WAKING UP IN ANDERSONVILLE--SOME DESCRIPTION OF THE PLACE--OUR FIRST
MAIL--BUILDING SHELTER--GEN. WINDER--HIMSELF AND LINEAGE.
We roused up promptly with the dawn to take a survey of our new abiding
place. We found ourselves in an immense pen, about one thousand feet
long by eight hundred wide, as a young surveyor--a member of the
Thirty-fourth Ohio--informed us after he had paced it off. He estimated
that it contained about sixteen acres. The walls were formed by pine
logs twenty-five feet long, from two to three feet in diameter, hewn
square, set into the ground to a depth of five feet, and placed so
close together as to leave no crack through which the country outside
could be seen. There being five feet of the logs in the ground, the
wall was, of course, twenty feet high. This manner of enclosure was in
some respects superior to a wall of masonry. It was equally unscalable,
and much more difficult to undermine or batter down.
The pen was longest due north and south. It was divided in the center
by a creek about a yard wide and ten inches deep, running from west to
east. On each side of this was a quaking bog of slimy ooze one hundred
and fifty feet wide, and so yielding that one attempting to walk upon
it would sink to the waist. From this swamp the sand-hills sloped north
and south to the stockade. All the trees inside the stockade, save two,
had been cut down and used in its construction. All the rank vegetation
of the swamp had also been cut off.
There were two entrances to the stockade, one on each side of the
creek, midway between it and the ends, and called respectively the
“North Gate” and the “South Gate.” These were constructed double, by
building smaller stockades around them on the outside, with another
set of gates. When prisoners or wagons with rations were brought in,
they were first brought inside the outer gates, which were carefully
secured, before the inner gates were opened. This was done to prevent
the gates being carried by a rush by those confined inside.
At regular intervals along the palisades were little perches, upon
which stood guards, who overlooked the whole inside of the prison.
The only view we had of the outside was that obtained by looking from
the highest points of the North or South Sides across the depression
where the stockade crossed the swamp. In this way we could see about
forty acres at a time of the adjoining woodland, or say one hundred and
sixty acres altogether, and this meager landscape had to content us for
the next half year.
Before our inspection was finished, a wagon drove in with rations, and
a quart of meal, a sweet potato and a few ounces of salt beef were
issued to each one of us.
In a few minutes we were all hard at work preparing our first meal in
Andersonville. The debris of the forest left a temporary abundance
of fuel, and we had already a cheerful fire blazing for every little
squad. There were a number of tobacco presses in the rooms we occupied
in Richmond, and to each of these was a quantity of sheets of tin,
evidently used to put between the layers of tobacco. The deft hands of
the mechanics among us bent these up into square pans, which were real
handy cooking utensils, holding about--a quart. Water was carried in
them from the creek; the meal mixed in them to a dough, or else boiled
as mush in the same vessels; the potatoes were boiled; and their final
service was to hold a little meal to be carefully browned, and then
water boiled upon it, so as to form a feeble imitation of coffee. I
found my education at Jonesville in the art of baking a hoe-cake now
came in good play, both for myself and companions. Taking one of the
pieces of tin which had not yet been made into a pan, we spread upon
it a layer of dough about a half-inch thick. Propping this up nearly
upright before the fire, it was soon nicely browned over. This process
made it sweat itself loose from the tin, when it was turned over and
the bottom browned also. Save that it was destitute of salt, it was
quite a toothsome bit of nutriment for a hungry man, and I recommend my
readers to try making a “pone” of this kind once, just to see what it
was like.
The supreme indifference with which the Rebels always treated the
matter of cooking utensils for us, excited my wonder. It never seemed
to occur to them that we could have any more need of vessels for our
food than cattle or swine. Never, during my whole prison life, did I
see so much as a tin cup or a bucket issued to a prisoner. Starving men
were driven to all sorts of shifts for want of these. Pantaloons or
coats were pulled off and their sleeves or legs used to draw a mess’s
meal in. Boots were common vessels for carrying water, and when the
feet of these gave way the legs were ingeniously closed up with pine
pegs, so as to form rude leathern buckets. Men whose pocket knives had
escaped the search at the gates made very ingenious little tubs and
buckets, and these devices enabled us to get along after a fashion.
After our meal was disposed of, we held a council on the situation.
Though we had been sadly disappointed in not being exchanged, it
seemed that on the whole our condition had been bettered. This first
ration was a decided improvement on those of the Pemberton building;
we had left the snow and ice behind at Richmond--or rather at some
place between Raleigh, N. C., and Columbia, S. C.--and the air here,
though chill, was not nipping, but bracing. It looked as if we would
have a plenty of wood for shelter and fuel, it was certainly better
to have sixteen acres to roam over than the stiffing confines of a
building; and, still better, it seemed as if there would be plenty of
opportunities to get beyond the stockade, and attempt a journey through
the woods to that blissful land --“Our lines.”
