Taking Deadlines Seriously

SEELEY LAKE – A deadline is a time limit, a stated time when an assignment is due – or when an article must be submitted to the newspaper editor. If the deadline is missed it might mean an F on a school assignment. Or it might mean an article or ad won’t make it into the next issue of the Seeley Swan Pathfinder. Problematic as those scenarios are, they won’t be fatal. But when the term was first coined, its meaning was deadly serious.

The term originated in American Civil War prison camps. Though there is some evidence “dead line” may have been used earlier and the practice it referred to may have taken place in both Confederate and Union prison camps, the term is most commonly associated with Henry Wirz and the Andersonville prison camp.

In early 1864 the Confederacy built a 26-acre compound to sequester captured Union war prisoners. Officially named Camp Sumter, the site was more commonly called by the name of the nearby town of Andersonville, Ga.

A 15-foot stockade fence outlined the compound, with guard platforms rising every 80-100 yards. Though the camp was built to house 10,000 prisoners, the population quickly grew to 26,000 and ultimately peaked at 33,000.

Conditions inside the compound were deplorable with no shelter available and no provisions for sewage disposal. The Confederacy, experiencing defeat in battles and the depletion of men and resources, directed all its assets to the support of its troops, ignoring the needs of prisoners.

Captain Henry Wirz was commander of Andersonville Prison. When the war ended, he was accused of war crimes and put on trial. The following excerpt comes from the trial records:

“And he, the said Wirz, still wickedly pursuing his evil purpose, did establish and cause to be designated within the prison enclosure containing said prisoners a “dead line,” being a line around the inner face of the stockade or wall enclosing said prison and about twenty feet distant from and within said stockade; and so established said dead line, which was in many places an imaginary line, in many other places marked by insecure and shifting strips of [boards nailed] upon the tops of small and insecure stakes or posts, he, the said Wirz, instructed the prison guards stationed around the top of said stockade to fire upon and kill any of the prisoners aforesaid who might touch, fall upon, pass over or under across the said “dead line” ....” [“Trial of Henry Wirz,” Report of the Secretary of War, Oct. 31, 1865]

Before “deadline” took up the less lethal meaning of a fixed time limit, the term was used by the printing industry to designate a guideline marked on a printer’s plate. A line designated the area beyond which typeset would not transfer to the printed page.

Closely related to the sense that any type outside the line was “dead” in terms of being visible and readable, journalism eventually began using the term to mean the time after which an article or ad would no longer be accepted for a particular issue of publication.

From that usage, “deadline” soon came to denote anything that needed to be accomplished in a fixed time. A stern warning perhaps, but no longer a deadly one.