ANDERSONVILLE
A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS
FIFTEEN MONTHS A GUEST OF THE SO-CALLED
SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY
A PRIVATE SOLDIERS EXPERIENCE
IN
RICHMOND, ANDERSONVILLE, SAVANNAH, MILLEN
BLACKSHEAR AND FLORENCE
BY JOHN McELROY
Late of Co. L. 16th Ill Cav.
1879
TO THE HONORABLE
NOAH H. SWAYNE.
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES,
A JURIST OF DISTINGUISHED TALENTS AND EXALTED CHARACTER;
ONE OF THE LAST OF THAT
ADMIRABLE ARRAY OF PURE PATRIOTS AND SAGACIOUS COUNSELORS,
WHO, IN
THE YEARS OF THE NATION’S TRIAL,
FAITHFULLY SURROUNDED THE GREAT PRESIDENT,
AND, WITH HIM, BORE THE BURDEN
OF
THOSE MOMENTOUS DAYS;
AND WHOSE WISDOM AND FAIRNESS HAVE DONE SO MUCH SINCE
TO
CONSERVE WHAT WAS THEN WON,
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED WITH RESPECT AND APPRECIATION,
BY THE AUTHOR.
INTRODUCTION.
The fifth part of a century almost has sped with the flight of time
since the outbreak of the Slaveholder’s Rebellion against the United
States. The young men of to-day were then babes in their cradles, or,
if more than that, too young to be appalled by the terror of the times.
Those now graduating from our schools of learning to be teachers of
youth and leaders of public thought, if they are ever prepared to teach
the history of the war for the Union so as to render adequate honor to
its martyrs and heroes, and at the same time impress the obvious moral
to be drawn from it, must derive their knowledge from authors who can
each one say of the thrilling story he is spared to tell: “All of which
I saw, and part of which I was.”
The writer is honored with the privilege of introducing to the reader
a volume written by an author who was an actor and a sufferer in the
scenes he has so vividly and faithfully described, and sent forth to
the public by a publisher whose literary contributions in support of
the loyal cause entitle him to the highest appreciation. Both author
and publisher have had an honorable and efficient part in the great
struggle, and are therefore worthy to hand down to the future a record
of the perils encountered and the sufferings endured by patriotic
soldiers in the prisons of the enemy. The publisher, at the beginning
of the war, entered, with zeal and ardor upon the work of raising
a company of men, intending to lead them to the field. Prevented
from carrying out this design, his energies were directed to a more
effective service. His famous “Nasby Letters” exposed the absurd and
sophistical argumentations of rebels and their sympathisers, in such
broad, attractive and admirable burlesque, as to direct against them
the “loud, long laughter of a world!” The unique and telling satire of
these papers became a power and inspiration to our armies in the field
and to their anxious friends at home, more than equal to the might of
whole battalions poured in upon the enemy. An athlete in logic may
lay an error writhing at his feet, and after all it may recover to do
great mischief. But the sharp wit of the humorist drives it before the
world’s derision into shame and everlasting contempt. These letters
were read and shouted over gleefully at every camp-fire in the Union
Army, and eagerly devoured by crowds of listeners when mails were
opened at country post-offices. Other humorists were content when they
simply amused the reader, but “Nasby’s” jests were arguments--they had
a meaning--they were suggested by the necessities and emergencies of the
Nation’s peril, and written to support, with all earnestness, a most
sacred cause.
The author, when very young, engaged in journalistic work, until the
drum of the recruiting officer called him to join the ranks of his
country’s defenders. As the reader is told, he was made a prisoner.
He took with him into the terrible prison enclosure not only a brave,
vigorous, youthful spirit, but invaluable habits of mind and thought
for storing up the incidents and experiences of his prison life. As a
journalist he had acquired the habit of noticing and memorizing every
striking or thrilling incident, and the experiences of his prison
life were adapted to enstamp themselves indelibly on both feeling and
memory. He speaks from personal experience and from the stand-paint of
tender and complete sympathy with those of his comrades who suffered
more than he did himself. Of his qualifications, the writer of these
introductory words need not speak. The sketches themselves testify to
his ability with such force that no commendation is required.
