SURLY BRITON--THE STOLID COURAGE THAT MAKES THE ENGLISH FLAG A
BANNER OF TRIUMPH--OUR COMPANY BUGLER, HIS CHARACTERISTICS AND HIS
DEATH--URGENT DEMAND FOR MECHANICS--NONE WANT TO GO--TREATMENT OF
A REBEL SHOEMAKER --ENLARGEMENT OF THE STOCKADE--IT IS BROKEN BY A
STORM--THE WONDERFUL SPRING.
Early in August, F. Marriott, our Company Bugler, died. Previous to
coming to America he had been for many years an English soldier, and
I accepted him as a type of that stolid, doggedly brave class, which
forms the bulk of the English armies, and has for centuries carried
the British flag with dauntless courage into every land under the
sun. Rough, surly and unsocial, he did his duty with the unemotional
steadiness of a machine. He knew nothing but to obey orders, and obeyed
them under all circumstances promptly, but with stony impassiveness.
With the command to move forward into action, he moved forward without
a word, and with face as blank as a side of sole leather. He went
as far as ordered, halted at the word, and retired at command as
phlegmatically as he advanced. If he cared a straw whether he advanced
or retreated, if it mattered to the extent of a pinch of salt whether
we whipped the Rebels or they defeated us, he kept that feeling so
deeply hidden in the recesses of his sturdy bosom that no one ever
suspected it. In the excitement of action the rest of the boys shouted,
and swore, and expressed their tense feelings in various ways, but
Marriott might as well have been a graven image, for all the expression
that he suffered to escape. Doubtless, if the Captain had ordered him
to shoot one of the company through the heart, he would have executed
the command according to the manual of arms, brought his carbine to
a “recover,” and at the word marched back to his quarters without an
inquiry as to the cause of the proceedings. He made no friends, and
though his surliness repelled us, he made few enemies. Indeed, he was
rather a favorite, since he was a genuine character; his gruffness had
no taint of selfish greed in it; he minded his own business strictly,
and wanted others to do the same. When he first came into the company,
it is true, he gained the enmity of nearly everybody in it, but an
incident occurred which turned the tide in his favor. Some annoying
little depredations had been practiced on the boys, and it needed
but a word of suspicion to inflame all their minds against the surly
Englishman as the unknown perpetrator. The feeling intensified, until
about half of the company were in a mood to kill the Bugler outright.
As we were returning from stable duty one evening, some little
occurrence fanned the smoldering anger into a fierce blaze; a couple
of the smaller boys began an attack upon him; others hastened to their
assistance, and soon half the company were engaged in the assault.
He succeeded in disengaging himself from his assailants, and, squaring
himself off, said, defiantly:
“Dom yer cowardly heyes; jest come hat me one hat a time, hand hI’ll
wollop the ’ole gang uv ye’s.”
One of our Sergeants styled himself proudly “a Chicago rough,” and was
as vain of his pugilistic abilities as a small boy is of a father who
plays in the band. We all hated him cordially--even more than we did
Marriott.
He thought this was a good time to show off, and forcing his way
through the crowd, he said, vauntingly:
“Just fall back and form a ring, boys, and see me polish off
the---fool.”
The ring was formed, with the Bugler and the Sergeant in the center.
Though the latter was the younger and stronger the first round showed
him that it would have profited him much more to have let Marriott’s
challenge pass unheeded. As a rule, it is as well to ignore all
invitations of this kind from Englishmen, and especially from those
who, like Marriott, have served a term in the army, for they are likely
to be so handy with their fists as to make the consequences of an
acceptance more lively than desirable.
So the Sergeant found. “Marriott,” as one of the spectators expressed
it, “went around him like a cooper around a barrel.” He planted his
blows just where he wished, to the intense delight of the boys, who
yelled enthusiastically whenever he got in “a hot one,” and their
delight at seeing the Sergeant drubbed so thoroughly and artistically,
worked an entire revolution in his favor.
Thenceforward we viewed his eccentricities with lenient eyes, and
became rather proud of his bull-dog stolidity and surliness. The whole
battalion soon came to share this feeling, and everybody enjoyed
hearing his deep-toned growl, which mischievous boys would incite by
some petty annoyances deliberately designed for that purpose. I will
mention incidentally, that after his encounter with the Sergeant no one
ever again volunteered to “polish” him off.
