It Laid the Ground For the War Crimes Tribunals...

[Gladstone]

With the recent hanging of Saddam in Iraq it makes for an appropriate time to explore the origins of 'the war crimes tribunal'. Contrary to what some might presume these tribunals in their modern sense did not originate in the Soviet Union but rather in the United States. Henry Wirz, the Southern commander of the Andersonville prison camp, was at the end of the US Civil War (1861-1865) charged with the mass 'systematic' murder of Northern prisoners at Andersonville by a variety of means...ie. the random shooting down of prisoners...deliberate and purposeful starvation...dogs..etc. After a trial he would be executed for these alleged crimes.

In the present day the charges for which Wirz was hung are acknowledged to have been fruadulent, the trial itself a farcical show trial, the deaths of the prisoners a terrible tragedy in a ghastly war but hardly a plot of murder.

But little good these acknowledgements of truth will be doing Wirz now.

Wirz has gone down in history as the first man in modern times to face a war crimes trial. As such, it laid the ground for the war crimes tribunals that followed World War II and subsequent conflicts.

As Union soldiers chanted "Wirz, remember Andersonville," the gallows' trap door opened, but the execution was botched. Instead of his neck snapping, Wirz slowly strangled..

Henry Wirz (1823-1865)

Arbitrary execution, torture, starvation, lack of medical care - the photos and reminiscences of prisoners released at the end of the American Civil War have a chillingly modern ring. And yet only one person was tried and executed for war crimes: the Swiss emigrant, Henry Wirz.

Wirz was born in Zurich to an old Zurich family. His family had been granted a coat of arms in the 15th century, and its members had held government office there over many generations. Wirz qualified as a doctor, studying not only in Zurich but also in Paris and Berlin.

He immigrated to the US in 1849, and settled at first in Kentucky, moving later to Louisiana.

When the Civil War started, Wirz enlisted with the Louisiana Volunteers. He was badly wounded at the Battle of Seven Pines, losing most of the use of one arm. He was promoted "for bravery on the field of battle", but this injury left him unfit to fight, and instead he was attached to General John Winder, who was in charge of Confederate prisoner of war camps. After stints in two other prisons, he took charge of Camp Sumter prison, near Andersonville, Georgia, in March 1864, where he remained for just over a year.

He was arrested by Federal troops in May 1865. Even before the end of the war, reports had been coming out about the appalling conditions at Andersonville. The conviction grew that the Confederates were deliberately mistreating Unionist prisoners. It is generally agreed today that the victors were looking for a scapegoat to vent their anger, and Wirz fulfilled that role.

His two-month trial, held in Washington, was a sensation, but the outcome was a foregone conclusion. He was found guilty of several counts of murder and of mistreating the prisoners in his care "willfully and maliciously, in furtherance of his evil designs" – the purpose being to "weaken and impair" the Unionist army.

The testimony was damning. In addition to the prisoners he was found guilty of shooting in cold blood, it was said that he had used bloodhounds "to seize, tear, mangle, and maim the bodies and limbs" of escapees, that he injected "impure and poisonous vaccine matter" into the arms of prisoners, some of whom died as a result, and that he used his boots to "jump upon, stamp, kick, bruise" a number of prisoners. He had shackled them in painful positions, and ordered the guards to shoot any prisoner who crossed the "dead line": a poorly delineated border within the outer fence. (The expression has changed its meaning in the last 150 years, but derives from the Civil War prison camps.)

It is undisputed that conditions at Andersonville were appalling. Ironically, it was built to relieve overcrowding at the camp in Richmond, where 10 prisoners a day were dying by the end of 1863. But it was poorly planned and brought into use too early. By the middle of August 1864 it held 32-33,000 men, and not 10, but up to 100 were dying every day. Between February 1864 and May 1865 a total of about 45,000 Unionist prisoners were held there. About 13,000 of them – nearly 29 per cent - died. (This compares with an average death rate of about 13 per cent in Unionist and Confederate prison camps as a whole.)

But Wirz was not responsible for the planning and construction of Camp Sumter. The authorities – notably Winder, who conveniently died shortly before the end of the war – had failed to build the wooden barracks that were originally planned, and the prisoners were held in the open air. The guards were poorly trained and equipped, there was insufficient food, and what there was was often unsuitable: many prisoners suffered from scurvy which left them unable to chew and swallow. There was a lack of drinkable water, and the sanitary conditions were poor. All this meant that prisoners were often in dire need of medical treatment, but the supplies were inadequate.