This work is needed. A generation is arising who do not know what the
preservation of our free government cost in blood and suffering. Even
the men of the passing generation begin to be forgetful, if we may
judge from the recklessness or carelessness of their political action.
The soldier is not always remembered nor honored as he should be. But,
what to the future of the great Republic is more important, there is
great danger of our people under-estimating the bitter animus and
terrible malignity to the Union and its defenders cherished by those
who made war upon it. This is a point we can not afford to be mistaken
about. And yet, right at this point this volume will meet its severest
criticism, and at this point its testimony is most vital and necessary.
Many will be slow to believe all that is here told most truthfully
of the tyranny and cruelty of the captors of our brave boys in
blue. There are no parallels to the cruelties and malignities here
described in Northern society. The system of slavery, maintained for
over two hundred years at the South, had performed a most perverting,
morally desolating, and we might say, demonizing work on the dominant
race, which people bred under our free civilization can not at once
understand, nor scarcely believe when it is declared unto them. This
reluctance to believe unwelcome truths has been the snare of our
national life. We have not been willing to believe how hardened,
despotic, and cruel the wielders of irresponsible power may become.
When the anti-slavery reformers of thirty years ago set forth the
cruelties of the slave system, they were met with a storm of indignant
denial, villification and rebuke. When Theodore D. Weld issued his
“Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses,” to the cruelty of slavery, he
introduced it with a few words, pregnant with sound philosophy, which
can be applied to the work now introduced, and may help the reader
better to accept and appreciate its statements. Mr. Weld said:
“Suppose I should seize you, rob you of your liberty, drive you into
the field, and make you work without pay as long as you lived. Would
that be justice? Would it be kindness? Or would it be monstrous
injustice and cruelty? Now, is the man who robs you every day too
tender-hearted ever to cuff or kick you? He can empty your pockets
without remorse, but if your stomach is empty, it cuts him to the
quick. He can make you work a life-time without pay, but loves you
too well to let you go hungry. He fleeces you of your rights with a
relish, but is shocked if you work bare-headed in summer, or without
warm stockings in winter. He can make you go without your liberty,
but never without a shirt. He can crush in you all hope of bettering
your condition by vowing that you shall die his slave, but though he
can thus cruelly torture your feelings, he will never lacerate your
back--he can break your heart, but is very tender of your skin. He can
strip you of all protection of law, and all comfort in religion, and
thus expose you to all outrages, but if you are exposed to the weather,
half-clad and half-sheltered, how yearn his tender bowels! What! talk
of a man treating you well while robbing you of all you get, and as
fast as you get it? And robbing you of yourself, too, your hands and
feet, your muscles, limbs and senses, your body and mind, your liberty
and earnings, your free speech and rights of conscience, your right to
acquire knowledge, property and reputation, and yet you are content to
believe without question that men who do all this by their slaves have
soft hearts oozing out so lovingly toward their human chattles that
they always keep them well housed and well clad, never push them too
hard in the field, never make their dear backs smart, nor let their
dear stomachs get empty!”
In like manner we may ask, are not the cruelties and oppressions
described in the following pages what we should legitimately expect
from men who, all their lives, have used whip and thumb-screw, shot-gun
and bloodhound, to keep human beings subservient to their will? Are we
to expect nothing but chivalric tenderness and compassion from men who
made war on a tolerant government to make more secure their barbaric
system of oppression?
These things are written because they are true. Duty to the brave
dead, to the heroic living, who have endured the pangs of a hundred
deaths for their country’s sake; duty to the government which depends
on the wisdom and constancy of its good citizens for its support and
perpetuity, calls for this “round, unvarnished tale” of suffering
endured for freedom’s sake.
The publisher of this work urged his friend and associate in journalism
to write and send forth these sketches because the times demanded just
such an expose of the inner hell of the Southern prisons. The tender
mercies of oppressors are cruel. We must accept the truth and act in
view of it. Acting wisely on the warnings of the past, we shall be able
to prevent treason, with all its fearful concomitants, from being again
the scourge and terror of our beloved land.
ROBERT McCUNE.
