Sultana

by Alan Huffman

  Reading between the lines—always a good idea with a carefully crafted memoir—one can surmise that Elliott spent most of his time at Camp Oglethorpe, the preferable prison on the south side of Macon, about sixty miles away. He avoided the stockade because no one knew his identity. Not that the Macon prison was comfortable. Elliott recalled “the stench of rotten meat, of which we had not half enough to eat” and “the bitter, bitter feeling that our country had abandoned us to our fate.” Still, for the men who were incarcerated at length inside the stockade, the horrors superseded everything that had preceded them, perhaps even in bloody battles such as Gettysburg and Chickamauga.

  Why would anyone claim to have been inside the stockade if they had not? Clearly, no one wanted to be there at the time; yet, many prisoners would later make much of their experiences at Andersonville, which represented a survival saga of epic proportions.

  Of the more than forty-five thousand prisoners who passed through the stockade, about thirteen thousand died—almost one in three, the highest rate of any prison during the Civil War. Formerly healthy men died of malnutrition or easily treatable illnesses and wounds, and the underworld of criminal raiders within the prisoners’ ranks was entrenched and at times murderous.

  The stockade’s physical boundary was a wooden palisade fifteen feet tall, inside of which ran a deadline extending nineteen to twenty-five feet into the compound. Prisoners who stepped across the deadline were shot. Thomas Newton recalled that, “About my second day there, without doubt my head would have been pierced with a bullet, but for a comrade’s timely jerking me from the scene of danger. I was not aware that in stooping over, my head extended a few inches beyond the ‘dead line.’” In some cases, men who were within the safe zone were shot by stray bullets aimed at violators. Another prisoner recounted how a crippled soldier nicknamed Chickamauga, who was in the habit of approaching the guards to talk or trade, retreated to the space inside the deadline because he feared a group of fellow inmates, and asked to be let out of the stockade. When his request was denied, he refused to return to the safe zone. Prison commandant Captain Henry Wirz then rode up on his horse and ordered him back. Although Chickamauga initially complied, he later returned, and Wirz ordered the guard to shoot him, which he did.

  For some the deadline represented more than a restriction on their freedom. Numerous accounts tell of prisoners who gave in to the temptation to end their own suffering by intentionally stepping across the line to be shot. Andersonville was also an incubator of psychiatric disorders ranging from acute depression to abject, raving lunacy. Men kept their distance from the crazed among them out of fear of injury, such as being bitten. A great many more suffered loss of hope, and now and then someone quietly ambled across the line to embrace death. After having survived the war and months inside the worst prison anyone could then imagine, they had finally reached their limit.

  If there was one overarching factor influencing a prisoner’s chances of survival, it was luck, but there was no accounting for it. Even if a man was lucky, he had to know how to take advantage of it. The factor over which the prisoners had most control was the ability to maintain presence of mind, and in that regard they made countless crucial decisions every day. Upon his arrival, Newton recalled feeling “the most intense agony I have ever experienced”—so much so that he had trouble catching his breath. At that moment his mind reeled at the specter of his life’s dreadful new context: A world of dispossessed soldiers, some of whom were “literally rotting alive, limbs dropping off with scurvy and other diseases.” Another arriving prisoner reported observing “living skeletons, with sunken eyes and long matted, tangled hair, dirty and filthy, many of them with not enough clothing to cover their nakedness.” Once Newton caught his breath, he felt overpowering bitterness toward his captors, followed by resolve to survive despite them. As a survival mechanism, it worked. He was able to remain focused.

  Still, there was no guarantee that firm resolve would carry a prisoner through. If the men learned anything during their captivity, it was that death was not always heralded by alarums and excursions, with the blast of bugles and the booming of cannonades. It could begin with quiet despair, with a covetous stare from a raider, or it could hop unseen onto a man’s skin and inflict a tiny, fateful bite. It was possible to die as a result of almost anything. Men became dangerously sunburned, suffered heat stroke, were driven by overwhelming thirst to drink water contaminated by feces and parasites. They suffered from the relentless summer heat with little or no shade, and in winter they endured teeth-chattering nights, often without so much as a blanket. As soldiers they had experienced profound discomfort before, but never with such intensity, for so long, with so little hope of relief.

