Jesus Christ, POW

One hundred and fifty years ago the POW camp at Andersonville, Georgia, was a place of death and degradation.

On February 14, 1864, during the latter half of the American Civil War (or the Yankee War of Aggression, as it's still known by many in the South), the first 500 Union prisoners of war arrived at the newly opened Confederate stockade in Andersonville, Georgia. Andersonville was far from the war front, and, with the Confederate government needing every available man in the ranks, this remote POW camp in the rural South was in a place where enemy raids were less likely. Only a skeleton force was needed to guard the prisoners. It was also far away from any possibility of inspection by Union officials, who had stopped the longstanding practice of prisoner exchanges that had prevailed earlier in the war.

When those first prisoners walked into the gates of Andersonville, officially named Camp Sumter in honor of the first battle in the war, they entered a stockade designed to hold 10,000 men. It had log walls and covered 16.5 acres with a small stream running through it. By the summer of...