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
Fifteen months ago--and one month before it was begun--I had no more
idea of writing this book than I have now of taking up my residence in
China.
While I have always been deeply impressed with the idea that the
public should know much more of the history of Andersonville and other
Southern prisons than it does, it had never occurred to me that I was
in any way charged with the duty of increasing that enlightenment.
No affected deprecation of my own abilities had any part is this.
I certainly knew enough of the matter, as did every other boy who
had even a month’s experience in those terrible places, but the
very magnitude of that knowledge overpowered me, by showing me the
vast requirements of the subject-requirements that seemed to make
it presumption for any but the greatest pens in our literature to
attempt the work. One day at Andersonville or Florence would be task
enough for the genius of Carlyle or Hugo; lesser than they would fail
preposterously to rise to the level of the theme. No writer ever
described such a deluge of woes as swept over the unfortunates confined
in Rebel prisons in the last year-and-a-half of the Confederacy’s life.
No man was ever called upon to describe the spectacle and the process
of seventy thousand young, strong, able-bodied men, starving and
rotting to death. Such a gigantic tragedy as this stuns the mind and
benumbs the imagination.
I no more felt myself competent to the task than to accomplish one of
Michael Angelo’s grand creations in sculpture or painting.
Study of the subject since confirms me in this view, and my only claim
for this book is that it is a contribution--a record of individual
observation and experience--which will add something to the material
which the historian of the future will find available for his work.
The work was begun at the suggestion of Mr. D. R. Locke, (Petroleum V.
Nasby), the eminent political satirist. At first it was only intended
to write a few short serial sketches of prison life for the columns
of the TOLEDO BLADE. The exceeding favor with which the first of the
series was received induced a great widening of their scope, until
finally they took the range they now have.
I know that what is contained herein will be bitterly denied. I am
prepared for this. In my boyhood I witnessed the savagery of the
Slavery agitation--in my youth I felt the fierceness of the hatred
directed against all those who stood by the Nation. I know that hell
hath no fury like the vindictiveness of those who are hurt by the
truth being told of them. I apprehend being assailed by a sirocco
of contradiction and calumny. But I solemnly affirm in advance the
entire and absolute truth of every material fact, statement and
description. I assert that, so far from there being any exaggeration
in any particular, that in no instance has the half of the truth
been told, nor could it be, save by an inspired pen. I am ready to
demonstrate this by any test that the deniers of this may require,
and I am fortified in my position by unsolicited letters from over
3,000 surviving prisoners, warmly indorsing the account as thoroughly
accurate in every respect.
It has been charged that hatred of the South is the animus of this
work. Nothing can be farther from the truth. No one has a deeper love
for every part of our common country than I, and no one to-day will
make more efforts and sacrifices to bring the South to the same plane
of social and material development with the rest of the Nation than I
will. If I could see that the sufferings at Andersonville and elsewhere
contributed in any considerable degree to that end, and I should not
regret that they had been. Blood and tears mark every step in the
progress of the race, and human misery seems unavoidable in securing
human advancement. But I am naturally embittered by the fruitlessness,
as well as the uselessness of the misery of Andersonville. There was
never the least military or other reason for inflicting all that
wretchedness upon men, and, as far as mortal eye can discern, no
earthly good resulted from the martyrdom of those tens of thousands.
I wish I could see some hope that their wantonly shed blood has sown
seeds that will one day blossom, and bear a rich fruitage of benefit to
mankind, but it saddens me beyond expression that I can not.
The years 1864-5 were a season of desperate battles, but in that
time many more Union soldiers were slain behind the Rebel armies, by
starvation and exposure, than were killed in front of them by cannon
and rifle. The country has heard much of the heroism and sacrifices of
those loyal youths who fell on the field of battle; but it has heard
little of the still greater number who died in prison pen. It knows
full well how grandly her sons met death in front of the serried ranks
of treason, and but little of the sublime firmness with which they
endured unto the death, all that the ingenious cruelty of their foes
could inflict upon them while in captivity.
It is to help supply this deficiency that this book is written. It is
a mite contributed to the better remembrance by their countrymen of
those who in this way endured and died that the Nation might live. It
is an offering of testimony to future generations of the measureless
cost of the expiation of a national sin, and of the preservation of our
national unity.