  A small barracks was eventually built at one end of the stockade, but for the most part the men slept in the open or in the prison’s signature “shebangs”—crude shelters cobbled together from whatever materials the prisoners could find, including pieces of tents, sticks, and other debris, over holes dug in the ground. When William Jellison first arrived and stood surveying the scene, he was relieved to hear someone call his name and turned to see a member of his old company, who had also been captured in Stoneman’s raid. “He invited me home with him,” he recalled. “I asked where he lived, and he led the way to his abode, which was a hole in the ground.” The interiors of the shebangs were filthy and cramped. Weiser wrote that he slept each night “in a sitting position with my knees drawn up and my head and arms resting on my knees.”

  Meanwhile, Stockade Branch, the prison’s primary water supply, was contaminated by runoff from the guard camps and livestock pens before it entered the compound. Once inside it was used for everything—drinking, washing, and the discharge of human waste. Theoretically, those uses were segregated: Drinking at the beginning of the stream, then washing, then the latrines. But in practice the system broke down. Eventually the entire branch was coated with scum. Because the muddy ground around the latrines was so difficult to traverse, many men relieved themselves where they were and, by convention, buried the waste. The holes, Weiser wrote, “thousands of them, would get full and by the effect of the hot sun and rain they would boil over and run down the hill. This was the cause of creating millions of maggots, and when we would lay down to sleep hundreds of maggots would crawl over us. Some of them would crawl in our ears and in our mouths.”

  Cleanliness was all but impossible. In addition to the filth they walked through, and their own accumulated sweat, the men burned pine branches in their cook fires, which created black soot, “and not being furnished any soap, we could not keep our persons nor scanty clothing anything but filthy,” Newton wrote. “There were serious disputes sometimes whether a person was a negro or white person, which would be decided by the hair, being straight or curly.”

  In such an environment a body develops its own wild and fecund ecosystem, and the period of transition for a previously sanitary man was tough. On Jellison’s first night he crawled into his friend’s hole and was immediately overwhelmed by lice. “The whole pen was literally alive with crawling vermin,” he wrote. “I lay about thirty minutes, but could stand it no longer; got up and attempted to walk around, but the darkness was so intense that I could not see where I was going; so I had just to stand and stamp and shake myself for hours, and each hour seemed an age. I thought morning would never come.”

  Lice were so prolific that many prisoners felt compelled to strip and spend hours picking them from their bodies and clothes each day, “or they would kill us,” George Weiser wrote. “From the fourth of July until the first day of September, every day in those two months, I killed three hundred lice and nits. When I got up to this number I would stop killing until the next day.”

  A man who could spend hours not only picking lice but counting them does not have much to do, which was another problem at Andersonville. The prisoners were for the most part idle. In a typical entry from his diary, William Farrand Keys wrote, “Hot, Showery. Passed like man
y more, lying in my kennel like a dog. It would be far better for our health if we had something to do that would offer muscular exercise and I often start for a walk within our prison walls but the sickening sights and smells to be met with everywhere are harder to bear than dull activity.”

  The atmosphere was so self-contained, miasmic, and stifling that one of George Hitchcock’s friends volunteered to carry a body to the dead house—a shelter of bowers outside the stockade where cadavers were held for burial—just to get some fresh air. “When he returned, after a stay of some ten minutes, he seemed greatly refreshed,” Hitchcock wrote. Later, Hitchcock had a similar experience. “Rourke, of our squad, died to-night,” he wrote in his diary, “and I was detailed to carry him out to the dead-house. This is the first time I have been outside these horrid gates since I came in three months ago, and ‘tho’ outside less than three minutes, I caught a breath of fresh air which gave me a new lease on life.”

