Deadline

The word deadline first appeared in writing in 1864, in an inspection report by Confederate Captain Walter Bowie describing conditions at Andersonville Prison in Georgia.1 Bowie wrote that on the inside of the stockade, twenty feet from the wall, there was "a dead-line established, over which no prisoner is allowed to go, day or night, under penalty of being shot."

Andersonville held approximately 45,000 Union prisoners of war over its fourteen months of operation. Nearly 13,000 of them died from disease, malnutrition, overcrowding, or exposure.2

The dead line was a physical boundary, sometimes marked by wooden planks nailed to small stakes, sometimes only an imaginary line understood by prisoners and guards alike. Guards stationed along the top of the stockade, positioned in elevated posts called pigeon roosts roughly ninety feet apart, had orders to fire without warning on any prisoner who crossed it.3

The term became nationally known through the 1865 trial of Captain Henry Wirz, the commandant of Andersonville. Wirz was convicted of war crimes and hanged on November 10, 1865, the only Confederate soldier executed for crimes committed during the Civil War.

After the trial, the word went into what the copy editor Benjamin Dreyer has described as hibernation.4 It resurfaced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in various uses related to absolute limits, including a reference to age limits in factory employment, often set at thirty-five.

By 1919, American newspaper jargon had adopted deadline to mean the absolute last moment when copy could be sent to the printer.5 The line that once separated a prisoner from a bullet now separated a reporter from a missed edition. The word retained its finality while shedding its violence. Every office worker who has ever said "I have a deadline" is using a term that originally meant the boundary beyond which someone would be killed.