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Nov 10, 1865: Henry Wirz was hanged in Washington for what happened at Andersonville, the deadliest prison camp of the Civil War. He was one of only two Confederates executed for war crimes, and people still argue about whether he deserved it. He was born Heinrich Hartmann Wirz in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1823. He got into legal trouble over money there and left for America in 1849. He worked as a doctor's assistant and called himself a physician, eventually settling in Louisiana. When the war came, he enlisted in a Louisiana regiment. At the Battle of Seven Pines in 1862, his right arm was shattered by a bullet. It never healed properly and caused him pain for the rest of his life. Unfit for the front lines, he was assigned to work in the Confederate prison system. Early in the war, the two sides exchanged prisoners regularly. By 1863 that system had broken down. The Confederacy refused to exchange Black Union soldiers as prisoners of war, and later Grant saw that keeping Confederate prisoners locked up hurt the South more than the North. Prisoners started piling up with nowhere to go. In early 1864, the Confederacy built a new prison in the middle of southwest Georgia, officially called Camp Sumter. Everyone called it Andersonville. It wasn't a building. It was an open field surrounded by a log wall about 15 feet high. There were no barracks. Prisoners built shelters out of blankets, sticks, and holes dug in the dirt. In April 1864, Wirz was put in command of the inside of the prison. It was meant to hold around 10,000 men. By August 1864, about 33,000 were crammed inside, roughly 26 acres. At its peak it held more people than all but a few cities in the Confederacy. A small creek ran through the middle of the stockade. It was the prisoners' main supply of drinking water, and also their sewer. Upstream, the Confederate guards' camp and cookhouse fouled it before it even reached them. The ground around it turned into a swamp of filth. The food was coarse cornmeal, often ground with the cob, sometimes raw, sometimes not at all. Men starved. Scurvy rotted their gums and swelled their legs. Dysentery and gangrene killed thousands. In the summer of 1864, more than 100 men died on some days. About 19 feet inside the wall was a line of posts and railing called the deadline. Any prisoner who crossed it, or even reached across it, could be shot by guards in the towers. Gangs of prisoners, known as the Raiders, robbed, beat, and sometimes killed other prisoners for their food and blankets. The other prisoners organized and fought back. With Wirz's permission, they held their own trial and hanged six of the Raiders inside the stockade. In about 14 months, roughly 45,000 Union soldiers passed through Andersonville. Nearly 13,000 of them died. A young prisoner from Connecticut named Dorence Atwater was given the job of keeping the official list of the dead. Afraid it would be lost or destroyed, he secretly made his own copy and smuggled it out. After the war, he and Clara Barton went to Andersonville and used his list to mark the graves of nearly 13,000 men. That ground is now Andersonville National Cemetery. When the war ended, the North was furious. As photos of skeleton-thin survivors spread, people demanded someone pay. Wirz's commander, Gen. John Winder, had died in early 1865. Wirz was arrested at Andersonville in May. He was tried before a military commission in Washington led by Gen. Lew Wallace, who later wrote the novel Ben-Hur. The trial lasted about two months. Former prisoners testified that Wirz had shot, beaten, and killed men himself, and set dogs on escapees. Some of the testimony was powerful. Some of it fell apart. One of the key witnesses turned out to be a deserter testifying under a fake name. Wirz's lawyers argued that with his crippled arm, he could never have done some of what he was accused of, and that he had begged his superiors for more food and supplies. He was convicted and sentenced to death. According to his lawyer, the night before his execution, a man came to his cell and offered to spare his life if he would testify that Jefferson Davis was responsible for what happened at Andersonville. Wirz refused, saying Davis had nothing to do with it. On the morning of Nov 10 he was led to a gallows in the yard of the Old Capitol Prison, on the site where the Supreme Court building stands today. Soldiers in the crowd chanted the name Andersonville. He reportedly told the officer in charge that he knew what orders were, and that he was being hanged for obeying them. The trapdoor dropped, but his neck didn't break. He slowly strangled to death. Ever since, Andersonville has been argued over. Some see Wirz as a cruel man who earned his fate. Others see a minor officer blamed for the failures of a collapsing Confederacy that couldn't feed its own soldiers. Union prisons were deadly too. At the camp in Elmira, New York, about a quarter of the Confederate prisoners died. What isn't argued over is what the men inside went through. Andersonville is now a national historic site, home to the National Prisoner of War Museum, which honors American POWs from every war. In the national cemetery there, nearly 13,000 headstones stand in tight rows, so close together they almost touch, the way the men were buried.

Nov 9, 1620: After 66 days at sea, the passengers of the Mayflower saw land. It wasn't where they were supposed to be. The ship had left England in September with 102 passengers, a mix of religious separatists who called themselves Saints and others they called Strangers, along with the crew. The crossing was brutal. Storms battered the ship, and a main beam cracked and had to be jacked back into place. One young passenger died. A baby was born and named Oceanus. At daybreak on Nov 9 by the calendar they used, they sighted the high sandy cliffs of Cape Cod. Their permission to settle was for land farther south, near the mouth of the Hudson River. The captain turned the ship south, but they ran into dangerous shoals and roaring surf off the elbow of the Cape. Afraid of wrecking, they turned back. Two days later they anchored in what is now Provincetown Harbor. Because they were outside the area their charter covered, some of the Strangers said nobody had the authority to tell them what to do once they got ashore. So before anyone landed, the men signed an agreement to form their own government and obey its laws. It became known as the Mayflower Compact. William Bradford wrote that when they reached land, they fell on their knees and blessed God for bringing them safely across the ocean. They eventually settled at Plymouth. About half of them died that first winter.