Andersonville did not improve either his temper or his
communicativeness. He seemed to want to get as far away from the rest
of us as possible, and took up his quarters in a remote corner of
the Stockade, among utter strangers. Those of us who wandered up in
his neighborhood occasionally, to see how he was getting along, were
received with such scant courtesy, that we did not hasten to repeat
the visit. At length, after none of us had seen him for weeks, we
thought that comradeship demanded another visit. We found him in the
last stages of scurvy and diarrhea. Chunks of uneaten corn bread lay
by his head. They were at least a week old. The rations since then had
evidently been stolen from the helpless man by those around him. The
place where he lay was indescribably filthy, and his body was swarming
with vermin. Some good Samaritan had filled his little black oyster
can with water, and placed it within his reach. For a week, at least,
he had not been able to rise from the ground; he could barely reach
for the water near him. He gave us such a glare of recognition as I
remembered to have seen light up the fast-darkening eyes of a savage
old mastiff, that I and my boyish companions once found dying in the
woods of disease and hurts. Had he been able he would have driven us
away, or at least assailed us with biting English epithets. Thus he had
doubtless driven away all those who had attempted to help him. We did
what little we could, and staid with him until the next afternoon, when
he died. We prepared his body, in the customary way: folded the hands
across his breast, tied the toes together, and carried it outside, not
forgetting each of us, to bring back a load of wood.
The scarcity of mechanics of all kinds in the Confederacy, and the
urgent needs of the people for many things which the war and the
blockade prevented their obtaining, led to continual inducements being
offered to the artizans among us to go outside and work at their
trade. Shoemakers seemed most in demand; next to these blacksmiths,
machinists, molders and metal workers generally. Not a week passed
during my imprisonment that I did not see a Rebel emissary of some kind
about the prison seeking to engage skilled workmen for some purpose
or another. While in Richmond the managers of the Tredegar Iron Works
were brazen and persistent in their efforts to seduce what are termed
“malleable iron workers,” to enter their employ. A boy who was master
of any one of the commoner trades had but to make his wishes known, and
he would be allowed to go out on parole to work. I was a printer, and I
think that at least a dozen times I was approached by Rebel publishers
with offers of a parole, and work at good prices. One from Columbia, S.
C., offered me two dollars and a half a “thousand” for composition. As
the highest price for such work that I had received before enlisting
was thirty cents a thousand, this seemed a chance to accumulate untold
wealth. Since a man working in day time can set from thirty-five
to fifty “thousand” a week, this would make weekly wages run from
eighty-seven dollars and fifty cents to one hundred and twenty-five
dollars--but it was in Confederate money, then worth from ten to twenty
cents on the dollar.
Still better offers were made to iron workers of all kinds, to
shoemakers, tanners, weavers, tailors, hatters, engineers, machinists,
millers, railroad men, and similar tradesmen. Any of these could
have made a handsome thing by accepting the offers made them almost
weekly. As nearly all in the prison had useful trades, it would have
been of immense benefit to the Confederacy if they could have been
induced to work at them. There is no measuring the benefit it would
have been to the Southern cause if all the hundreds of tanners and
shoemakers in the Stockade could have, been persuaded to go outside
and labor in providing leather and shoes for the almost shoeless
people and soldiery. The machinists alone could have done more good
to the Southern Confederacy than one of our brigades was doing harm,
by consenting to go to the railroad shops at Griswoldville and ply
their handicraft. The lack of material resources in the South was
one of the strongest allies our arms had. This lack of resources was
primarily caused by a lack of skilled labor to develop those resources,
and nowhere could there be found a finer collection of skilled
laborers than in the thirty-three thousand prisoners incarcerated in
Andersonville.
All solicitations to accept a parole and go outside to work at one’s
trade were treated with the scorn they deserved. If any mechanic
yielded to them, the fact did not come under my notice. The usual reply
to invitations of this kind was:
“No, Sir! By God, I’ll stay in here till I rot, and the maggots carry
me out through the cracks in the Stockade, before I’ll so much as raise
my little finger to help the infernal Confederacy, or Rebels, in any
shape or form.”
In August a Macon shoemaker came in to get some of his trade to go
back with him to work in the Confederate shoe factory. He prosecuted
his search for these until he reached the center of the camp on the
North Side, when some of the shoemakers who had gathered around him,
apparently considering his propositions, seized him and threw him into
a well. He was kept there a whole day, and only released when Wirz cut
off the rations of the prison for that day, and announced that no more
would be issued until the man was returned safe and sound to the gate.
The terrible crowding was somewhat ameliorated by the opening in
July of an addition--six hundred feet long--to the North Side of the
Stockade. This increased the room inside to twenty acres, giving about
an acre to every one thousand seven hundred men,--a preposterously
contracted area still. The new ground was not a hotbed of virulent
poison like the olds however, and those who moved on to it had that
much in their favor.
The palisades between the new and the old portions of the pen were left
standing when the new portion was opened. We were still suffering a
great deal of inconvenience from lack of wood. That night the standing
timbers were attacked by thousands of prisoners armed with every
species of a tool to cut wood, from a case-knife to an ax. They worked
the live-long night with such energy that by morning not only every
inch of the logs above ground had disappeared, but that below had been
dug up, and there was not enough left of the eight hundred foot wall of
twenty-five-foot logs to make a box of matches.
One afternoon--early in August--one of the violent rain storms
common to that section sprung up, and in a little while the water
was falling in torrents. The little creek running through the camp
swelled up immensely, and swept out large gaps in the Stockade, both
in the west and east sides. The Rebels noticed the breaches as soon
as the prisoners. Two guns were fired from the Star Tort, and all the
guards rushed out, and formed so as to prevent any egress, if one was
attempted. Taken by surprise, we were not in a condition to profit by
the opportunity until it was too late.
