Andersonville relics for sale
Library of Congress
The summer after the Civil War ended, famed nurse Clara Barton traveled to Andersonville, the notorious Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in Georgia, to assist in identifying and marking the graves of the nearly 13,000 men who had died there. It was part of the federal government’s move to appropriate the prison’s burial ground and make it a national cemetery.
When she returned to Washington, D.C., Barton resumed her work at the Missing Soldiers Office, which she had founded earlier that year to help families locate soldiers who had not returned home.
To help support her efforts—Barton refused to take money from those searching for lost relatives—she displayed and sold some Andersonville relics that she and her companions had collected during their time at the camp. Among the carefully labeled items for sale at an event held in June 1866 (shown above) was a piece of the camp’s “Dead Line,” a post and rail fence positioned 19 feet inside the prison’s wall and beyond which inmates were not permitted to cross on pain of being shot. Though it is unclear how much money was raised by this sale, Barton’s Missing Soldiers Office was an unquestioned success. By the time it closed in 1868, it had received 63,182 inquiries and helped identify 22,000 missing men, including those buried at Andersonville.
Related topics: prisons and prisoners
