The Confederacy established Camp Sumter near Andersonville, Georgia, in early 1864 as a prison for captured Union soldiers. A stockade of tall pine logs enclosed an exposed valley crossed by a small stream. Designed for roughly ten thousand prisoners, it soon held more than thirty thousand at once after prisoner exchange largely collapsed. Captives built shelters from scraps, blankets, and excavated earth. A railing inside the wall marked the deadline; guards could shoot anyone who crossed it. Overcrowding rapidly overwhelmed the water supply, sanitation, food distribution, and medical care.

Nearly forty-five thousand prisoners passed through Camp Sumter during its fourteen months of operation, and almost thirteen thousand died. Diarrhea, scurvy, dysentery, exposure, contaminated water, and starvation were leading causes, intensified by administrative failure and the Confederacy's deteriorating resources. Prisoners organized mutual aid, markets, policing, escape attempts, and burial details, but violence and inequality existed within the captive population. African American Union soldiers and people held in other categories also experienced Confederate imprisonment, though the surviving Andersonville record and later memory long centered white enlisted captives.

As Union armies advanced, Confederate authorities transferred many prisoners elsewhere, and the camp ceased regular operation in 1865. Clara Barton and former prisoner Dorence Atwater helped identify graves and mark the cemetery that summer. The United States tried commandant Henry Wirz for conspiracy and murder; he was convicted and executed, becoming a focus for conflicting sectional narratives about responsibility. The prison's suffering resulted from policies and conditions larger than one officer, including the Confederacy's decision to wage war to preserve slavery and its treatment of Black Union troops, which complicated exchange negotiations.

The stockade and most camp buildings disappeared after the war, leaving earthworks, archaeological deposits, the stream valley, wells, monuments, and grave rows. Veterans' groups and states erected memorials, and the Woman's Relief Corps preserved the prison grounds before transfer to the federal government. Congress established Andersonville National Historic Site in 1970. The National Park Service later reconstructed limited sections of the stockade and deadline based on historical and archaeological evidence. Those upright log walls are modern interpretive structures; the terrain, earthworks, cemetery, graves, and subsurface remains carry the principal original fabric.

The site now includes the former prison, Andersonville National Cemetery, and the National Prisoner of War Museum, which interprets American prisoners across conflicts. The National Park Service and Department of Veterans Affairs share responsibilities in the broader complex, and access is generally free under posted hours and cemetery rules. Modern roads, exhibits, monuments, reconstructed features, and commemorative ceremonies layer later memory onto the 1864 landscape. Strong interpretation preserves individual testimony without turning suffering into spectacle, distinguishes wartime remains from later memorial construction, and situates captivity within military policy, race, disease, logistics, survival, death, and national reconciliation.