% effective. put another way, the boys and girls received at least one injection of vaccine at about four times as much protection as those without it. we can all be proud of the vaccine but you can all share in the hope that this is a victory. >> for maximum protection of paralytic polio, three inoculations the second not less than two weeks after the first, the third not less than seven months later. your child or anyone else eligible in your community should be vaccinated now. vaccination now will save lives from death or paralysis this year. make use of increasing supplies of vaccine, help your child grow up strong and straight, free from crippling polio. youngsters like david eisenhower, like polio pioneer randy kerr, are part of a bright

new future. a future which will see the unconditional surrender of infantile paralysis. >> tonight, on q&a, david brooks, columnist for "the new york times" on writing an article for the times and the awards he gives out at the end of the year. the sidney awards. >> they're given for the best magazine essays of the year. and they can be in journals or in the new yorker, atlantic or obscure literary magazines. the idea is they come out at christmas week between christmas and new year's. that's a time to step back, not to read things -- to step back and read something deeper and longer. and it's to celebrate those longer pieces. >> i do believe magazines change history. the new republic which until the

recent destruction was the most influential american political magazine of the 20th century. really did change history. it created progressivism, a voice for modern liberalism. conservatism barely existed before national review and gave it a voice. >> tonight at 8:00 eastern and pacific on c-span's q&a. swiss born confederate captain henry wirz was in charge of a war camp where 13,000 of approximately 45,000 union prisoners died while being held. author and law professor paul finkleman discussed the execution of henry wirz and the concept of war crimes. the half hour long talk is a portion of the 2014 civil war symposium hosted by the u.s. capital historical society. >> your next speaker is me.

so having introduced myself, i will not do it again. because of the vagaries of the world of the u.s. senate we're going try to get out of here at 4:30 instead of a 4:45. i'm going to speak in a truncated version of my talk so that michael hornberg can have the full allotted time that he's been promised. so both of us in a sense will be talking about andersonville and the trial of henry wirz. in the civil war, frank leslie illustrated -- published this set of photographs at the -- on the front page of it. you can see all of them are soldiers who had just come back. it's like nothing that americans had ever seen and in fact looking like people that americans or the world would mostly not see again until the

end of world war ii until people came out of places like auschwitz. these were truly frightening pictures. after the war, we began to get other pictures. this is a soldier from new york. a recently discovered photograph by a graduate student, a new graduate student at george mason university candace gray found this for me. this is a man whose feet became infected and his feet were literally cut off by scissors and then later they had to use bone saws to saw the bones off. and he -- along with this picture of calvin baits of new york, an affidavit that he sent to the government about what happened to him. he was in andersonville. another person from andersonville. the same guy being examined in a number of different ways.

i will shut them off. we don't want to be staring at them. but i think it's important to understand that when we think about the trial of henry wirz the anderson mill trial we start with the images. because what americans saw at the end of the war as the prisoners came back from the south were horrors that seemed unbelievable. andersonville was the worse of the prison camps. approximately 13,400 of them died while they were at andersonville. hen rip wirz, the captain in charge of andersonville was arrested in may, 1865. he was subsequently tried. while he was held in jail, he made complaints that his wife was not allowed to visit him as often as he wanted. this is a man who clearly had a sense of entitlement that seems

totally disconnected from what he was on trial for and the way that he treated prisoners in andersonville. a nice play off of that. while u.s. soldiers were prisoners in andersonville, women from the area tried to bring them fresh vegetables, because confederate southern women saw what was happening to the prisoners of andersonville and they were shocked by the horror of it. there are letters where they say that even those -- these people were evil yankees, nobody should be treated like this. and, of course, wirz would not allow them to bring fresh vegetables to the soldiers who are incarcerated there. at wirz's trial, 160 people to testify. the trial is by all standards of modern trials in due processes a train wreck. it is not a legitimate trial we

normally would hold trials. the evidence is weird, for example, a number of soldier ss testified that they saw wirz with soldiers on the particular days and some of the days were the days that he was not in the camp because he was on sick leave. we have a trial where it is easy to pick apart the trial and say the trial of henry wirz was not a legitimate trial. it was a trial of vengeance of venningble northerners picking on this poor captain. had people incarcerated and people looking at this. one of the questions was not why wirz was tried. why was wirz the only one that was tried.