However bad-tempered and inefficient Wirz may or may not have been, there was nothing he could do to alleviate these problems.

Even at the time, there were some who recognized that it was a show trial. Many of the witnesses whom Wirz wanted to call in his defence were never summoned; others of them complained that "improper language" had been used to get them to provide material for the prosecution.

The Washington lawyer, James W Denver, whose firm was originally defending Wirz, wrote to his wife that he believed Wirz ought to be acquitted, "but I am of opinion that the intention is hang him and that no stone will be left unturned to effect it." Denver's firm backed out on the first day of the trial for that very reason. The lawyer who took over the defence complained that the military commission had violated " all rules of law and equity." He singled out the commission president - Lew Wallace, the author of "Ben Hur" – for his failure in ensuring justice.

Wirz was duly found guilty, and he was hanged on the same site where the Lincoln conspirators had been executed a few months earlier, and where now the US Supreme Court stands.

He denied his guilt until the last; when the death warrant was read to him, the officer overseeing the hanging told Wirz that he deplored carrying out this duty. Wirz's reply: "I know what orders are, Major. And I am being hanged for obeying them."

He lies buried in Mount Olivet cemetery; the simple stone describes him as "Confederate Hero-Martyr."

Wirz has gone down in history as the first man in modern times to face a war crimes trial. As such, it laid the ground for the war crimes tribunals that followed World War II and subsequent conflicts.

The Execution By Hanging of Henry Wirz - November 10, 1865

Swiss Roots: Henry Wirz

Heinrich Hartmann Wirz

Additional Links

TIMELINE: RECORD OF ACTIVITY - CAMP SUMTER

Scopes Trial Home Page - UMKC School of Law

Andersonville / Wirz Collection, 1864-65

The Court Martial of Henry Wirz Official Records

[Gladstone]

To protect the prisoners' health the Confederate States arranged that they be vaccinated against disease. Amongst the fruadulent charges made against Wirz, and for which he was hung, was that he had murdered hundreds of men at Andersonville by having them injected with poisons rather than with vaccine. In light of such accusations there's little doubt that had the technology existed in the 1860's for Zyklon-B to be used on the prisoners' lice, and the South had done so, that they would have been accused of 'gassing' the Union men.

The question then arises if the United States (in conjunction with the Soviet Union) got the very idea for the accusations made against Germany in 1945 from the fraudulent accusations it had made up eighty years prior to smear the Confederacy.

Below are media accounts from the time of the US Civil War and the decades immediately after..

For our America shall be the Sinai of the nations, and from the terrible thunders and lightnings of its great struggle shall proceed the divine law of liberty that shall subdue and harmonize the world. George William Curtis - 1865



Grand Review of the Armies - May 23 & 24 1865

Cattle Cars

And what was done in prison and hospital to our private soldiers on Belle Isle, and to our officers in Libby, was done nearly all over the South...The very railroads can speak of inhuman transportations from one point to another of the sick, the wounded, and the unwounded together, crowded into cattle and baggage cars, lying and dying in the filth of the sickness and the blood of undressed wounds

But we will consider the revolting pictures of atrocities at Libby Prison and Belle Isle no longer. It remains for us only to briefly notice Andersonville Prison, the most extensive, as it was the most infamous, of all the prisoner-pens into which Union captives were gathered.

A few days thereafter about three hundred prisoners were crowded into cattle cars bound for Andersonville.

We were packed in cattle cars, and after waiting two long hours started on our rough trip to Gordonsville, and, arriving there, were placed in a barn...

The Manufacturing of Leather Wallets and Jewelry Out of Human Skin and Body Parts

Again, there was the talk about money purses made of Yankees' scalps, and finger rings from Yankee bones; and, during the dinner, I was no little astonished to see the valiant Southerner exhibit to his eager listeners a veritable ring, rough and yellow, made as he said from the bones of one of Sherman's cavalrymen...

This continues on..

...This was not the only time I heard such talk from Southern soldiers. My ears became accustomed to it during the wanderings in disguise about the army there. I recall having heard, one day, the most diabolical and dastardly statement ever made by a civilized man. I was standing at the roadside, watching some Federal prisoners march by who had just been captured.

