GEORGIA--A LEAN AND HUNGRY LAND--DIFFERENCE BETWEEN UPPER AND LOWER
GEORGIA--THE PILLAGE OF ANDERSONVILLE.
As the next nine months of the existence of those of us who survived
were spent in intimate connection with the soil of Georgia, and, as it
exercised a potential influence upon our comfort and well-being, or
rather lack of these--a mention of some of its peculiar characteristics
may help the reader to a fuller comprehension of the conditions
surrounding us--our environment, as Darwin would say.
Georgia, which, next to Texas, is the largest State in the South, and
has nearly twenty-five per cent. more area than the great State of New
York, is divided into two distinct and widely differing sections, by a
geological line extending directly across the State from Augusta, on
the Savannah River, through Macon, on the Ocmulgee, to Columbus, on the
Chattahoochie. That part lying to the north and west of this line is
usually spoken of as “Upper Georgia;” while that lying to the south and
east, extending to the Atlantic Ocean and the Florida line, is called
“Lower Georgia.” In this part of the State--though far removed from
each other--were the prisons of Andersonville, Savannah, Millen and
Blackshear, in which we were incarcerated one after the other.
Upper Georgia--the capital of which is Atlanta--is a fruitful,
productive, metalliferous region, that will in time become quite
wealthy. Lower Georgia, which has an extent about equal to that of
Indiana, is not only poorer now than a worn-out province of Asia Minor,
but in all probability will ever remain so.
It is a starved, sterile land, impressing one as a desert in the first
stages of reclamation into productive soil, or a productive soil in
the last steps of deterioration into a desert. It is a vast expanse
of arid, yellow sand, broken at intervals by foul swamps, with a
jungle-life growth of unwholesome vegetation, and teeming With venomous
snakes, and all manner of hideous crawling thing.
The original forest still stands almost unbroken on this wide stretch
of thirty thousand square miles, but it does not cover it as we say
of forests in more favored lands. The tall, solemn pines, upright and
symmetrical as huge masts, and wholly destitute of limbs, except the
little, umbrella-like crest at the very top, stand far apart from each
other in an unfriendly isolation. There is no fraternal interlacing of
branches to form a kindly, umbrageous shadow. Between them is no genial
undergrowth of vines, shrubs, and demi-trees, generous in fruits,
berries and nuts, such as make one of the charms of Northern forests.
On the ground is no rich, springing sod of emerald green, fragrant
with the elusive sweetness of white clover, and dainty flowers, but
a sparse, wiry, famished grass, scattered thinly over the surface in
tufts and patches, like the hair on a mangy cur.
The giant pines seem to have sucked up into their immense boles all the
nutriment in the earth, and starved out every minor growth. So wide and
clean is the space between them, that one can look through the forest
in any direction for miles, with almost as little interference with the
view as on a prairie. In the swampier parts the trees are lower, and
their limbs are hung with heavy festoons of the gloomy Spanish moss, or
“death moss,” as it is more frequently called, because where it grows
rankest the malaria is the deadliest. Everywhere Nature seems sad,
subdued and somber.
I have long entertained a peculiar theory to account for the decadence
and ruin of countries. My reading of the world’s history seems to teach
me that when a strong people take possession of a fertile land, they
reduce it to cultivation, thrive upon its bountifulness, multiply into
millions the mouths to be fed from it, tax it to the last limit of
production of the necessities of life, take from it continually, and
give nothing back, starve and overwork it as cruel, grasping men do a
servant or a beast, and when at last it breaks down under the strain,
it revenges itself by starving many of them with great famines, while
the others go off in search of new countries to put through the same
process of exhaustion. We have seen one country after another undergo
this process as the seat of empire took its westward way, from the
cradle of the race on the banks of the Oxus to the fertile plains in
the Valley of the Euphrates. Impoverishing these, men next sought the
Valley of the Nile, then the Grecian Peninsula; next Syracuse and the
Italian Peninsula, then the Iberian Peninsula, and the African shores
of the Mediterranean. Exhausting all these, they were deserted for the
French, German and English portions of Europe. The turn of the latter
is now come; famines are becoming terribly frequent, and mankind is
pouring into the virgin fields of America.
Lower Georgia, the Carolinas and Eastern Virginia have all the
characteristics of these starved and worn-out lands. It would seem as
if, away back in the distance of ages, some numerous and civilized race
had drained from the soil the last atom of food-producing constituents,
and that it is now slowly gathering back, as the centuries pass, the
elements that have been wrung from the land.
Lower Georgia is very thinly settled. Much of the land is still in
the hands of the Government. The three or four railroads which pass
through it have little reference to local traffic. There are no towns
along them as a rule; stations are made every ten miles, and not named,
but numbered, as “Station No. 4”--“No. 10”, etc. The roads were built
as through lines, to bring to the seaboard the rich products of the
interior.
Andersonville is one of the few stations dignified with a same,
probably because it contained some half dozen of shabby houses, whereas
at the others there was usually nothing more than a mere open shed, to
shelter goods and travelers. It is on a rudely constructed, rickety
railroad, that runs from Macon to Albany, the head of navigation on
the Flint River, which is, one hundred and six miles from Macon, and
two hundred and fifty from the Gulf of Mexico. Andersonville is about
sixty miles from Macon, and, consequently, about three hundred miles
from the Gulf. The camp was merely a hole cut in the wilderness. It was
as remote a point from, our armies, as they then lay, as the Southern
Confederacy could give. The nearest was Sherman, at Chattanooga, four
hundred miles away, and on the other side of a range of mountains
hundreds of miles wide.
To us it seemed beyond the last forlorn limits of civilization. We felt
that we were more completely at the mercy of our foes than ever. While
in Richmond we were in the heart of the Confederacy; we were in the
midst of the Rebel military and, civil force, and were surrounded on
every hand by visible evidences of the great magnitude of that power,
but this, while it enforced our ready submission, did not overawe us
depressingly, We knew that though the Rebels were all about us in great
force, our own men were also near, and in still greater force--that
while they were very strong our army was still stronger, and there was
no telling what day this superiority of strength, might be demonstrated
in such a way as to decisively benefit us.
But here we felt as did the Ancient Mariner:
Alone on a wide, wide sea,
So lonely ’twas that God himself
Scarce seemed there to be.