Camp Hoffman, built after the Battle of Gettysburg, was the largest Union prison camp for Confederate soldiers. Planned to hold 10,000 prisoners, it confined more than five times that number—52,000 in all—at some point between 1863 and 1865, with the largest one-time population about 20,000 in August 1864. Conditions were terrible, and prisoners faced hunger, contaminated water, disease, and the weather. In 1865 a prisoner wrote, "If it were not for hope, how could we live in a place like this?" More than 3500 Confederate soldiers died here during the war, along with 1000 Union soldiers and an unknown number of contrabands. Soldiers of the United States Colored Troops served here as prison guards, and one African-American soldier remarked on the role reversal, "the bottom rail's on top, now".