"Where will they take them to?" I innocently inquired of a well dressed man standing near me, who, like myself, was watching the unfortunate men pass.

"I suppose to Andersonville," was the answer.

After some little conversation on the subject of prisoners in general, I added, "It is all stuff, of course, what the Northerners say about the Yankees dying off so at Andersonville."

"Stuff! No," he interrupted; "they do die like rats, and it's a good thing. If the North won't exchange them, why not kill them?"....

Another writes

...Was it they who carved the skulls of our boys into drinking cups and their bones into trinkets? Was it they who starved and froze our brothers into idiocy and madness at Andersonville and Belle Isle?..

who concludes..

Never fear, true hearts! A people which has shown the quality of its genius as this nation has in the last four years will finish its work. It will go forward and not backward.

"Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching.
Cheer up, comrades - they will come!"

For our America shall be the Sinai of the nations, and from the terrible thunders and lightnings of its great struggle shall proceed the divine law of liberty that shall subdue and harmonize the world.

Crimes Against Humanity

Fifty-eight miles below Macon, by the Southwestern Railroad, is the scene of the crimes against humanity for which Henry Wirz was punished with death. The place is set down as Anderson on maps and in guidebooks; and that is the name by which it was known to the inhabitants of the country...

Every cruel jailer who exposed, starved, and robbed our prisoned soldiers will vote against Grant.

Every aider in those crimes against humanity and against civilization, perpetrated at the Libby and at Andersonville, will vote against Grant.

They have appealed to the sword; - if they were tried by the laws of war, their barbarous crimes against humanity would doom them to their death...The blood of thousands of murdered prisoners cries to heaven.

The secessionists found in him a formidable opponent. He struggled for the indivisibility of the republic as earnestly as they struggled for its disorganization and wreck. He rallied under the banner of "Constitutional Liberty" as constantly and orderly as they rallied under the piratical flag of the Confederate despotism, all stained with its foul crimes against humanity and God!

He said England had a legal right to be neutral, but had no moral right to withhold her sympathies with a nation struggling for its existance and universal justice against rebels intent on crimes against humanity. - America Before Europe: translated by Mary I. Booth.

Systematic Starvation at Andersonville

Systematic starvation commenced the day the prisoner set his foot within the pen...That prisoners were starved the world believes, and even the South have ceased to deny it...

...they will listen to the horrid tales of Andersonville and Libby, where our noble patriot soldiers were systematically and deliberately tortured and starved; to death; they will read and study the long fearful narratives of wanton cruelty, and unpitying, unrelenting hate, in comparison with which the blind, frenzied rage of the Indian Sepoys can scarcely be named...

A few months later the rebels threw off even this thin disguise, and in terms too plain to be mistaken announced by their acts their intentions to systematically destroy their prisoners, for the purpsose, apparently, of relieving themselves of the charge of such persons, and of thereby lessening the numbers of their enemies. As if the Libby Prison and Belle Isle at Richmond were not sufficient, refinements in cruelty were attempted, and at Charlotte and Salisbury in North Carolina, and Millen and Andersonville in Georgia, prison pens were erected, in which tens of thousands of Union prisoners were deliberately starved to death...

Never Forget

Music - The Boys that Wear the Blue. Words by Mrs. M. A. Kidder; music by Henry Tucker. 30 cts. Festival March by Charles Fradel. 30 cts. Never Forget; or, The Memories of Andersonville Prison Pens. Words by Mrs. Kidder; music by Henry Tucker. 30 cts. The above are from W. Jennings Demcrest, 39 Beckman Street, New York. Sent by mail on receipt of price.

The Official US Charges Against Captain Henry Wirz - Now Acknowledged To Have Been Rubbish

These were...the purposeful and deliberate murder of ten thousand men by systematic starvation...the shooting for sport of prisoners...the pretending to vaccinate prisoners for their health but really injecting them with 'poisonous matter' to murder hundreds, similarly many men were crippled by poisonous injections, 'stomping' and 'kicking' prisoners with his boots, and the use of 'bloodthirsty' dogs on the prisoners, etc., etc.

And he, the said Wirz, still pursuing his evil purpose, did keep and use ferocious and bloodthirsty beast, dangerous to human life, called bloodhounds, to hunt down prisoners of war aforesaid who made their escape from his custody, and did then and there willfully and maliciously suffer, incite, and encourage the said beasts to seize, tear, mangle, and maim the bodies and limbs of said fugitive prisoners of war, which the said beasts, incited as aforesaid, then and there did, whereby a lage number of said prisoners of war, who, during the time aforesaid, made their escape and were recaptured, and were, by the said beasts then and there cruelly and inhumanely injured, insomuch that many of said prisoners, to wit, the number of about fifty died.

