DIMINISHING RATIONS--A DEADLY COLD RAIN--HOVERING OVER PITCH PINE FIRES
--INCREASE ON MORTALITY--A THEORY OF HEALTH.
The rations diminished perceptibly day by day. When we first entered
we each received something over a quart of tolerably good meal, a
sweet potato, a piece of meat about the size of one’s two fingers, and
occasionally a spoonful of salt. First the salt disappeared. Then the
sweet potato took unto itself wings and flew away, never to return.
An attempt was ostensibly made to issue us cow-peas instead, and the
first issue was only a quart to a detachment of two hundred and seventy
men. This has two-thirds of a pint to each squad of ninety, and made
but a few spoonfuls for each of the four messes in the squad. When it
came to dividing among the men, the beans had to be counted. Nobody
received enough to pay for cooking, and we were at a loss what to do
until somebody suggested that we play poker for them. This met general
acceptance, and after that, as long as beans were drawn, a large
portion of the day was spent in absorbing games of “bluff” and “draw,”
at a bean “ante,” and no “limit.”
After a number of hours’ diligent playing, some lucky or skillful
player would be in possession of all the beans in a mess, a squad, and
sometimes a detachment, and have enough for a good meal.
Next the meal began to diminish in quantity and deteriorate in quality.
It became so exceedingly coarse that the common remark was that the
next step would be to bring us the corn in the shock, and feed it to
us like stock. Then meat followed suit with the rest. The rations
decreased in size, and the number of days that we did not get any, kept
constantly increasing in proportion to the days that we did, until
eventually the meat bade us a final adieu, and joined the sweet potato
in that undiscovered country from whose bourne no ration ever returned.
The fuel and building material in the stockade were speedily exhausted.
The later comers had nothing whatever to build shelter with.
But, after the Spring rains had fairly set in, it seemed that we had
not tasted misery until then. About the middle of March the windows of
heaven opened, and it began a rain like that of the time of Noah. It
was tropical in quantity and persistency, and arctic in temperature.
For dreary hours that lengthened into weary days and nights, and these
again into never-ending weeks, the driving, drenching flood poured
down upon the sodden earth, searching the very marrow of the five
thousand hapless men against whose chilled frames it beat with pitiless
monotony, and soaked the sand bank upon which we lay until it was like
a sponge filled with ice-water. It seems to me now that it must have
been two or three weeks that the sun was wholly hidden behind the
dripping clouds, not shining out once in all that time. The intervals
when it did not rain were rare and short. An hour’s respite would be
followed by a day of steady, regular pelting of the great rain drops.
I find that the report of the Smithsonian Institute gives the average
annual rainfall in the section around Andersonville, at fifty-six
inches --nearly five feet--while that of foggy England is only
thirty-two. Our experience would lead me to think that we got the five
feet all at once.
We first comers, who had huts, were measurably better off than the
later arrivals. It was much drier in our leaf-thatched tents, and we
were spared much of the annoyance that comes from the steady dash of
rain against the body for hours.
The condition of those who had no tents was truly pitiable.
They sat or lay on the hill-side the live-long day and night, and took
the washing flow with such gloomy composure as they could muster.
All soldiers will agree with me that there is no campaigning hardship
comparable to a cold rain. One can brace up against the extremes of
heat and cold, and mitigate their inclemency in various ways. But there
is no escaping a long-continued, chilling rain. It seems to penetrate
to the heart, and leach away the very vital force.
The only relief attainable was found in huddling over little fires kept
alive by small groups with their slender stocks of wood. As this wood
was all pitch-pine, that burned with a very sooty flame, the effect
upon the appearance of the hoverers was, startling. Face, neck and
hands became covered with mixture of lampblack and turpentine, forming
a coating as thick as heavy brown paper, and absolutely irremovable by
water alone. The hair also became of midnight blackness, and gummed up
into elflocks of fantastic shape and effect. Any one of us could have
gone on the negro minstrel stage, without changing a hair, and put to
blush the most elaborate make-up of the grotesque burnt-cork artists.