  Small changes could be pivotal in a man’s struggle to survive. A seriously despondent, failing man could be brought around by a friendly sing-along. But a summer storm that brought a respite from the heat, and an opportunity to capture fresh water or bathe, could impose a final intolerable stress upon someone who was extremely weak, particularly if he had no shelter. To make matters worse, there was no real hospital to turn to as a last resort. What passed for a hospital was a cluster of crowded, unsanitary tents and sheds outside the stockade, which served more as a halfway house to the cemetery than as a medical facility. Not only was the hospital ill-equipped, it was vulnerable to theft by soldiers assigned as nurses and by unscrupulous or desperate prisoners. In a report for the Confederate Army, Andersonville surgeon Joseph Jones wrote that the diseases his overworked staff treated in the hospital were myriad, but all were exacerbated by “seclusion from society, long-deferred hope, a lack of cleanliness, insufficient supply of nourishing food, a want of proper exercise of both body and mind.” Once weakened, Jones wrote, the prisoners tended to suffer oxygen deprivation, which led to a variety of both physical and psychiatric ills. Stockade Branch was so contaminated that it emitted “a sickening stench”—one of many olfactory assaults Jones referenced in his report. In fact, the odor of Andersonville was so vile and pervasive that people complained about it in Americus, Georgia, more than ten miles away.

  The hospital itself was a breeding ground for contagious diseases, and sponges and bandages were routinely reused. The most common diseases Jones treated were diarrhea, fevers, respiratory infections, sexually transmitted diseases, scurvy, and skin ulcers, the latter of which, he wrote, “are produced from the slightest causes imaginable. A pin scratch, a prick of a splinter, a pustule, an abrasion, or even a mosquito bite are sufficient causes for their production.” Even the inoculation of prisoners for smallpox caused some to develop deadly ulcers, he wrote. The only solution to unchecked gangrene was amputation, and there was more to fear than loss of a limb when a man was operated on in such an environment. During August and September 1864, Jones reported performing thirty-two surgeries, after which eighteen of the patients died. Medicine was hard to come by, and Jones often had to rely upon “such other indigenous remedies as we can obtain from the woods.” Sometimes the only remedy was “one ounce good whisky” every six hours.

  Initially the dead were buried in caskets, but the graveyard details soon became overwhelmed, and the bodies were interred en masse in long shallow trenches that sometimes received more than one hundred cadavers per day. Dying became so commonplace that men expected it, though they never truly got used to it. “One poor wretch died this morning within a rod of our tent, he had been suffering some time with diarrhea and scurvy,” William Farrand Keys wrote in his diary. “Last night I heard him crying out calling on his mother and incoherently wandering in his speech. When the sun had fairly risen he calmly died. Requiescat.”

  Henry Devillez recalled “one poor fellow who was wasted to a mere skeleton by a long and painful disease, when at last he was unable to longer move around, he retired to his burrow in the ground, and without hat, coat or vest lay down there, and in his miserable louse-infested kennel resigned himself to die. Being unable to partake of one morsel of the course and unwholesome food dealt out to the prisoners, he welcomed death as the means of ending forever his miserable existence. But death was slow to answer the summons. And thus he lay day after day in a semi-comatose condition, too weak to move either hand or foot, while the lice, fleas and musquitoes could be seen crawling from his nostrils, his ears and his mouth. Each morning for many days his comrades would go to his burrow expecting to find that death had closed the scene, but on their near approach, his stertorous breathing would announce to them that life was still there. It was not till after the vermin had actually eaten into his flesh, creating great sores where innumerable maggots found a burrow, did his spirit take its flight.”

  Lucius Wilder noticed that soon after arriving at Andersonville, several of his friends began to fail for no obvious reason. “There seemed to be no disease particularly, but a sort of despondency,” he wrote. “A man would lie there, and would groan and look up at the sky, and think of home and the old farm. He soon passed away.”