The storm did one good thing: it swept away a great deal of filth, and
left the camp much more wholesome. The foul stench rising from the
camp made an excellent electrical conductor, and the lightning struck
several times within one hundred feet of the prison.
Toward the end of August there happened what the religously inclined
termed a Providential Dispensation. The water in the Creek was
indescribably bad. No amount of familiarity with it, no increase of
intimacy with our offensive surroundings, could lessen the disgust
at the polluted water. As I have said previously, before the stream
entered the Stockade, it was rendered too filthy for any use by the
contaminations from the camps of the guards, situated about a half-mile
above. Immediately on entering the Stockade the contamination became
terrible. The oozy seep at the bottom of the hillsides drained directly
into it all the mass of filth from a population of thirty-three
thousand. Imagine the condition of an open sewer, passing through the
heart of a city of that many people, and receiving all the offensive
product of so dense a gathering into a shallow, sluggish stream, a yard
wide and five inches deep, and heated by the burning rays of the sun
in the thirty-second degree of latitude. Imagine, if one can, without
becoming sick at the stomach, all of these people having to wash in and
drink of this foul flow.
There is not a scintilla of exaggeration in this statement. That
it is within the exact truth is demonstrable by the testimony of
any man--Rebel or Union--who ever saw the inside of the Stockade at
Andersonville. I am quite content to have its truth--as well as that of
any other statement made in this book--be determined by the evidence
of any one, no matter how bitter his hatred of the Union, who had any
personal knowledge of the condition of affairs at Andersonville. No one
can successfully deny that there were at least thirty-three thousand
prisoners in the Stockade, and that the one shallow, narrow creek,
which passed through the prison, was at once their main sewer and their
source of supply of water for bathing, drinking and washing. With these
main facts admitted, the reader’s common sense of natural consequences
will furnish the rest of the details.
It is true that some of the more fortunate of us had wells; thanks to
our own energy in overcoming extraordinary obstacles; no thanks to our
gaolers for making the slightest effort to provide these necessities
of life. We dug the wells with case and pocket knives, and half
canteens to a depth of from twenty to thirty feet, pulling up the dirt
in pantaloons legs, and running continual risk of being smothered to
death by the caving in of the unwalled sides. Not only did the Rebels
refuse to give us boards with which to wall the wells, and buckets for
drawing the water, but they did all in their power to prevent us from
digging the wells, and made continual forays to capture the digging
tools, because the wells were frequently used as the starting places
for tunnels. Professor Jones lays special stress on this tunnel feature
in his testimony, which I have introduced in a previous chapter.
The great majority of the prisoners who went to the Creek for water,
went as near as possible to the Dead Line on the West Side, where the
Creek entered the Stockade, that they might get water with as little
filth in it as possible. In the crowds struggling there for their turn
to take a dip, some one nearly every day got so close to the Dead Line
as to arouse a suspicion in the guard’s mind that he was touching it.
The suspicion was the unfortunate one’s death warrant, and also its
execution. As the sluggish brain of the guard conceived it he leveled
his gun; the distance to his victim was not over one hundred feet;
he never failed his aim; the first warning the wretched prisoner got
that he was suspected of transgressing a prison-rule was the charge of
“ball-and-buck” that tore through his body. It was lucky if he was, the
only one of the group killed. More wicked and unjustifiable murders
never were committed than these almost daily assassinations at the
Creek.
One morning the camp was astonished beyond measure to discover that
during the night a large, bold spring had burst out on the North
Side, about midway between the Swamp and the summit of the hill. It
poured out its grateful flood of pure, sweet water in an apparently
exhaustless quantity. To the many who looked in wonder upon it, it
seemed as truly a heaven-wrought miracle as when Moses’s enchanted rod
smote the parched rock in Sinai’s desert waste, and the living waters
gushed forth.
The police took charge of the spring, and every one was compelled to
take his regular turn in filling his vessel. This was kept up during
our whole stay in Andersonville, and every morning, shortly after
daybreak, a thousand men could be seen standing in line, waiting their
turns to fill their cans and cups with the precious liquid.
I am told by comrades who have revisited the Stockade of recent years,
that the spring is yet running as when we left, and is held in most
pious veneration by the negros of that vicinity, who still preserve the
tradition of its miraculous origin, and ascribe to its water wonderful
grace giving and healing properties, similar to those which pious
Catholics believe exist in the holy water of the fountain at Lourdes.
I must confess that I do not think they are so very far from right. If
I could believe that any water was sacred and thaumaturgic, it would
be of that fountain which appeared so opportunely for the benefit of
the perishing thousands of Andersonville. And when I hear of people
bringing water for baptismal purposes from the Jordan, I say in
my heart, “How much more would I value for myself and friends the
administration of the chrismal sacrament with the diviner flow from
that low sand-hill in Western Georgia.”