This is all. I know I speak for all those still living comrades who
went with me through the scenes that I have attempted to describe, when
I say that we have no revenges to satisfy, no hatreds to appease. We do
not ask that anyone shall be punished. We only desire that the Nation
shall recognize and remember the grand fidelity of our dead comrades,
and take abundant care that they shall not have died in vain.
For the great mass of Southern people we have only the kindliest
feeling. We but hate a vicious social system, the lingering shadow of
a darker age, to which they yield, and which, by elevating bad men to
power, has proved their own and their country’s bane.
The following story does not claim to be in any sense a history of
Southern prisons. It is simply a record of the experience of one
individual--one boy--who staid all the time with his comrades inside
the prison, and had no better opportunities for gaining information
than any other of his 60,000 companions.
The majority of the illustrations in this work are from the skilled
pencil of Captain O. J. Hopkins, of Toledo, who served through the war
in the ranks of the Forty-second Ohio. His army experience has been of
peculiar value to the work, as it has enabled him to furnish a series
of illustrations whose life-like fidelity of action, pose and detail
are admirable.
Some thirty of the pictures, including the frontispiece, and the
allegorical illustrations of War and Peace, are from the atelier of Mr.
O. Reich, Cincinnati, O.
A word as to the spelling: Having always been an ardent believer in
the reformation of our present preposterous system--or rather, no
system--of orthography, I am anxious to do whatever lies in my power
to promote it. In the following pages the spelling is simplified to
the last degree allowed by Webster. I hope that the time is near when
even that advanced spelling reformer will be left far in the rear by
the progress of a people thoroughly weary of longer slavery to the
orthographical absurdities handed down to us from a remote and grossly
unlearned ancestry.
Toledo, O., Dec. 10, 1879.
JOHN McELROY.
We wait beneath the furnace blast
The pangs of transformation;
Not painlessly doth God recast
And mold anew the nation.
Hot burns the fire
Where wrongs expire;
Nor spares the hand
That from the land
Uproots the ancient evil.
The hand-breadth cloud the sages feared
Its bloody rain is dropping;
The poison plant the fathers spared
All else is overtopping.
East, West, South, North,
It curses the earth;
All justice dies,
And fraud and lies
Live only in its shadow.
Then let the selfish lip be dumb
And hushed the breath of sighing;
Before the joy of peace must come
The pains of purifying.
God give us grace
Each in his place
To bear his lot,
And, murmuring not,
Endure and wait and labor!
WHITTIER
ANDERSONVILLE
A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS
CHAPTER I.
A STRANGE LAND--THE HEART OF THE APPALACHIANS--THE GATEWAY OF AN EMPIRE
--A SEQUESTERED VALE, AND A PRIMITIVE, ARCADIAN, NON-PROGRESSIVE PEOPLE.
A low, square, plainly-hewn stone, set near the summit of the eastern
approach to the formidable natural fortress of Cumberland Gap,
indicates the boundaries of--the three great States of Virginia,
Kentucky and Tennessee. It is such a place as, remembering the old
Greek and Roman myths and superstitions, one would recognize as fitting
to mark the confines of the territories of great masses of strong,
aggressive, and frequently conflicting peoples. There the god Terminus
should have had one of his chief temples, where his shrine would be
shadowed by barriers rising above the clouds, and his sacred solitude
guarded from the rude invasion of armed hosts by range on range of
battlemented rocks, crowning almost inaccessible mountains, interposed
across every approach from the usual haunts of men.
Roundabout the land is full of strangeness and mystery. The throes of
some great convulsion of Nature are written on the face of the four
thousand square miles of territory, of which Cumberland Gap is the
central point. Miles of granite mountains are thrust up like giant
walls, hundreds of feet high, and as smooth and regular as the side of
a monument.
Huge, fantastically-shaped rocks abound everywhere--sometimes rising
into pinnacles on lofty summits--sometimes hanging over the verge of
beetling cliffs, as if placed there in waiting for a time when they
could be hurled down upon the path of an advancing army, and sweep it
away.
