A Thousand Words a Battle: Andersonville

Andersonville
Americas, Georgia

In 1865, Augustus Choate Hamlin paid a visit to Andersonville—the deadliest landscape of America’s deadliest war. Halting progress along the crude roads that cut through thickly timbered southwestern Georgia delivered the lieutenant colonel and army medical inspector—the son of Lincoln’s first vice-president—to the site of the notorious prisoner of war camp. While a special detail dispatched by the Quartermaster General’s Office worked to locate, record, and mark graves, Hamlin made his own, careful survey of the prison. His on-site sketches informed Martyria (1866), an unvarnished history that he dedicated “to the memory of the men who steadily upheld the cause of civil liberty, and who preferred lingering death, in the the midst of unparalleled privations and horrors, rather than dishonor.”

In the book, Hamlin mused about the war at its worst:

Heroism in the damp and noxious prisons, where the noble qualities of the mind are shaken and swayed by the sufferings of the body, is far different from that which is displayed upon the battle-field, amid the glittering and inspiring pomp of war…Here, instead of bright and glorious banners and the flash of arms, the long array of men eager for the contest, and the songs, the shouts of defiance, there was a vast ditch, crowded with living beings of scarce the human form, haggard and unnatural in appearance—a sea of red and fetid mud, trampled and defiled by the immense throng. Instead of the white tents and canopies of military encampments, there were the ragged blankets vainly stretched over upright sticks; there were the holes in the earth, the burrows in the sand, like the villages of the rats of the great prairies of the West. They were more like the dens of the beasts of the desert than habitations for human beings.

Though he did not wish “to rekindle the smouldering embers of hate,” Hamlin, like many other contributors to the genre, could not write dispassionately about Andersonville:

Life here was brief. The victims, as they entered the gate, were appalled at the horrors that were presented to them in this living sepulchre. Nature seemed to have abandoned the struggle early, and the young men passed, with rapid pace, from youth—that youth so rich in its future—to manhood, from manhood to old age. Neither prudence nor philosophy could protect them from the grievous influences of the morbid conditions to which they were exposed. The delicate and noble faculties were blunted and destroyed. Some perished at once—almost as quickly as though struck by the lightning of heaven, whilst others lingered, according to the strength of the hidden resources, and the reserved and superabundant powers of youth….The wretched men died in silence, or with the name of home or the loves ones on their lips, and adjuring their comrades to stand firm in defence of their faith, their country, their God. . . . The sufferings of these men, wasting, putrefying, dying daily by scores, by hundreds, without touching the remorseless hearts of the prison-keepers, recalls to mind those monsters which history points out as rising now and then from out the wreck of social order. It was one of the results of Slavery, for Slavery weakens the natural horror of blood.

Hamlin’s words were eloquent, though even he sensed they were inadequate. The most enduring witness to the monstrous human cruelty of Andersonville, he knew, lay just beyond the stockade:

Beneath the red clods of this field, thickly as the leaves of autumn, are stretched side by side a number of men more numerous than all of the American soldiers who perished by disease and casualty of battle during the Mexican war—more than all of the British soldiers who were killed, or perished from their wounds, on the bloody fields of the Crimea, the desperate struggles at Waterloo, the four great battles in Spain—Talavera, Salamanca, Albuera, Vittoria—and also the sanguinary contest at New Orleans. All these losses of the sons of the British empire do not build up a hecatomb of the human dead so high, so vast, so red, as this one single link of the great chain of wrong that stretched from Virginia to Texas.

There is no battle field on the face of the globe, known to the antiquary, where so many soldiers are interred in one group as are gathered together in the broad trenches of this neglected field. . . . Here is something required more than brief, hollow, human gratitude, and a sonorous, perishable epitaph.  

— Brian Matthew Jordan

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