We settled down to make the best of things. A Rebel Sergeant came
in presently and arranged us in hundreds. We subdivided these into
messes of twenty-five, and began devising means for shelter. Nothing
showed the inborn capacity of the Northern soldier to take care of
himself better than the way in which we accomplished this with the
rude materials at our command. No ax, spade nor mattock was allowed
us by the Rebels, who treated us in regard to these the same as in
respect to culinary vessels. The only tools were a few pocket-knives,
and perhaps half-a-dozen hatchets which some infantrymen-principally
members of the Third Michigan--were allowed to retain. Yet, despite
all these drawbacks, we had quite a village of huts erected in a few
days,--nearly enough, in fact, to afford tolerable shelter for the
whole five hundred of us first-comers.
The wither and poles that grew in the swamp were bent into the shape
of the semi-circular bows that support the canvas covers of army
wagons, and both ends thrust in the ground. These formed the timbers
of our dwellings. They were held in place by weaving in, basket-wise,
a network of briers and vines. Tufts of the long leaves which are the
distinguishing characteristic of the Georgia pine (popularly known as
the “long-leaved pine”) were wrought into this network until a thatch
was formed, that was a fair protection against the rain--it was like
the Irishman’s unglazed window-sash, which “kep’ out the coarsest uv
the cold.”
The results accomplished were as astonishing to us as to the Rebels,
who would have lain unsheltered upon the sand until bleached out like
field-rotted flax, before thinking to protect themselves in this
way. As our village was approaching completion, the Rebel Sergeant
who called the roll entered. He was very odd-looking. The cervical
muscles were distorted in such a way as to suggest to us the name of
“Wry-necked Smith,” by which we always designated him. Pete Bates, of
the Third Michigan, who was the wag of our squad, accounted for Smith’s
condition by saying that while on dress parade once the Colonel of
Smith’s regiment had commanded “eyes right,” and then forgot to give
the order “front.” Smith, being a good soldier, had kept his eyes in
the position of gazing at the buttons of the third man to the right,
waiting for the order to restore them to their natural direction,
until they had become permanently fixed in their obliquity and he was
compelled to go through life taking a biased view of all things.
Smith walked in, made a diagonal survey of the encampment, which, if
he had ever seen “Mitchell’s Geography,” probably reminded him of the
picture of a Kaffir village, in that instructive but awfully dull book,
and then expressed the opinion that usually welled up to every Rebel’s
lips:
“Well, I’ll be durned, if you Yanks don’t just beat the devil.”
Of course, we replied with the well-worn prison joke, that we supposed
we did, as we beat the Rebels, who were worse than the devil.
There rode in among us, a few days after our arrival, an old man whose
collar bore the wreathed stars of a Major General. Heavy white locks
fell from beneath his slouched hat, nearly to his shoulders. Sunken
gray eyes, too dull and cold to light up, marked a hard, stony face,
the salient feature of which was a thin-upped, compressed mouth, with
corners drawn down deeply--the mouth which seems the world over to be
the index of selfish, cruel, sulky malignance. It is such a mouth as
has the school-boy--the coward of the play ground, who delights in
pulling off the wings of flies. It is such a mouth as we can imagine
some remorseless inquisitor to have had--that is, not an inquisitor
filled with holy zeal for what he mistakenly thought the cause of
Christ demanded, but a spleeny, envious, rancorous shaveling, who
tortured men from hatred of their superiority to him, and sheer love of
inflicting pain.
The rider was John H. Winder, Commissary General of Prisoners,
Baltimorean renegade and the malign genius to whose account should be
charged the deaths of more gallant men than all the inquisitors of the
world ever slew by the less dreadful rack and wheel. It was he who in
August could point to the three thousand and eighty-one new made graves
for that month, and exultingly tell his hearer that he was “doing more
for the Confederacy than twenty regiments.”
His lineage was in accordance with his character. His father was that
General William H. Winder, whose poltroonery at Bladensburg, in 1814,
nullified the resistance of the gallant Commodore Barney, and gave
Washington to the British.
The father was a coward and an incompetent; the son, always cautiously
distant from the scene of hostilities, was the tormentor of those whom
the fortunes of war, and the arms of brave men threw into his hands.
Winder gazed at us stonily for a few minutes without speaking, and,
turning, rode out again.
Our troubles, from that hour, rapidly increased.