ANDERSONVILLE.
Just across the railroad track below Macon, in a pleasant pine grove, is
the Fair Ground, where was located that thing of misery known to us as
the Macon Prison. It was the “Yankee Prison,” down here.
I visited the spot one bright morning after a shower, when the breezes
and the sunshine were in the pine-tops overhead. The ground was covered
with a thin growth of brown grass, wet with the rain: stepping along
which I came suddenly to a quadrangular space, as arid as the hill of
Golgotha. No marks were necessary to show where the stockade had stood,
with its elevated scaffolding on which walked the Rebel guard. The
stockade had been removed; but the blasted and barren earth remained to
testify of the homesick feet that had trodden it into dreary sterility.
A little stream runs through a hollow below the Fair Ground, carrying
off much of the filth of the town. From that stream our prisoners drank.
The tub set in the side of the bank at the foot of the hill, and the
ditch that conducted into it the water for their use, were still there.
Guarded, they came down from the stockade, to this tub, of the contents
of which they were not always permitted to have enough. “I used to hear
’em yell for water,” said a negro living near. “I was bad off as a
slave, but I never begun to be so bad off as they was. Some of ’em had
no shoes for winter, and almost no clothes.”
In the pine woods on the hill above the area of the stockade is “Death’s
Acre,”—the prison burying-ground, enclosed by a plain board fence, and
containing little rows of humble graves marked with stakes, and
numbered. I noticed numbers as high as two hundred and thirty. How many
national soldiers lie buried in this lot I do not know.
I shall not dwell upon the sufferings endured by the inmates of this
prison. They shrink into insignificance compared with the horrors of the
great military prison of Georgia and the South. Neither of these do I
purpose to say much. Enough, and more than enough has been spoken and
written about them. The infamy of Andersonville is world-wide.
Passing through Washington in August, 1865, I one morning looked into
the hot and steaming court-room where Captain Henry Wirz was on trial.
In a somewhat worn broadcloth coat, with his counsel at his side
occasionally whispering him, his elbow on a table, and his thin uneasy
hand fingering his dark beard or supporting his chin; attenuated, bent,
and harassed with the most terrible anxieties,—for, however indifferent
he may have been to the lives of other and better men, there was one
life to which he was not indifferent, and which was now at stake;
down-looking for the most part, but frequently glancing his quick sharp
eye at the court or the witnesses; there sat the miserable man,
listening to minutely detailed accounts of the atrocities of which he
had been the instrument. The cause he had served with such savage
fidelity, had perished; and the original authors of the enormities he
had been employed to commit, stalked at large, or lay in temporary
confinement, confidently expecting the executive clemency; while this
wretched hireling, whose sin consisted in having done their work too
well, was to suffer, not the just for the unjust, but the guilty dog for
the still more guilty masters.
Fifty-eight miles below Macon, by the South-western Railroad, is the
scene of the crimes against humanity for which Henry Wirz was punished
with death. The place is set down as _Anderson_ on maps and in
guide-books; and that is the name by which it was known to the
inhabitants of the country, until the immense hideous business the war
brought to it dignified it with the title of _ville_.
It is a disagreeable town, with absolutely no point of interest about it
except the prison. Before the war it had but five buildings: a church
without a steeple; a small railroad depot; a little framed box in which
was the country post-office; and two dwellings,—a log-cabin, and a house
with a saw- and grist-mill attached. There were other dwellings within a
mile.
Such was Anderson. Anderson_ville_ contains some forty additional
cheap-looking, unpainted buildings, of various sizes, all of which were
constructed with reference to the prison; such as officers’ houses,
large or small according to the rank of the occupants, government
storehouses, hospital buildings, (for the troops on duty,) and so forth.
The hospital is now used as a hotel. The entire aspect and atmosphere of
the place are ugly and repulsive.
The village lies on the railroad and west of it. Between a third and one
half of a mile east of it, is the prison.
The space enclosed by the rough stockade contains twenty-five acres,
divided by a sluggish stream flowing through it. It looks like a great
horse-yard. Much of the land is swampy, but the rest is elevated, rising
on the south side gradually, and on the north side quite steeply from
the brook. It was from this shallow stream, defiled with refuse from the
camp of the Georgia Reserves, which it received before entering the
stockade, that the thirty thousand prisoners, who were sometimes crowded
into this broken oblong space, drew their chief supply of water. There
were a few little springs in the banks, very precious to them.
The walls of the stockade are of upright logs about a foot in diameter,
twenty feet high above the ground, in which they are set close together,
deep enough to be kept firmly in their position. There are an outer and
an inner wall of this description, with a space some fifty yards in
breadth between them. There were sentry-boxes for the soldiers on guard,
hung like birds’-nests near the top of the inner wall. These were
reached by ladders. For further security, the stockade was partly
surrounded by a deep ditch; and on portions of two sides there is an
unfinished third line of upright logs.
The outer wall of the stockade has but one entrance. Through this the
newly arrived prisoners were marched, and along the space between the
two walls, to one of two gates which gave admission to the interior of
the prison. How many thousands of brave and stalwart soldiers entered
these infernal doors, from which only ghostly skeleton-men, or the
corpses of skeleton-men, ever issued forth again!
