Concentration camps during the civil war?

Answer 1

They were not called that. They were called prison camps. Unlike the German concentration camps of World War 2, prisoners were not deliberately put to death. Prisoners were given very meager rations. They went hungry. In the Confederate camps, they received the same meager rations as the solders in the field. They too went hungry. The solders in the field would steal food as they marched through the land. They only went hungry as they camped and depended on the supply wagons for food.

Answer 2

Not in the Nazi style, where the express purpose was to kill or starve.

But after Grant ended the system of prisoner-exchange in March 1864, there was going to be an awful lot of overcrowding (or 'concentration'), that would bring out the worst in both jailers and jailed.

The most notorious camp was Andersonville in Georgia, where 45,000 Union troops were held prisoner, and nearly a third of them died.

This would probably have happened, even under an entirely ethical camp commandant, since the Confederate armies themselves were on short rations by this stage in the war, and medical supplies were virtually non-existent.

Those who claim that the camp was the scene of deliberate war-crimes can point to the eventual hanging of the commandant (Wirz) for murder and conspiracy.

But his court-martial was conducted in a highly-emotive atmosphere, just after Lincoln's assassination, and the claims of brutality (now known to be exaggerated) attracted more attention than Wirz's proof that he had been trying to appeal to the Confederate Government to get conditions improved.

The biggest cause of suffering was the overcrowding itself, and as starvation took hold, prisoners formed rival gangs who fought each other savagely. Under these conditions, the prison guards would be liable to forget the official rules of engagement.