A Half Attempt to Get it Right

And, now, we are willing to admit that, in many instances the truth lies at the halfway point between these accounts and those to which we formerly trusted....Wheat was becoming very scarce. The starving out process was a part of our [the Federal Union] plan, and it was now working most effectively. Sherman was striking the belt of supplies and every time he burned a flour mill, he was fast reducing the minimum of flour to zero...

Confederate Defenses Outside of Atlanta - Summer 1864

References

Cattle Cars

'Pictorial History of the Civil War in the United States of America', published in 1866-68, pg 599

Making of America

'A Hard Road to Travel Out of Dixie' published in The Century Magazine October 1890 , pg 933

Cornell University Making of America

'Prison Life' published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine July 1865 pg 139

Cornell University Making of America


The Manufacturing of Leather Wallets and Jewelry Out of Human Skin and Body Parts

'Ten Days in the Rebel Army' published in The Atlantic Monthly May 1880 pg 621

Cornell University Making of America

'Orations and addresses of George William Curtis; ed. by Charles Eliot Norton' , pg 174, 176-177, published in 1894

Making of America


Crimes Against Humanity

'The South: A Tour of its Battle-fields and Ruined Cities...' published in 1866 by J. T. Trowbridge pg 469

Making of America

'Crimes Against Humanity' published 1887 (?) pg 20

Making of America

'Lincoln Memorial' pg 251 published in 1865

Making of America

'History of the Old Second Division, Army of the Cumberland...' published in 1864 By William Sumner Dodge pg 300

Making of America

'Pictorial History of the Civil War in the United States of America' published in 1866-68 By Benson J. Lossing pg 569

Making of America


Systematic Starvation at Andersonville

'Andersonville' appeared in The Michigan University Magazine, Devoted to College Literature and Education ...: Published by the students, May 1869, pg 314-315

Making of America

'Lights and Shadows of Army Life' published in 1865 pg 375

Making of America

'History of the Great Rebellion...' published in 1866 pg 740-741

Making of America


Never Forget

'Never Forget; or, The Memories of Andersonville Prison Pens' which appeared in The Ladies Repository published February 1866 pg 124

Making of America


The Official US Charges Against Captain Henry Wirz

'Correspondence, Etc. - Union and Confederate' (US Charges Against Wirz), published in 1899 pg 785-791

Cornell University Making of America


A Half Attempt to Get it Right

'Andersonville' published in Yale and New Englander Review September 1880 pg 729-773

Cornell University Making of America

[Menydh]

It tells you that war crimes tribunals are just an invention to justify the thirst for lynching and revenge of the winners.

Vae victis!

[Gladstone]

Originally Posted by Mynydd

It tells you that war crimes tribunals are just an invention to justify the thirst for lynching and revenge of the winners.

Yes, it does. The concept of 'the war crimes tribunal' and 'crimes against humanity' ought to be done away with. Too much imperfection abounds for one country (or group of countries) to be judging another country.

[Gladstone]

The intention of the United States had been to execute the political and military leadership of the South as 'war criminals', something that did not come about in part thanks to Wirz's refusal to perjure himself . As has been indicated earlier in this thread, these trials are not about justice and injustice, but rather about the 'crime' of resisting and or saying 'no'.

The excerpts below are from a paper published in 1876...

General Robert E. Lee, President Jefferson Davis, and Vice President Alexander Stephens

"The grand object of the trial and condemnation of Henry Wirz was the conviction and execution of President Davis, General Robert E. Lee, and other prominent men of the Confederacy..."

"I have been persecuted, and if there is such a thing as a spirit coming back to Earth I'll come back to persecute those who have perjured themselves to hang me." Henry Wirz

The Treatment Of Prisoners During The War Between The States.

