What would you have done, if you had spent your youth fighting for freedom as you saw it, settled in a new country with promise, built a career, and then found your adopted country embroiled in a fight for its life? Fought alongside it, no doubt. What would you have done then, if, wounded, useless in battle, you had been assigned the most thankless, impossible task of the war - overseeing 45,000 prisoners with a skeleton crew, a few cannon, and minimal supplies? The best you could, within your orders?
What if, the war lost, you had been put on trial by the victors? Would you have said, 'I made this situation, I am responsible', or would you have said, 'I did the best I could'? Who was responsible for this horror, anyway?
In our day, we are accustomed to international tribunals which try political and military leaders for war crimes, for what we call crimes against humanity. But Henry Wirz, the only man hanged for a war crime at the end of the US Civil War, was the first such 'war criminal'. Whether this was just - whether Wirz deserved to die for what he did or did not do during the last 14 months of this bitter internecine conflict - is a question that is still controversial.
For Henry Wirz was the commandant of the Confederate prison stockade called Camp Sumter - known to history as Andersonville.
