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Civil War Camp Sumter, the notorious Confederate prison popularly known as Andersonville, became the world's first great concentration camp. Almost one third of the some 40,000 federal prisoners who entered its gates remain there today in its cemetery. The National POW Museum, representing all of America's wars, is part of the modern national park and cemetery on the site.
The volumes of material in print about this prison do not, until now, include an in depth discussion of the subject of escape. Contrary to popular myth only some two dozen men broke out of Andersonville and successfully reached Federal lines. And despite legends to the contrary, almost none of them escaped by tunnel.
This article uses statistics and personal narratives to explore how isolation thwarted efforts to flee the high mortality rate of this prison. Although the article covers many factors unique to Andersonville, such as POWs helped by slaves, it also compares fleeing this prison to generalities about escapes from confinement in later wars.
IN late February 1864, the Confederate States of America (CSA) opened Camp Sumter at Anderson Station, Andersonville Post Office, in southern Georgia. It became the largest prisoner-of-war (POW) camp of the American Civil War. Of United States prisoners in all wars, more than one in sixteen were among the approximately forty thousand confined in Andersonville. (Andersonville National Historic Site today includes the National POW Museum.) More than any other of the many large Civil War prisons, Andersonville can be said to mark the beginning of the modern concentration camp and thus furnishes the camp with a notoriety that extends beyond the Civil War.
Andersonville's fame extends to stories of successful escapes, although the general histories of the camp seldom provide specifics on this subject. The dozens of prisoner memoirs prove almost as silent.1 Thousands of American families do have tales of ancestors who successfully broke out of this notorious prison, usually by tunnel, but, unfortunately, most of these men were confined elsewhere not at Andersonville. The camp's reputation, which almost obliterated the memory of other Confederate prisons, inspired veterans falsely to claim confinement there.2
Although some soldiers fabricated accounts of their escapes from Andersonville, many of the camp's actual prisoners did attempt to flee its harsh conditions. The...