the thing we need to think about when we think about the end of the war is not the wirz trial but the failure to try a number of significant other confederate leaders for what today comes. and one of the problems of the jurisprudence of postcivil war america that no one has a conception of what a war trial is. when wirz is put on trial, they want to put him on trial for murder. and the charge is you have to prove that wirz himself murdered prisoners of war. now there's fairly strong evidence that he did shoot prisoners of war. there is fairly strong evidence that he may have simply killed or ordered the summary execution of people for no good reason at all. but what the wirz trial really is is the beginnings of the concept of war crimes and the concept of crimes against humanity and the idea that some

people can be tried not for what they did in the direct sense of killing people, but rather for their leadership, for their crimes of omission as leaders, and for their crimes of co-mission in creating circumstances that leads to the death of in this case, thousands of people who needlessly died. to apply the standards of the wirz trial in nuremberg or after world war ii, one would image than you would have to prove that the nazis tried at nuremberg tried in israel would have to prove that they personally put somebody in the gas chamber. and, of course, by the end of world war ii we no longer have to do that. so what i want to do is step away from the trial itself. and talk about the crime and talk about what wirz is on trial for. before the civil war the united states army had something known

as the u.s. articles of war. and the u.s. articles of war essentially followed the traditional well understood customs of warfare at the time. and one of the customs of warfare at times, the understandings and usages that were accepted by all americans since the revolution that had been promulgated by the military over and over again. including the general regulations of army promulgated by john c. calhoun. all of the rules sailed you had to treat prisoners of war humanely. you had to provide them with enough food and shelter. you could not summarily execute them. and every one of the leading confederate officers and all of the confederate officers because most of them were west point graduates had studied the rules learned about the rules. applied the rules while they

were in the united states army before they left the united states army. the confederate government adopts the regulations of the army of the confederate states. among other things when it adopts, it adopts verbatim the u.s. articles of war. so in fact the existing rules on how you treat prisoner ohs of war in 1860 are the same for the confederate army in 1865. now, they have changed for the united states because during the war, the united states used the libra code, which is a code of war and a conduct written by frances liber. he's spent most of his adult life at the college of south carolina which became the university of south carolina. and his code sets out again further rules for the treatment of war. but not substantially different

from the rules. now they explicitly codified a few more rules and the united states made it clear that it expects its soldiers and its enemies to abide by these rules. and while the confederates can say we are not under the liber code, the confederates are certainly aware that the liber code was out there and might be used against them. by the way we heard a more vel louse talk about general sherman. general sherman marches through georgia under the libra code and he executes his own troops for violating the code. there are northern troops, for instance in one case. they -- the servants' officers find a covered wagon full of things that american soldiers have taken from southern homes. and sherman orders the trial of everyone connected to this wagon. and he simply burns the entire

wagon. he doesn't know who these things belong to, but clearly they are not going to belong to u.s. troops because that would violate the libra coat. it allows for the taking of food, it does not allow for the taking of private possessions. and, of course, as we learned earlier today, the libra protects scientific instruments and books, etc. now the treatment of prisoners of war had been on the table for a long time. after the american revolution, it's how they treated p.o.w.'s. the southerners complained about the way the british treated americans captured in the war of 1812. so southerners have long been complaining about inhumane treatment of people who are prisoners of war. now, at andersonville, as in any of these camps, you could be certain that there would be a

reasonably high death toll because of disease, because of the not very well understood ways in which you have sanitation in a prisoner of war camp. because prisoners of war came wounded. but there are certain things that happen in andersonville that don't happen anywhere else. one of them is the water supply. andersonville is built downstream from a confederate military camp. the confederate military camp uses the river that runs through the andersonville prison. it's really a creek. uses the creek as a sort of open latrine. so the creek going through andersonville increasingly becomes an open sewer. the water is polluted. by the end of the war, the only marginally fresh water in this stream is in the very center of the stream. so if you wade through the muck

the human waste and pollution coming down from the confederate camp and reach into the middle of the river, you can get fresh water. captain wirz puts ropes along the river to prevent people from reaching the middle of the river and orders the soldiers who shoots to kill anyone reaching over the rope to get fresh water. so the prisoners in andersonville have a choice. they can either drink polluted water filled with human waste or they can risk getting shot trying to reach fresh water. this is an example of the kind of behavior of captain wirz that rises to the level of a war crime. similarly, wirz builds other barriers around the camp with a very ex-police it orders to shoot to kill anybody who crosses it barriers, even though the barriers seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with what might be considered an escape.

