We visited the Andersonville Confederate prison camp in GA yesterday. The Federal Government created the museum and national cemetery to honor Prisoners of War (POWs) throughout our history. The graphic design on the plaque was wonderful and the building design evoked the feeling of entering a prison.
Since I’m fascinated with how people respond in difficult circumstances, I knew I’d learn something from this brutal place. In case you don’t know the background, the Confederate Army, during the US Civil War in the early 1864, built a POW camp to hold 10,000 men. Within months they had 24,000 within the vertical log wall enclosure and a couple hundred men dying each day.
Since the Confederates had almost no chance of winning the war at that time, the conditions were horrible. The food rations were extremely limited, and the vendors that provided the cornmeal often ground the corncobs as well to increase profits. With most of the men suffering from dysentery, the ground corncobs played further havoc on their GI tracts.
The guards were posted on watchtowers outside the walls and all the prisoners were a mass inside. No shelter was provided. So any prisoner that brought a blanket or a part of a tent could fashion some covering from the weather. The prisoners named these shelters “Shebangs”. The expression “The whole shebang” came from Andersonville.
If you look carefully at the photo above, you’ll see a simple board fence 19′ inside the vertical log prison walls. Captain Wirz,the camp commandant, gave orders that any prisoner crossing this line would be shot. Many were shot and the prisoners nicknamed the fence “The Deadline”. The term deadline, meaning an important event that must be recognized, came into the English language from Andersonville.
The leadership of Captain Wirz captured my attention. Some historians describe him as a good man caught in an untenable situation. He wrote letters to his superiors, to surrounding towns and to businesses describing the horrible conditions and requesting help. One prisoner wrote in his diary that Wirz was “A beast of a man.” He responded to one prisoner plea about the horrible conditions by indicating that he had no ability to change it, he said, “God help you, I cannot”. After the war, in the heat of the Northern rage about Andersonville, Wirz was tried as a war criminal and hung. He was the only person held responsible for the conditions.
So, was he good? Was he evil? I think situations often take us past those questions to another, was he competent? Since his duty was to keep the prisoners from escaping and almost no one escaped, he was competent in that regard. Yet his competency for feeding and health care was lacking. He did write letters, but I believe more could have been done. Creative thinking grows from competency.
When evaluating others and ourselves, we need to consider both our morality (good or evil) and our competency (ability to get the important things done). I have known and worked with lots of decent, incompetent people. It’s an important skill to determine where the folks you deal with fall on the decency and the competency scales. Then you can make effective decisions about what to expect from them.
Take some time to think about where you hang on those scales as well. I know I strive to be as decent and as competent a person as I’m capable of being. To move in those directions takes intent, introspection and action.
