The Ghost of Georgia Clay: Andersonville, America’s Hell on Earth
The red clay of Sumter County, Georgia, still whispers stories. Stories of desperation, disease, and death. Stories etched into the very soil where, for a harrowing 14 months during the American Civil War, stood Camp Sumter, more commonly known as Andersonville Prison. It was a place designed to hold captured Union soldiers, but it rapidly devolved into a crucible of human suffering so profound it remains a scar on the nation’s conscience, a stark reminder of war’s ultimate brutality.
Between February 1864 and April 1865, approximately 45,000 Union prisoners of war were confined within its crude, pine-log stockade. Of these, nearly 13,000 perished from starvation, disease, or exposure – a death rate of almost 29%. To put that into perspective, more Americans died at Andersonville than in the entirety of the Vietnam War. This wasn’t a battlefield,
