The Pull and Fears of Andersonville

“So what do you want to see in south Georgia?” my brother asked as we chatted on the phone over the holidays and started planning a visit for early in this new year. I told him I mostly just wanted to see him and my sister-in-law and hang out with them since it’s been years since we’ve been able to visit in-person. But he let the question hang, so I had to add softly, “It’s not too far of a detour… Could we go to Andersonville?”

Nobody—at least no one in blue—said those words during the American Civil War.

Andersonville. The very name might bring a type of dread to the mind of a Civil War history reader. It was certainly a place feared by even some of the most stalwart Union soldiers. Rumors of Andersonville and other Confederate prisons became the threats of officers to their men. By 1864, the dread of prisons may have contributed to some the ferocious, no-surrender style fighting both sides used in that year of carnage. The break-down of the prisoner parole and exchange system compound the difficulties also made a vicious cycle of Federal and Confederate authorities allowing or turning a blind eye to the camp conditions because of how badly the other side was treating its prisoners. Andersonville does not rank alone for terrible conditions. Nor does the Confederacy have singular distinction for bad prisoner of war camps; in the northern states, prisoner of war camps (detaining Confederates) also had poor shelter, atrocious sanitation and disease, and limited food rations.

Established in February 1864, Camp Sumter—better known as Andersonville—was supposed to be an interior, secure prisoner of war camp to shift captured Union soldiers out of the extremely overcrowded prisons in Virginia and the Carolinas. Within weeks, Andersonville was overcrowded, too. Of the approximately 45,000 total prisoners of war held at Andersonville during its operational period, nearly 28% died there (~13,000) and others suffered for the rest of their lives from the effects of their imprisonment. Records show some attempts and plans prepared by the camp’s administrators and commander to try to improve and alleviate the suffering, but their ideas were ignored or un-provisioned, creating a horrific situation of starvation, lack of water, no sanitation efforts, and rampant disease and death.[1]

Andersonville haunted the steps of some of “my soldiers” in the Shenandoah Valley in 1864. There is a graphic diary I’ve seen by a Union soldier captured at the battle of New Market who ends up in Andersonville, watching his friends die of starvation or simply give up on life. The dread of Confederate prisons among Union soldiers was real whether they had heard of Andersonville specifically or not.[2]

Trying to remember the first time I heard or read about Andersonville takes me back to curling up on my mom’s bed as she read to me when I was probably about ten or eleven. We were reading the Elsie Dinsmore Series, a very moralistic and religious series of girls’ literature written in the 19th century. Book Four tries to cover parts of the American Civil War, and includes a thieving fortune-hunting scoundrel who meets his “just reward” (dies) in Andersonville while one of the noble characters makes an escape…but later dies at home after reconciling with the lady he loved…but who had married someone else. It’s quite a story with lots of “happy slave” mythology and “both sides were noble/right” perspectives mixed in. What still stands out in my mind even now is the description of the foul drinking water and the dead line* in the description of Andersonville. Even in a “messy history setting” story, the horror of that prison came through. A soldier could die trying to get a drink of water from the spring. A soldier could starve to death there, or even when he got home.

(*The dead line at Andersonville was a marked space about 19 feet from the inside of the stockade wall; if a prisoner entered that area, a guard shot him.)

I didn’t go looking for information about Andersonville for a long time. It might have been mentioned in some of the non-fiction children’s Civil War history books I read. I really don’t remember. Of course, I encountered Andersonville mentioned in chapters or in passing in books, magazines, or blog posts over the years. But I hadn’t really spent much time thinking or reading it about it for myself until I started planning to travel to the area. A couple weeks ago a stack of books and a DVD came home from the library with me, and I started really reading about this prison camp.

It’s been disturbing and unsettling. The politics of prisoner exchange. The actual conditions of Andersonville—living in a human waste sewer with just 6 feet by 5 feet of personal space, no access to clean water, severely limited food, and with little hope of exchange, escape, or rescue. The cruelty accounts of the prisoners to each other within the camps, which stand out more to me than the captor to prisoner scenarios. The twisted narrative of prisoner war camps in Civil War memory. The reality that so many families probably did know what happened to their “missing” loved ones…and this was their fate.

I put the books down. Why do I want to go to Andersonville?

Other ECW writers have written about their visits to Andersonville, and you should read their posts. However, I wanted to pause before I go and write beforehand…because I don’t know if I will want to publicly post about my visit. I suspect it will be a place that will either bring some type of closure or it will haunt me. Not in a ghost-y way, but in a “facing suffering and the cruelty of humans toward each other” type of way. Yes, I know that Andersonville was not the only Civil War prison. Yes, I’m well aware that there were extensive hardships and cruelties inflicted in some of the Union prisons, too. There isn’t a “free card” for cruelty or creating suffering, no matter who did it. And there are parallels that can be drawn to modern headlines too. Cruelty is part of war, but are humans morally obligated to lessen that suffering as much as possible…or allow it to continue to force a point or end a conflict quicker? These are questions that should loom over us now and not just in the 1860s history of Civil War prisons.

There’s something about Andersonville. It looms and shadows. Like a unknown, yet namable fear hovering over the fates of soldiers in blue on the 1864 battlefields. But then gates opened and prisoners were shoved inside the over-crowded despair and stockade. For now, it just looms in my mind. In a few days, I’ll walk through the gates of the national cemetery there. Something warns me, “You won’t be the same once you’ve seen Andersonville.” Yet I still feel compelled to go, and see, and think about the history and moral dilemmas. But mostly to see the place where so many soldiers gave their last full measure—not dying “in glory” on a battlefield but perishing in an over-crowded yet lonely, wretched place so far from home.

Listless he eyes the palisades

And sentries in the glare….

His world is ended there.[3]

Sources:

[1] I’ve been reading the following books over the last few weeks and draw my summary from these texts:

• Benjamin G. Cloyd, Haunted by Atrocity: Civil War Prisons in American Memory (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010).
• Ovid L. Futch, History of Andersonville Prison, Revised Edition (Gainesville: The University of Florida Press, 1968, 2011).
• Charles W. Sanders, Jr., While in the Hands of the Enemy: Military Prisons of the Civil War (Baton Rogue: Louisiana State University Press, 2005).

[2] Sarah Kay Bierle’s New Market research files 2018-2024, and Jon Tracey’s 54th Pennsylvania research, 2023 Wreaths Across America history notes.

The following books were also consulted for a small sample of Union soldiers experiences in the battlefield, capture, and eventually Andersonville:

• Ira Pettit, edited by J.P. Ray, The Diary of a Dead-Man, 1862-1864 (Eastern National, 1999 edition).
• John L. Ransom, Andersonville Diary, 1883. Accessed through Google Books.
• Robert Knox Sneden, edited by Charles F. Bryan, Jr. and Nelson D. Lankford, Eye of the Storm (New York: The Free Press and Virginia Historical Society, 2000).

[3] “In the Prison Pen” by Herman Melville, The Battle-Pieces of Herman Melville (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1963), page 112.