  The dead wagon, which arrived inside the stockade each morning, was at its busiest in August, when more than three thousand prisoners died. Some mornings Henry Harman stood near the gate and watched the bodies being removed. Most were brought there by their surviving friends and had been stripped of their clothing and possessions, often “before the breath had left the body,” as he put it. “It was pitiable to view the naked dead as they were pitched like cord-wood into the wagon preparatory to their ride to the deadhouse or cemetery. They were thrown in indiscriminately. It was horrible to see the heads, arms and legs as they swung back and forth with the jolting motion of the wagon. This wagon was made to do double duty, for it not only carried the dead out in the morning, but it brought in our rations of bread in the afternoon, not as much as being swept out.”

  Weiser sometimes stood at the gate and counted the bodies, and occasionally he observed fights breaking out over claims to their tattered and filthy rags. It happened most frequently when the arrival of the wagon coincided with the morning sick call—an ugly combination—which was announced by a drummer boy at 10 a.m. Sick call was a chaotic event, with hundreds of prisoners typically rushing toward the gate. “Very often when the fight was over one or the other of the sick men would be dead,” Weiser wrote. “This surely was a sad sight.”

  But if the dead wagon presented a gruesome sight, it also spurred men to survive. Some attempted escape during work details or through tunnels dug in secret from the shebangs to beyond the stockade wall, or joined the Confederate Army. Others came up with their own diversions. They played cards, staged plays, formed debating societies, and held religious meetings, chess matches—even classes in foreign languages. Drawing from captive members of the estimated forty thousand musicians employed by the Union Army, an 8th Indiana cavalryman formed a glee club.

  With all this activity, the stockade was normally a noisy place, quiet only in the predawn hours, when the silence was punctuated by the moaning of the sick and dying and the hourly calls of the guards. But with no real focus other than survival, there were a lot of hours to fill. The men who fared best were those who conceded that Andersonville was now their world and made the most of it.

  Remarkably, among the core functions of civilization that survived in the prison was property ownership. More fortunate prisoners had access to one of the fifteen or so hand-dug wells, from three to thirty feet deep, which were “owned” by communal parties. “Anyone who was not an owner was not allowed to use this well water, without which they bought it at a rate of one cent a quart,” Weiser wrote. With three friends, Weiser also bought a twelve-foot-long board from another prisoner for $2 and used it to build a frame for a tent. Their shebang was so renowned that Weiser claimed a few prisoners made drawings of it to copy.

  When Wilder first
arrived, he was surprised to be approached by a prisoner offering to sell him a place to live. “I replied, ‘Do you sell the land here?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there is no rule, but all of my friends have died and I am heir to the estate,’ and he smiled.” Wilder and a friend paid the man $5 for the lot. They had one blanket between them, for which they had traded a haversack to a Rebel officer, and joined it with a shirt and extra pair of pants to make a tent. Because Wilder was part of a larger group, the men took turns using the shelter. When they slept, they lay “spoon fashion, one turn, all turn.”

  The prison was roughly divided into neighborhoods, some better than others. According to William Marvel’s Andersonville: The Last Depot, sailors, black prisoners, and criminals gravitated toward the south side of town. There were also ethnic ghettos, including German, Irish, French, Scots-Irish, Swiss, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Slavic, Italian, and Native American sectors. So many immigrants were incarcerated at Andersonville that Wirz, who was himself Swiss and spoke three languages, employed translators in his office and in the hospital.

  Eventually craftsmen began to ply their wares, trading with other prisoners, guards, and even civilians outside the stockade for extra rations, wood, and clothing. Some traded brass buttons from their uniforms. Marvel noted that Andersonville at its height was the fifth largest city in the Confederacy, and that “Hardly an occupation could not boast of at least one representative inside the palisade.” Among them were barbers, merchants, at least one dentist and doctor, two watchmakers, bakers, tailors, cobblers, and real estate speculators. Newton sold wood. “Rather small business,” he recalled, “but it diverted the mind in a measure from our extreme misery.” The value of everything was increased at Andersonville. Even a bone could be fashioned into a tool.