Andersonville National Cemetery sits just north of the prison stockade. It holds the graves of nearly 13,000 Union soldiers who died at the camp — most of them buried shoulder to shoulder in trenches that have since been marked with individual white headstones in long, tight rows. The cemetery remains an active military cemetery and is still used for the burial of American veterans.
The scale is the thing that lands hardest: the headstones run on and on, and the visual rhythm of them gives the abstract death toll a physical presence. Several state monuments stand among the graves, erected by Northern states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to commemorate their dead. The cemetery is open daily; a quiet walk through it is the natural conclusion of a visit to Andersonville.