but what they do do, of course, is to provide for the opportunity to shoot soldiers when ever -- to shoot prisoners when ever you want. the food supply, which, of course, leads to the starvation to the cadaver-like survivors that we just looked at. the food supply, of course, is an issue. now, defenders of wirz, lost cause historians, people who want the south to rise again, constantly say that, in fact, wirz did the best he could under terrible circumstances because the south was starving. but if the south was starving, why were general sherman's troops eating better than they ever ate before. the reason is because georgia is full of food. there is not starvation in georgia. there are southern troops that aren't getting enough food. that has to do with the complete and total mismanagement of the army. it has to do a lot with

jefferson davis utter incompetence as president of the confederacy. but it is not because there's an absolute lack of food in the south. it's a question of how you get food from north carolina and georgia and mississippi to the troops. but wirz is in south georgia where food is available. food could have been commandeered, food could have been bought. the local women who wanted to bring fresh vegetables to the starving prisoners in andersonville could have been allowed to bring the food or they could have brought them to the camp and the camp could have brought camp officers and soldiers could have brought them to the prisoners. fresh water would have been obtained in a variety of ways, one of which was to order the troops upstream to stop using this -- the creek as a latrine. the other thing would have been to take a detail of prisoners every day and march them upstream, fill large barrels or buckets of water and bring the

water down. prisoners could have marched all day long up and down bringing water, but you would have had fresh water. wirz does not do any of those things. instead he thinks of new ways to harass prisoners and to prevent them from getting basic nutrition and any kind of basic health. so it strikes me that when we think about andersonville, we need to think about the notion of a war crime. and the notion of the duty that you owe to soldiers who you have captured. now, part of the horror of andersonville goes to the question of the exchange of prisoners. and the exchange of prisoners collapses in 1863. the lost cause history of the exchange of prisoners is that grant cynically decides that he doesn't need to exchange prisoners because he has more troops in the confederates than by exchanging prisoners or by

paroling prisoners which means they can't be allowed to reenlist in the army. he's going to release confederate troops which will only lengthen the war. that's not grant's position at all. his position is simple. he's happy to exchange prisoners for prisoners provided that the confederates will exchange all prisoners of war. the confederate government led by secretary of start setten with the approval of jefferson davis and with the approval of robert e. lee and with the approval of the entire confederate high command says, "we will not exchange black prisoners of war because we refuse to recognize that black people can legitimately be soldiers." and therefore if they cannot be soldiers, we cannot exchange them as prisoners of war. in fact what the confederate army does for a short while is enslave them. a violation of every known rule of war at the time. a throwback to the roman empire.

if you add to this jubilorly's excursions twice where he hunts down blacks to bring them back to the south, the confederate army looks like a weird modern version of the roman empire going to hunt slaves in gall or among the germanic tribes, or, even more weirdly, it looks like a precursor of the nazis who spend their time hunting jews in the ukraine and russia rather than fighting the russian army just as the confederates are hunting blacks in pennsylvania and in maryland rather than perhaps fighting the united states army. the question of war crimes and the confession of henry wirz is not does he richly dethe serve to be hanged?

i'm against capital punishment but i'm a 21st century person. i'm not a mid 19th century person. had i been a mid 19th cent rip person, i probably would not have been against capital punishment certainly for war criminals like wirz. if you believe in capital punishment, there are very few people in american history who more richly deserved to be at the end of a rope than henry wirz. but there were some. they would have included jubillorjubill er early. they would have included perhaps the commanders of the confederate army, not for being traitors, but rather for perpetuating war crimes against black soldiers against white p.o.w.s during the civil war. and so i leave you with these thoughts. we have a few minutes for questions. [ applause ]

an anxious hand here in the middle row. >> wonderful talk. may be true that conditions in andersonville were worse than for confederate p.o.w.s at point lookout and elmira. >> yes. >> but no question the union could have provided better treatment. but did the mistreatment of confederate p.o.w.s in northern camps rise to the level of war crimes? >> i do not think -- i will first say i'm not an expert on northern p.o.w. camps. but from what i have read, it doesn't seem to me that the northern camps are led by such creative and inventive people as henry wirz and people who seem

desire rouse of having the outcome. the best p.o.w. camps in the civil war. listen, if you look at the -- if you look at the death of the united states army soldiers who are in u.s. army camps, the death rate is very high. sanitation lousy, diseases rampant. but there's a huge difference between what's going on in those camps and i think what is going on in elmira. and what is going on in andersonville. no confederate pictures -- pictures of confederate prisoners i have seen that look like the pictures coming out of andersonville. they do not look like they're coming out of da ha. >> paul, you're uncharacteristically shy at the end of your talk when you referred to confederate commanders who deserved execution. you seemed to imply robert e.