The prisoners were of course confined within the inner wall. And not
only so, but they were prevented from approaching within twenty feet of
it by the dead line. Or if not prevented,—for much of the way this fatal
boundary was marked only by posts set at intervals of six or seven
yards,—he who, in blindness and sickness and despair, perhaps jostled
out of his way by the blind, sick, despairing multitude crowded within,
set his foot one inch beyond the strict limits, as some Rebel on guard
chose to _imagine_ them, crack-went a musket, a light puff of smoke
curled up from one of the birds’-nests, and the poor wretch lay in his
blood, groaning out the last of many groans, which ended his long
misery.
I learned that when the stockade was first built the ground it encloses
was covered with forest-trees. Why were they not left—at least a few of
them—to bless with their cooling shade the unfortunate captives, in the
heat of those terrible prison summers? Not a tree remained. Near by were
forests of beautiful timber, to which they were not even permitted to go
and cut wood for fuel and huts.
One can imagine nothing more dreary and disheartening than the interior
view of the stockade as it is to-day, except the stockade as it was
during the war. The holes in which the prisoners burrowed for protection
from the weather, have been mostly destroyed by the washing rains.
Nearly all the huts are in ruins. The barrack sheds, in which but a mere
handful of the thirty thousand prisoners could find place, still remain,
marked with sad relics,—bunks with the names of the occupants cut upon
them, or fragments of benches, knives, old pipes, and old shoes.
Between the outer and inner walls were the bakehouse, the pen for
sick-call, and the log-sheds in which the stocks were kept. The
cookhouse was outside.
Besides the great stockade, there was a small stockade for officers, and
a hospital stockade containing some eight acres, and surrounded by
upright logs ten or twelve feet high.
In pleasant pine woods, about a hundred rods north of the stockade, is
the original burying-ground of the Andersonville prison, enlarged and
converted into a national cemetery since the war. A whitewashed
picket-fence encloses a square space of near fifty acres, divided into
four main sections by two avenues crossing it and cutting each other at
right angles. Two of these sections—those south of the east-and-west
road—are subdivided by alleys into five smaller sections, where the dead
lie in long, silent rows, by hundreds. Here are about seven thousand
graves. The northeast quarter of the cemetery is undivided; and here, in
a single vast encampment, sleep five thousand men. There are in all near
thirteen thousand graves, each with its little white head-board
commemorating the name, rank, company, regiment, and date of death, of
its inmate. The records show that the first death occurred on February
27th, 1864, and the last on April 28th, 1865. From April 1st, 1864, to
April 1st, 1865, the average rate of mortality was over a thousand a
month. It sometimes reached a hundred a day.
Apart from the rest, in the northwestern corner of the cemetery, are the
graves of the Georgia Reserves who died while on duty here,—one hundred
and fifteen out of four regiments. The mortality among them appears also
to have been great; and indeed one cannot conceive how it should be
otherwise, living as they did within the pestiferous influence of the
prison atmosphere.
At the entrance to the cemetery, on the south side, appears the
following inscription,—the same I noticed above the graves at
Spottsylvania, and which might with propriety be placed before every
national soldiers’ cemetery:—
“On Fame’s eternal camping-ground
Their silent tents are spread,
And Glory guards with solemn round
The bivouac of the dead.”
At the alley-crossings stand the following:—
“The hopes, the fears, the blood, the tears,
That marked the battle strife,
Are now all crowned by Victory
That saved the Nation’s life.”
“Whether in the prison drear,
Or in the battle’s van,
The fittest place for man to die,
Is where he dies for man.”
“A thousand battle-fields have drunk
The blood of warriors brave,
And countless homes are dark and drear
In the land they died to save.”
“Then shall the dust
Return to the earth as it was;
And the spirit shall return
Unto God who gave it.”
Over the encampment of five thousand is raised the following:—
“Through all Rebellion’s horrors
Bright shines our Nation’s fame:
Our gallant soldiers, perishing,
Have won a deathless name.”
At the intersection of the avenues rises the flag-staff planted here by
Miss Clara Barton’s party, who laid out the Cemetery Grounds in the
summer of 1865. Here, on the soil of Georgia, above the graves of our
dead, waves the broad symbol of the Nation’s power and victory; while
all round this sanctified ground stand the ancient pines, Nature’s
serene and solemn priesthood, waving their green arms, and murmuring
softly, by day and all through the starry night,—whilst thou, O mother!
O wife! art mourning in thy desolated Northern home,—the requiems of the
weary ones at rest.
The Rebel owner of the land occupied by the prison had been pardoned by
the President; and I learned of the Freedmen’s Bureau that he had asked
for the restoration of his property,—demanding even that the cemetery
grounds should be turned over to him.
In conclusion I may state that citizens of Georgia, living at a distance
from Andersonville, said to me that they knew of the atrocities
permitted there at the time of their occurrence, and that they did not
think it possible for the Rebel leaders to have been ignorant of them.