Compiled by Rev. Wm. Jones, Secretary of Southern Historical Society

There is, perhaps, no subject connected with the late war which more imperatively demands discussion at our hands than the Prison Question. That the Confederate Government should have been charged in the heat of the passions of the war with a systematic cruelty to prisoners was to be expected. The pulpits, the press and the Government reports, which were so busy denouncing "Rebel barbarities" that they had no censure for the McNeils, the Turchins, the Butlers, the Milroys, the Hunters, the Shermans, and the Sheridans, who, under the flag of "Liberty," perpetrated crimes which disgrace the age, were not to be expected to be over scrupulous in originating and retailing slanders against the Government and people of the South. But it was hoped that after the passions of the war had cooled, and the real facts had become accessible, that these sweeping charges would be at least modified, and these bitter denunciations cease.

We have been doomed to a sad disappointment. The leader of the Radical party (Mr. Blaine) has recently in his place in the United States Congress revived all of the charges which twelve years ago "fired the Northern heart," and has marred the music of the "Centennial chimes," with such language as this:

"Mr. [Jefferson] Davis was the author, knowingly, deliberately, guiltily and wilfully, of the gigantic murder and crime at Andersonville. And I here, before God, measuring my words, knowing their full extent and import, declare that neither the deeds of the Duke of Alva in the Low countries nor the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, nor the thumb screws and engines of torture of the Spanish Inquisition begin to compare in atrocity with the hideous crimes of Andersonville."

He then quotes and endorses the following extract from the report of the ex parte committee of Congress who examined this question at a time when passion was at its flood tide:

"The subsequent history of Andersonville has startled and shocked the world with a tale of horror, of woe and death before unheard and unknown to civilization. No pen can describe, no painter sketch, no imagination comprehend its fearful and unutterable iniquity. It would seem as if the concentrated madness of earth and hell had found its final lodgment in the breasts of those who inaugurated the rebellion and controlled the policy of the Confederate Government, and that the prison at Andersonville had been selected for the most terrible human sacrifice which the world had ever seen. Into its narrow walls were crowded thirty five thousand enlisted men, many of them the bravest and best, the most devoted and heroic of those grand armies which carried the flag of their country to final victory. For long and weary months here they suffered, maddened, were murdered, and died. Here they lingered, unsheltered from the burning rays of a tropical sun by day, and drenching and deadly dews by night, in every stage of mental and physical disease, hungered, emaciated, starving maddened; festering with unhealed wounds; gnawed by the ravages of scurvy and gangrene; with swollen limb and distorted visage; covered with vermin which they had no power to extirpate; exposed to the flooding rains which drove them drowning from the miserable holes in which, like swine, they burrowed; parched with thirst and mad with hunger; racked with pain or prostrated with the weakness of dissolution; with naked limbs and matted hair, filthy with smoke and mud; soiled with the very excrement from which their weakness would not permit them to escape; eaten by the gnawing worms which their own wounds had engendered; with no bed but the earth; no covering save the cloud or the sky; these men, these heroes, born in the image of God, thus crouching and writhing in their terrible torture and calculating barbarity, stand forth in history as a monument of the surpassing horrors of Andersonville as it shall be seen and read in all future time, realizing in the studied torments of their prison house the ideal of Dante's Inferno and Milton's Hell."

VICE PRESIDENT ALEXANDER HAMILTON STEPHENS, in his "War Between the States," declares that the escorts which have been made to "fix the odium of cruelty and barbarity" upon Mr. Davis and the Confederate authorities "constitute one of the boldest and baldest attempted outrages upon the truth of history which has ever been essayed...."

CHARGE OF INTENTIONAL STARVATION AND CRUELTY.

We now proceed to notice, under one head, the last and gravest charge made in these publications. They assert that the Northern prisoners in the hands of the Confederate authorities have been starved, frozen, inhumanly punished, often confined in foul and loathsome quarters, deprived of fresh air and exercise, and neglected and maltreated in sickness and that all this was done upon a deliberate, willful and long conceived plan of the Confederate Government and officers, for the purpose of destroying the lives of these prisoners, or of rendering them forever incapable of military service. This charge accuses the Southern Government of a crime so horrible and unnatural, that it could never have been made except by those ready to blacken with slander men whom they have long injured and hated. Your committee feel bound to reply to it calmly but emphatically. They pronounce it false in fact and in design; false in the basis on which it assumes to rest, and false in its estimate of the motives which have controlled the Southern authorities.

Statement of Dr. Joseph Jones.

