War has many unpleasant sides, and the way in which prisoners of war are held can be one of them.  The US Civil War cannot be proud of the places like Andersonville (and both sides had them) where the conditions in which men were held were pretty dreadful. To keep the record straight, we British cannot be proud of the camps in which we held people in the Boer War, where we built the first Concentration Camps.  After WW1 my Grandfather always spoke well of the way he was treated by the Germans after he was taken prisoner.

There is an excellent visitor centre and museum at Andersonville, with lots of photos etc. on display.  The extent of the camp is all marked out on the fields, but the camp itself is pretty well all gone.  The photos below are my own.

This is a small section of the large cemetery at Andersonville.  The headstones are closer together than in WW2 cemeteries, but there is much more space between the rows.  Most of us in Europe are used to seeing the very large WW1 cemeteries in France, but do not expect to see them in the US.  We have never come to fully appreciate over here how many men fell in the Civil War.

I was struck by the small physical area covered by the camp, it is all marked out. But there were many thousands of men in that small area, with just a small stream flowing through the middle of it.  There is a small bridge over it in the middle forground of the photo.

The photo above shows one of the replicas of the shelters in which the prisoners lived.  They had to build these themselves.  It was a hot day when I visited, it must have been pretty unpleasant to be there for real.

Some of the headstones at Andersonville, from the left; Private Lewis Anderson, N.Y.; Private John Billows, Mich.; W.H. Boyd, Tenn.; W. Lancha, U.S.A.; Sergeant T.W. Rankin, KY; C.T. Hartleib, PA.; M. Whalen, NY.; Corporal H. Stines, Mich.