly in the late 1840s for unknown reasons.

He established a medical practice in Kentucky where he married a Methodist widow named Wolfe. Along with her two daughters they moved to Louisiana. In 1855 his wife gave birth to their daughter Cora. By 1861, Wirz had a successful medical practice.

Civil War

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Wirz claimed to have enlisted as a private in Company A, Fourth-Battalion, Louisiana Volunteers of the Confederate States Army. It is rumored that he took part in the Battle of Seven Pines in May 1862, during which he was supposedly severely wounded by a minie ball and lost the use of his right arm. No official record exists to give credence to any involvement in that or any other military affair before he become director of Andersonville. Wirz allegedly then served on detached duty as a prison guard in Alabama, then transferred to help guard Federal prisoners incarcerated at Richmond, Virginia. Because of his injury, Wirz was assigned to the staff of General John H. Winder, who was in charge of Confederate prisoner of war camps.

In February 1864, the Confederate government established Camp Sumter, a large military prison in Georgia near the small railroad depot of Anderson (as it was called then), to house Union prisoners of war. In March, Wirz took command of Camp Sumter where he remained for over a year.

Though wooden barracks were originally planned, the Confederates incarcerated the prisoners in a vast, rectangular, open-air stockade originally encompassing sixteen and a half acres, which had been intended as only a temporary prison pending exchanges of prisoners with the North. The prisoners themselves gave this place the name Andersonville. The prison suffered an extreme lack of food, tools and medical supplies, severe overcrowding, poor sanitary conditions and a lack of potable water. At its peak in August 1864, the camp held approximately 32,000 Union prisoners, making it the fifth largest city in the Confederacy. The monthly mortality rate from disease and malnutrition reached 3,000. Around 45,000 prisoners were incarcerated during the camp's 14-month existence, of whom 13,000 (28%) died.

Trial and execution

Wirz was arrested in May 1865, by a contingent of federal cavalry and taken by rail to Washington, D.C., where the federal government intended to place him on trial for conspiring to impair the lives of Union prisoners of war. A military tribunal was convened with Major General Lew Wallace presiding. The other members of the commission were Gershom Mott, John W. Geary, Lorenzo Thomas, Francis Fessenden, Edward S. Bragg, John F. Ballier, T. Allcock, John H. Stibbs. Norton P. Chipman served as prosecutor.

In July 1865, the trial convened in the Capitol building and lasted for two months, dominating the front pages of newspapers across the United States. The court heard the testimony of former inmates, ex-Confederate officers and even nearby residents of Andersonville. Most the evidence was hearsay, but there was one witness whose testimony was particularly damning. His name was Felix de la Baume, and he claimed to be a descendant of the heroic Lafayette. He was able to name a victim killed directly by Wirz. This eyewitness was a skilled orator and his story was so compelling, that he was given a written commendation signed by all the members of the commission for his part in the trial. He was also rewarded a position in the department of the Interior while the trial was still in progress. Finally, in early November, the commission announced that it had found Wirz guilty of conspiracy as charged, along with 11 of 13 counts of murder. He was sentenced to death.

In a letter to President Andrew Johnson, Wirz asked for clemency, but the letter went unanswered. The night before his execution, Louis Schade (an attorney working on behalf of Wirz) was told that a high Cabinet official wished to assure Wirz that if he would implicate Jefferson Davis with the atrocities committed at Andersonville, his sentence would be commuted. Schade repeated the offer to Wirz and was told, "Mr. Schade, you know that I have always told you that I do not know anything about Jefferson Davis. He had no connection with me as to what was done at Andersonville. If I knew anything about him, I would not become a traitor against him or anybody else even to save my life." Wirz was hanged at One First Street, Northeast, Washington, D.C., the present-day site of the Supreme Court of the United States. His neck did not break from the fall, however, and the crowd watched as he writhed and slowly suffocated. He was later buried in the Mount Olivet Cemetery in Washington, D.C. He was survived by his wife and one daughter.

Eleven days after the execution of Wirz, it was revealed that the star witness from the trial had perjured himself. He was not Felix de la Baume from France, but Felix Oeser, born in Saxony, Prussia. He was actually a deserter from the 7th New York Volunteers. With his real identity revealed, he quickly disappeared.

Henry Wirz was one of two men tried, convicted and executed for war crimes during the Civil War (the other being Confederate guerrilla Champ Ferguson). His conviction remains controversial today. Residents of the town of Andersonville annually march to a Wirz memorial, along with supporters of a congressional pardon for Wirz.

Some writers have said that Wirz was unfairly tried and convicted because the South had low food rations and there was a Northern blockade of all medicines, both of which were out of Wirz's control. The controversial trial, one of the nation's first war crimes tribunals, created enduring moral and legal notions and established the precedent that certain wartime behavior is unacceptable, regardless if committed under the orders of superiors or on one's own. In a 1980 study, the historian Morgan D. Peoples refers to Wirz as a "scapegoat.

Depictions

Wirz's trial was depicted in the 1970 television film The Andersonville Trial, directed by George C. Scott who had appeared in the Broadway play by Saul Levitt upon which it was based. It featured Richard Basehart as Wirz and William Shatner as chief government prosecutor Lieutenant Colonel Norton P. Chipman. The film centered upon the question of whether Wirz should have been condemned for following orders, in a parallel with the then-current controversy over the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War. In TNT's 1996 film, Andersonville, Jan Triska played Wirz.