lee would be one culpable for the chasing of blacks and enslaving them for war crimes. is that what you're saying? >> in pennsylvania, when lee enters pennsylvania in '63, you either have two theorys of general lee -- one is that he is absolutely incapable of controlling his subordinate commanders so that jubil early does what he wants and lee doesn't do anything about it and lee can't tell him what to do, or lee is come police it with the fact that early spends three or four days chasing blacks, capturing them, enslaving them when they retreat from gettysburg these black prisoners are taken back with them. either one or the other. and by every known rule of the law of war, of the mid 19th cent rip, it is against the rule of war to enslave civilians. it's against the rule of law to

ask for payment and bribery in order not to destroy a town as again jubil early does and other commanders do. and my assumption is that leinos this is going on. now maybe he's incapable of doing anything about it which, of course, raises a different kind of lost cause history question. the incompetent general lee. but i think he knows what's going on. i think he is competent and i think he doesn't have any problem with this. but i preempted your question, maybe, or was that it? therefore, he's culpable and should have been executed. >> it's reasonable they could have put him on trial for this. i don't think they would have. i think politically it would not have happened to him. i think certainly bedford forrest is so clearly more culpable and could have been put on trial and could have been executed and would have deserved it.

again, we talk about how to bring the war to an end. one way to bring the war to an end is to have a soft piece. everybody in this conference today has talked about the catastrophe of the soft piece. and people talk about, well, if lincoln was president, would it have been better? i don't think the ku klux klan would have been any different if lincoln had not been assassinated. however one wonders what would have happened with the ku klux klan if bedford forrest would have been hanged before he could have started the ku klux klan. i wonder if a harsher peace might have brought a more lasting and just peace. it's at least something to speculate. again, one of the models is the reconstruction of germany.

after the second world war, the german people had no doubt what the cost was, at least for the highest leaders of war crimes. while he's a worker criminal and he's a lesser war criminal, there are others. >> the pictures you showed to begin were taken of people after the camp had been liberated. how much was known by the northern public or the government about andersonville and what was happening before? >> i don't know. i think the histories are in dispute on this. there are not people being exchanged out of andersonville. and while there are some escaping from andersonville and there are rumors going on. but i don't know -- oob. >> my second to that is, you discussed the ladies and their

vegetables. how much was known in and around andersonville? >> enough to know -- enough to know that local -- >> beginning to sound a lot like germany. >> you know, i -- these are -- these are difficult analogies to make particularly when one lives in baton rouge. but not only then. i mean i think -- i think that -- i think there are analogies about the american civil war that americans have never wanted to come to terms with. but what's interesting about the literature in andersonville is most of it is written by what i would call lost cause apologists and it's the lost cause apologists who talk about the local women who are trying to bring vegetables to the poor starving union soldiers. and they condemn words for saying that these local women must be traitors because they want to bring vegetables to the union soldiers. so i think yes people at least

within the vicinity of andersonville have to know what was going on. the stench alone must have been enormous. i mean that's the other thing. it's hard to imagine how you could get anywhere near andersonville without being fully aware that it's a -- there's a horror show there. there's one more hand here. then i'm going to get it off. [ inaudible question ] one of the climaxes for the film. >> can you wait for the -- if anyone in this room has not seen shoa, anyone interested in history, it's about the holocaust. but there's a scene in poland that the camp was in the distance. the gas chambers, they interviewed all of the people who were -- they didn't smell anything. they didn't know anything. they just -- it just reminds me about that. the image of shoa. >> the great ole factory collapse in poland. i'm out of time. and so i -- as i said for all of the other papers, i think mine

>> the c-span cities tour travels to learn about history and literary life. we partnered with time warner cable for a trip to corpus christi, texas. >> the federal government does not have many deployable resources. the army does a variety of things. they are discoverers they are explorers. army contracts were an important part of the western economy. the army plays a role in conservation. in the recent can burn's series on the development of american national parks it points out that he parks were established in the 19th century but there was no one to protect them or preserve them or keep as