Judge Advocate General Holt said that language could not be found "to denounce, even in faint terrors, the diabolical combination for the destruction and death, by cruel and fiendishly ingenious purposes, of helpless prisoners of war who might fall into their hands, which this record shows was plotted and deliberately entered upon, and as far as time permitted, accomplished by the rebel authorities and their brutal underlings at Andersonville prison. He could find in criminal history, "no parallel to this monstrous conspiracy." A system for murdering men "more revolting in its details could not have been planned."

Lewis L. Laska and James M Smith, 'Hell And The Devil': Andersonville and the Trial of Captain Henry Wirz, C.S.A., 1865 68 Mil. L. Rev. 77, 78, (1975) quoted in Louis Fisher, Military Tribunals And Presidential Power, (University Press Of Kansas, 2005) at 62.