Civil War
Wirz enlisted as a private in Company A, Fourth Battalion of Louisiana Volunteers of the Confederate States Army in May 1861. He took part in the Battle of Seven Pines in May 1862, during which he was wounded by a minie ball and lost the use of his right arm. After returning to his unit on June 12, 1862, Wirz was promoted to Captain "for bravery on the field of battle." Because of his injury, Wirz was assigned to the staff of General John H. Winder, who was in charge of Confederate prisoner of war camps.
President Jefferson Davis made Captain Wirz a Special Minister and sent him to Europe carrying secret dispatches to the Confederate Commissioners, Mister Mason in England and Mister Slidell in France. Wirz returned from Europe in January 1864 and reported back to Richmond, Virginia, where he began working for General Winder in the prison department. Wirz then served on detached duty as a prison guard in Alabama, then transferred to help guard Federal prisoners incarcerated at Richmond.
Read more about this topic: Henry Wirz
Famous quotes related to civil war:
“We have heard all of our lives how, after the Civil War was over, the South went back to straighten itself out and make a living again. It was for many years a voiceless part of the government. The balance of power moved away from it—to the north and the east. The problems of the north and the east became the big problem of the country and nobody paid much attention to the economic unbalance the South had left as its only choice.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“Since the Civil War its six states have produced fewer political ideas, as political ideas run in the Republic, than any average county in Kansas or Nebraska.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“The utter helplessness of a conquered people is perhaps the most tragic feature of a civil war or any other sort of war.”
—Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930)
“... there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)