The guards, disease, starvation and exposure are…
July 1864 CE
The guards, disease, starvation and exposure are not all that prisoners have to deal with.
A group of prisoners, calling themselves the Andersonville Raiders, attack their fellow inmates to steal food, jewelry, money and clothing.
They are armed mostly with clubs and kill to get what they want.
Another group had risen up to stop the larceny, calling themselves "Regulators".
They catch nearly all of the Raiders, who are then tried by a judge (Peter "Big Pete" McCullough) and jury selected from a group of new prisoners.
This jury, upon finding the Raiders guilty, had set punishment that includes running the gauntlet, being sent to the stocks, ball and chain and, in six cases, hanging, which takes place on July 11, 1864, concluding the group's control of the Confederate prison.
The conditions are so poor that in July, 1864 Captain Henry Wirz, commandant of the inner stockade at Camp Sumter, paroles five Union soldiers to deliver a petition signed by the majority of Andersonville's prisoners asking that the Union reinstate prisoner exchanges.
The request in the petition is denied and the Union soldiers, who had sworn to do so, return to report this to their comrades.