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On July 11, 1862, the Richmond Enquirer reported that 5,300 prisoners were held in the 3,000-capacity facility, although the paper noted that “their friends in the North may be perfectly satisfied that they will pass a pleasant summer at Richmond.” Wirz revoked all privileges, in part due to overcrowding. Considered lenient with the prisoners, he was replaced in August 1862 by Captain Henry Wirz, a Swiss-born medical doctor who was hanged after the war for his treatment of prisoners at Andersonville in Georgia. The prison’s first commandant was Captain Norris Montgomery. This limited shelter proved grossly inadequate, especially as the number of prisoners steadily grew. The prison’s six-acre perimeter consisted of earthworks that stood roughly three feet high, and the prisoners’ only shelter came from three hundred or fewer Sibley tents (conical, pole tents invented by Henry Hopkins Sibley), which slept about ten men each. Unlike Castle Thunder and Libby prisons, both brick structures located in Richmond, Belle Isle was an open-air stockade. In the meantime, the bridge connecting the island to the city could facilitate the movement of prisoners to the Richmond and Danville Railroad for easy transfer to points outside Richmond.Īlthough Belle Isle’s isolation was ideal in terms of discouraging escape attempts, its location proved less than ideal in terms of shelter. The island, formerly a vacation spot for the people of Richmond, was located at the fall line of the James River, and Confederate authorities reasoned that the site’s swift rapids would discourage escape attempts. To remedy the situation, Confederate officials purchased a fifty-four-acre island in the James River from Old Dominion Iron and Nail Works. In the summer of 1862, Richmond suffered from an overpopulation of Union prisoners of war.