In the specification of the first charge against Henry Wirz, formerly commandant of the interior of the Confederate States military prison at Andersonville, during his trial before a special Military Commission, convened in accordance with Special Orders No. 453, War Department, Adjutant General's office, Washington, August 23d, 1865, the following is written:

"And the said Wirz, still pursuing his wicked purpose and still aiding in carrying out said conspiracy, did use and caused to be used, for the pretended purpose of vaccination, impure and poisonous matter, which said impure and poisonous matter was then and there, by the direction and order of said Wirz, maliciously, cruelly and wickedly deposited in the arms of many of the said prisoners, by reason of which large numbers of them -- to wit: one hundred -- lost the use of their arms; and many of them -- to wit: about the number of two hundred -- were so injured that soon there after they died; all of which he, the said Henry Wirz, well knew and maliciously intended, and, in aid of the then existing rebellion against the United States, with the view of weakening and impairing the armies of the United States; and in furtherance of the said conspiracy, and with full knowledge, consent and connivance of his co conspirators aforesaid, he, the said Wirz, then and there did."

Among the co conspirators specified in the charges were the surgeon of the post, Dr. White, and the surgeon in charge of the military prison hospital, R. R. Stevenson, Surgeon, C.S.A. As the vaccinations were made in accordance with the orders of the Surgeon General, C.S.A., and of the medical officers acting under his command, the charge of deliberately poisoning the Federal prisoners with vaccine matter is a sweeping one, and whether intended so or not, affects every medical officer stationed at that post; and it appears to have been designed to go farther, and to affect the reputation of every one who held a commission in the Medical Department of the Confederate army....

"When we remember that the Surgeon General had been apprised of the wants of that prison, and that he had overlooked the real necessities of the prison, shifting the responsibility upon Dr. White, whom he must have known was totally incompetent, it is hard to conceive with what devilish malice, or criminal devotion to his profession, or reckless disregard of the high duties imposed upon him -- I scarcely know which -- he could sit down and deliberately pen such a letter of instructions as that given to Dr. Jones. Was it not enough to have cruelly starved and murdered our soldiers? Was it not enough to have sought to wipe out their very memories by burying them in nameless graves? Was it not enough to have instituted a system of medical treatment, the very embodiment of charlatanism? Was it not enough, without adding to the many other diabolical motives, which must have governed the perpetrators of these acts, this scientific object, as deliberate and cold blooded as one can conceive? The Surgeon General could quiet his conscience when the matter was laid before him, through Colonel Chandler, by endorsing that it was impossible to send medical officers to take the place of the contract physicians on duty at Andersonville; yet could select at the same time a distinguished gentleman of the medical profession and send him to Andersonville, directing the whole force of surgeons there to render him every assistance, leaving their multiplied duties for that purpose. Why? Not to alleviate the sufferings of the prisoners; not to convey to them one ounce more of nutritious food; to make no suggestions for the improvement of their sanitary condition; for no purpose of this kind, but, as the letter of instruction itself shows, for no other purpose than `that this great field of pathological investigation may be explored for the benefit of the Medical Department of the Confederate armies'! The Andersonville Prison, so far as the Surgeon General was concerned, was a mere dissecting room, a clinic institute, to be made tributary to the Medical Department of the Confederate armies."

FAILURE TO MAKE A CASE AGAINST MR. DAVIS.

But a crowning proof that this charge of cruelty to prisoners is false, may be more clearly brought out than it has been above intimated. In the proceedings against Wirz, Mr. Davis and other Confederate leaders were unquestionably on trial. Every effort that partisan hatred or malignant ingenuity could invent was made to connect Mr. Davis with and make him responsible for the "crimes of Andersonville." The captured Confederate archives were searched, perjured witnesses were summoned, and the ablest lawyers of the reigning party put their wits to work; but the prosecution utterly broke down. They were unable to make out a case upon which Holt and Chipman dared to go into a trial even before a military court, which was wont to listen patiently to all of the evidence for the prosecution, and coolly dismiss the witnesses for the defence. Does not this fact speak volumes to disprove the charge, and to show that no cases can be made out against our Government?

But an even stronger point remains. After despairing of convicting Mr. Davis on any testimony which they had or could procure, they tried to bribe poor Wirz to save his own life by swearing away the life of Mr. Davis, who was then in irons at Fortress Monroe....

eBay: ANDERSONVILLE PRISON Henry Wirz To HANG 1865 Newspaper (item 220041954276 end time Nov-04-06 16:45:00 PST)

The Treatment Of Prisoners During The Civil War