The encampments of the United States infantry afford, in the most
restricted portion (between stacks of arms and kitchens), two hundred and
forty-four square feet per man, or seventeen hundred and thirty-one square
feet per man for the whole camp.
The space allowed by law for barracks alone is fifty-four square feet for
each soldier, reckoned on the basis of a full complement of men. The rules
of the rebel army concerning camps are the same as those of the
regulations of the United States army.
The United States prison at Elmira contained six thousand men, and
extended over forty acres. The other prisons, at Chicago, Johnson's
Island, Point Lookout, and Fort Delaware, were provided with spacious
exercise grounds, and furnished with covered barracks, built of proper
form, and fitted up with the required conveniences of life. Belle Isle,
which held ten thousand prisoners, had but six acres, and no shelter, no
conveniences whatever.
Andersonville, which contained over thirty thousand prisoners, had in the
stockade, before enlargement, but eighteen acres in all, and but twelve
acres for the use of the prisoners, minus the dead line and the marsh.
The prison at Dartmoor, in England (which was a paradise in comparison
with Andersonville), where our prisoners were held in captivity by the
English during the last war, furnished two hundred to three hundred
square feet to every prisoner in the barracks, besides allowing spacious
yards, where the prisoners were permitted to exercise daily. There were
there seven large two-story stone buildings, each one hundred and eighty
feet in length. Five thousand prisoners enclosed within twenty acres of
land at Dartmoor, thirty thousand in twelve acres, or thirty-five thousand
in twenty-two acres, at Andersonville.