Henry Wirz

Career and family

Born in Zurich, Switzerland, to Hans Caspar Wirz and Sophie Barbara Philipp, Henry Wirz received elementary and secondary education. He aspired to become a physician, but his family did not possess funds to pay for his medical education. Instead, he became a merchant and worked in Zurich and Turin. Wirz, who had married Emilie Oschwald in 1845 and had two children, received a four-year prison term in April 1847 for inability to return money that he borrowed. The court commuted his sentence to 12-year forcible emigration. His wife refused to emigrate and obtained a divorce in 1853.

In 1848, Wirz went to Russia and the next year to the United States, where he found employment in a factory in Lawrence, Massachusetts. After five years, he moved to Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and worked as a doctor's assistant. He tried to establish his own homeopathic medicine practice in Cadiz, Kentucky, and also worked as superintendent of a water cure clinic in Northampton, Massachusetts.

In 1854, he married a Methodist widow named Elizabeth Wolfe. Along with her two daughters, they moved to Louisiana, where in 1855 she gave birth to their daughter Cora. In Louisiana, Wirz worked for Levin Marshall as a plantation overseer and physician.

Civil War

Wirz enlisted as a private in Company A (Madison Infantry), 4th Battalion of Louisiana Infantry of the Confederate army in Madison, Louisiana. He took part in the Battle of Seven Pines in May 1862, during which he was wounded by a Minie ball and lost the use of his right arm. After returning to his unit on June 12, 1862, Wirz was promoted to captain "for bravery on the field of battle." Because of his injury, he was assigned to the staff of Gen. John H. Winder, who was in charge of Confederate POW camps, as his adjutant.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis made Capt. Wirz a Special Minister and sent him to Europe carrying secret dispatches to Confederate Commissioners James Mason in England and John Slidell in France. Wirz returned from Europe in January 1864 and reported back to Richmond, Virginia, where he began working for Gen. Winder in the prison department. Wirz then served on detached duty as a prison guard in Alabama, then transferred to help guard Union prisoners incarcerated at Richmond.

Camp Sumter

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 April 1864, Wirz took command of Camp Sumter, where he remained for over a year. Shortly before the end of the war, Wirz was promoted to the rank of major.

Though wooden barracks were originally planned, the Confederates incarcerated the prisoners in a vast, rectangular, open-air stockade originally encompassing 16-1/2 acres, which had been intended as only a temporary prison pending exchanges of prisoners with the North. The prisoners gave this place the name Andersonville. The prison suffered from severe overcrowding; poor sanitary conditions; and an extreme lack of food, tools and medical supplies, and potable water.

Wirz recognized that the conditions were inadequate and petitioned his superiors to provide more support; this was denied. In July 1864, he sent five prisoners to the Union with a petition written by the inmates asking the government to negotiate their release.

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, dysentery, and malnutrition reached 3,000. Around 45,000 prisoners were incarcerated during the camp's 14-month existence, of whom close to 13,000 (28%) died.

Trial and execution

Wirz was arrested by a contingent of the 4th U.S. Cavalry on May 7, 1865, in Andersonville. He was taken first to Macon, Georgia, and then by rail to Washington, D.C., arriving there on May 10, 1865. He was held in the Old Capitol Prison since the Federal government decided to put him on trial for conspiring to impair the lives of Union prisoners of war. A special Military Commission was convened with Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace presiding. The other members were Gershom Mott; John W. Geary; Lorenzo Thomas; Francis Fessenden; Edward S. Bragg; John F. Ballier, U.S. Volunteers; T. Allcock, 4th New York Artillery; and John H. Stibbs, 12th Iowa Volunteers. Col. Norton P. Chipman served as Judge Advocate.

Charges

The military tribunal took place between August 23 and October 18, 1865, held in the Court of Federal Claims, and dominating the front pages of newspapers across the United States. Wirz was charged with "combining, confederating, and conspiring, together with John H. Winder, Richard B. Winder, Joseph [Isaiah H.] White, W. S. Winder, R. R. Stevenson, and others unknown, 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 and impaired, in violation of the laws and customs of war" and for "violation of the laws of war, to impair and injure the health and to destroy the lives—by subjecting to torture and great suffering; by confining in unhealthy and unwholesome quarters; by exposing to the inclemency of winter and to the dews and burning sun of summer; by compelling the use of impure water; and by furnishing insufficient and unwholesome food—of large numbers of Federal prisoners." Wirz was accused of committing 13 acts of personal cruelty and murders in August 1864: by revolver (specifications 1, 3, 4), by physically stomping and kicking the victim (specification 2) and by confining prisoners in stocks (specifications 5, 6), by beating a prisoner with a revolver (specification 13) and by chaining prisoners together (specification 7). Wirz was also charged with ordering guards to fire on prisoners with muskets (specifications 8, 9, 10, 12) and to have dogs attack escaped prisoners (specification 11). Wirz was found guilty of all charges except the murder in specification 4.