Large streams of water burst out in the most unexpected planes,
frequently far up mountain sides, and fall in silver veils upon
stones beaten round by the ceaseless dash for ages. Caves, rich in
quaintly formed stalactites and stalagmites, and their recesses filled
with metallic salts of the most powerful and diverse natures; break
the mountain sides at frequent intervals. Everywhere one is met by
surprises and anomalies. Even the rank vegetation is eccentric, and as
prone to develop into bizarre forms as are the rocks and mountains.
The dreaded panther ranges through the primeval, rarely trodden
forests; every crevice in the rocks has for tenants rattlesnakes or
stealthy copperheads, while long, wonderfully swift “blue racers” haunt
the edges of the woods, and linger around the fields to chill his
blood who catches a glimpse of their upreared heads, with their great,
balefully bright eyes, and “white-collar” encircled throats.
The human events happening here have been in harmony with the natural
ones. It has always been a land of conflict. In 1540--339 years ago
--De Soto, in that energetic but fruitless search for gold which
occupied his later years, penetrated to this region, and found it the
fastness of the Xualans, a bold, aggressive race, continually warring
with its neighbors. When next the white man reached the country--a
century and a half later--he found the Xualans had been swept away by
the conquering Cherokees, and he witnessed there the most sanguinary
contest between Indians of which our annals give any account--a pitched
battle two days in duration, between the invading Shawnees, who lorded
it over what is now Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana--and the Cherokees, who
dominated the country the southeast of the Cumberland range. Again the
Cherokees were victorious, and the discomfited Shawnees retired north
of the Gap.
Then the white man delivered battle for the possession the land, and
bought it with the lives of many gallant adventurers. Half a century
later Boone and his hardy companion followed, and forced their way into
Kentucky.
Another half century saw the Gap the favorite haunt of the greatest
of American bandits--the noted John A. Murrell--and his gang. They
infested the country for years, now waylaying the trader or drover
threading his toilsome way over the lone mountains, now descending upon
some little town, to plunder its stores and houses.
At length Murrell and his band were driven out, and sought a new field
of operations on the Lower Mississippi. They left germs behind them,
however, that developed into horse thieve counterfeiters, and later
into guerrillas and bushwhackers.
When the Rebellion broke out the region at once became the theater of
military operations. Twice Cumberland Gap was seized by the Rebels, and
twice was it wrested away from them. In 1861 it was the point whence
Zollicoffer launched out with his legions to “liberate Kentucky,” and
it was whither they fled, beaten and shattered, after the disasters of
Wild Cat and Mill Springs. In 1862 Kirby Smith led his army through the
Gap on his way to overrun Kentucky and invade the North. Three months
later his beaten forces sought refuge from their pursuers behind its
impregnable fortifications. Another year saw Burnside burst through the
Gap with a conquering force and redeem loyal East Tennessee from its
Rebel oppressors.
Had the South ever been able to separate from the North the boundary
would have been established along this line.
Between the main ridge upon which Cumberland Gap is situated, and the
next range on the southeast which runs parallel with it, is a narrow,
long, very fruitful valley, walled in on either side for a hundred
miles by tall mountains as a City street is by high buildings. It is
called Powell’s Valley. In it dwell a simple, primitive people, shut
out from the world almost as much as if they lived in New Zealand, and
with the speech, manners and ideas that their fathers brought into the
Valley when they settled it a century ago. There has been but little
change since then. The young men who have annually driven cattle to
the distant markets in Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia, have brought
back occasional stray bits of finery for the “women folks,” and the
latest improved fire-arms for themselves, but this is about all the
innovations the progress of the world has been allowed to make. Wheeled
vehicles are almost unknown; men and women travel on horseback as
they did a century ago, the clothing is the product of the farm and
the busy looms of the women, and life is as rural and Arcadian as any
ever described in a pastoral. The people are rich in cattle, hogs,
horses, sheep and the products of the field. The fat soil brings forth
the substantials of life in opulent plenty. Having this there seems
to be little care for more. Ambition nor avarice, nor yet craving
after luxury, disturb their contented souls or drag them away from the
non-progressive round of simple life bequeathed them by their fathers.