19. General Winder shifted his command to South Carolina
As the population of prisoners in Camp Sumter decreased, General Winder shifted most of his men to the new prison camps in Florence, South Carolina. He returned to Andersonville in the fall of 1864 and again in early 1865. Both trips were to ensure all prisoners healthy enough to be exchanged had been transferred from the camp. On February 7, 1865, Winder suffered a fatal heart attack while in Florence. His end led to Major General Gideon J. Pillow assuming Winder’s former position. Later that same month, Henry Wirz requested either a shipment of shoes or leather with which to make shoes be sent to the camp. Wirz reported many of the parolees in the camp were without shoes, though several of them possessed cobbler skills. Neither shoes nor leather was sent to the camp.
After the war, Henry Wirz, who predicted his own fate, was tried for what would today be called war crimes, by a military tribunal in Washington. He argued that the general parole granted By General Sherman when he accepted the surrender of the last Confederate army covered him. But too much evidence from former prisoners and Confederate guards convicted him. Apologists for the Confederacy claimed Wirz was scapegoated, and the man who ensured the suffering of the prisoners at Camp Sumter was really General John Winder. Wirz, convicted, was hanged in the Old Capitol Prison, one of only two Confederate’s to be executed following the war. In May 1865, townspeople and former guards looted the storehouses at Camp Sumter, coming away with supplies which had never been issued to the prisoners.