No wood was issued to us. The only way of getting it was to stand
around the gate for hours until a guard off duty could be coaxed or
hired to accompany a small party to the woods, to bring back a load of
such knots and limbs as could be picked up. Our chief persuaders to
the guards to do us this favor were rings, pencils, knives, combs, and
such trifles as we might have in our pockets, and, more especially, the
brass buttons on our uniforms. Rebel soldiers, like Indians, negros
and other imperfectly civilized people, were passionately fond of
bright and gaudy things. A handful of brass buttons would catch every
one of them as swiftly and as surely as a piece of red flannel will a
gudgeon. Our regular fee for an escort for three of us to the woods was
six over-coat or dress-coat buttons, or ten or twelve jacket buttons.
All in the mess contributed to this fund, and the fuel obtained was
carefully guarded and husbanded.
This manner of conducting the wood business is a fair sample of the
management, or rather the lack of it, of every other detail of prison
administration. All the hardships we suffered from lack of fuel and
shelter could have been prevented without the slightest expense or
trouble to the Confederacy. Two hundred men allowed to go out on
parole, and supplied with ages, would have brought in from the adjacent
woods, in a week’s time, enough material to make everybody comfortable
tents, and to supply all the fuel needed.
The mortality caused by the storm was, of course, very great. The
official report says the total number in the prison in March was four
thousand six hundred and three, of whom two hundred and eighty-three
died.
Among the first to die was the one whom we expected to live longest.
He was by much the largest man in prison, and was called, because of
this, “BIG JOE.” He was a Sergeant in the Fifth Pennsylvania Cavalry,
and seemed the picture of health. One morning the news ran through the
prison that “Big Joe is dead,” and a visit to his squad showed his
stiff, lifeless form, occupying as much ground as Goliath’s, after his
encounter with David.
His early demise was an example of a general law, the workings of which
few in the army failed to notice. It was always the large and strong
who first succumbed to hardship. The stalwart, huge-limbed, toil-inured
men sank down earliest on the march, yielded soonest to malarial
influences, and fell first under the combined effects of home-sickness,
exposure and the privations of army life. The slender, withy boys,
as supple and weak as cats, had apparently the nine lives of those
animals. There were few exceptions to this rule in the army--there were
none in Andersonville. I can recall few or no instances where a large,
strong, “hearty” man lived through a few months of imprisonment. The
survivors were invariably youths, at the verge of manhood,--slender,
quick, active, medium-statured fellows, of a cheerful temperament, in
whom one would have expected comparatively little powers of endurance.
The theory which I constructed for my own private use in accounting for
this phenomenon I offer with proper diffidence to others who may be in
search of a hypothesis to explain facts that they have observed. It is
this:
a. The circulation of the blood maintains health, and consequently
life by carrying away from the various parts of the body the particles
of worn-out and poisonous tissue, and replacing them with fresh,
structure-building material.
b. The man is healthiest in whom this process goes on most freely and
continuously.
c. Men of considerable muscular power are disposed to be sluggish;
the exertion of great strength does not favor circulation. It rather
retards it, and disturbs its equilibrium by congesting the blood in
quantities in the sets of muscles called into action.
d. In light, active men, on the other hand, the circulation goes on
perfectly and evenly, because all the parts are put in motion, and kept
so in such a manner as to promote the movement of the blood to every
extremity. They do not strain one set of muscles by long continued
effort, as a strong man does, but call one into play after another.
There is no compulsion on the reader to accept this speculation at any
valuation whatever. There is not even any charge for it. I will lay
down this simple axiom:
No strong man, is a healthy man
from the athlete in the circus who lifts pieces of artillery and
catches cannon balls, to the exhibition swell in a country gymnasium.
If my theory is not a sufficient explanation of this, there is nothing
to prevent the reader from building up one to suit him better.