Testimonies

The court heard the testimonies of former Camp Sumter prisoners, ex-Confederate soldiers, and residents of nearby Andersonville. Out of the 160 witnesses on the stand, 145 testified that they did not observe Wirz killing anybody; others failed to provide particulars and introduced evidence remained hearsay. Twelve said that they witnessed cruelty on behalf of Wirz. However, there was one witness whose testimony was particularly damning. He went by the name of Felix de la Baume and claimed to be a descendant of the Marquis de Lafayette. He identified under oath a victim allegedly killed personally 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. However, it was claimed after the trial that his real name was Felix Oesser and that he was a deserter from the 7th New York Volunteer Regiment.

Among those giving testimony was Father Peter Whelan, a Catholic priest who worked with the inmates, who testified on Wirz's behalf. Also among those called to testify was Robert E. Lee. According to Fitzhugh Lee, the nephew of General Robert E. Lee, "[Lee] knew the captain had done all that was possible with the resources at his disposal; subsistence for them had been most difficult to procure, their exchange for an equal number of Southerners had been refused, while the Federal blockade kept out medical supplies."

Verdict

In his closing statement, the Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt vilified Wirz and pronounced that, "his work of death seems to have been a saturnalia of enjoyment for the prisoner [Wirz], who amid these savage orgies evidenced such exultation and mingled with them such nameless blasphemy and ribald jest, as at times to exhibit him rather as a demon than a man."

In early November 1865, the Military Commission announced that it had found Wirz guilty of conspiracy as charged, along with 11 of 13 counts of acts of personal cruelty. He was sentenced to death.

In a letter to U.S. 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 by an emissary from a high Cabinet official that if Wirz would implicate Jefferson Davis in the atrocities committed at Andersonville, his sentence would be commuted. Allegedly, Schade repeated the offer to Wirz and was replied, "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 of him I would not become a traitor against him, or anybody else, even to save my life." Rev. P. E. Bole received the same visitor and later sent a letter to Jefferson Davis, who included it as well as Wirz's reply to Schade in his book, Andersonville and Other War-Prisons (1890). Andersonville quartermaster Richard B. Winder, who was in the prison at the time also confirmed this episode.

Execution

Wirz was hanged at 10:32 a.m. on November 10, 1865, at the Old Capitol Prison, by the U.S. Capitol, the present-day site of the Supreme Court of the United States. His neck did not break from the fall, and the crowd of 200 spectators guarded by 120 soldiers watched as he writhed and slowly suffocated. He was buried in the Mount Olivet Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

Wirz was one of two men tried, convicted, and executed for war crimes during the Civil War, the other being Confederate guerrilla Champ Ferguson. Confederate soldiers Robert Cobb Kennedy and John Yates Beall were executed for spying and Marcellus Jerome Clarke and Henry C. Magruder were executed for being guerrillas.

Wirz controversy

Henry Wirz's trial and execution created a lasting controversy. It started when it was disclosed that the star witness for the prosecution worked for the Interior Department and that he had perjured himself at the trial. He was not Felix de la Baume from France, but Felix Oeser born in the 1840s in Saxony, which was a part of the German Confederation at the time, and was actually a deserter from the 7th New York Volunteers. The Washington Evening Star published on November 27, 1865, the following, "The German witness Baume, who figured extensively in the Wirz trial, has been dismissed from the Interior Department, it having been shown that he was a deserter from the 7th New York (Steuben) regiment. His real name is Felix Oessel."

The Wirz controversy grew out of the questions remaining after his trial pertaining to guilt and responsibility for multiple deaths of prisoners of war in camps on both sides following after the Dix-Hill Cartel suspension. The Grand Army of the Republic, the United Confederate Veterans, Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, among others, evoked sad memories of Civil War prisoners portraying Wirz either a villain, or a martyr-hero, thus further contributing to the disputation. In 1899-1916, sixteen states erected monuments dedicated to the Camp Sumter's prisoners. In response, the United Daughters of the Confederacy initiated a construction of a monument honoring Henry Wirz in Andersonville, Georgia. Until recently, Sons of Confederate Veterans annually marched to a Wirz's memorial in Andersonville along with supporters of a congressional pardon for him.

During and after the trial Wirz was reviled in the court of public opinion as "The Demon of Andersonville". After time passed, some writers suggested Wirz's tribunal was unfair and claimed that "Wirz did not receive a fair trial. Nevertheless, he was found guilty and sentenced to death." Even a few of his former prisoners conceded during the trial that the little support Wirz received from the Confederate government in terms of food, water, and medical supplies made the conditions at Andersonville beyond his scope of responsibility. In 1980, historian Morgan D. Peoples referred to Wirz as a "scapegoat." Wirz's conviction remains controversial.

Despite the surrounding controversy, the Wirz trial, one of the nation's most famous early 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 popular culture

In Saul Levitt's 1959 play The Andersonville Trial, Wirz was first played by Herbert Berghof. When the play was recreated for an episode of PBS's 1970-71 season of Hollywood Television Theatre, Wirz was portrayed by Richard Basehart. Wirz was portrayed by actor Jan Tříska in the American film Andersonville (1996).