The Sentinels of Andersonville

by Tracy Groot

  The sun was beginning to set. It came through the magnolia and set some of the gray clapboards to green-gold. A bird lighted on an herb bundle, pecked first at the yarn, pecked at the drying herbs, eyed the four people on the porch, and flew away.

  Violet’s account of how she came to be at Andersonville ended with the very encounter Dr. Stiles had fought to prevent.

  She picked up a handful of seashells and let them drain into her lap. “Now I know why you smell of turpentine when you come home.”

  When the prison had first opened and hospital supplies had not yet arrived from Richmond, Dr. Stiles collected what he could from home, and his family helped. They tore old sheets into strips and rolled bandages. They scraped lint from old linen, for packing wounds. But time went on, and supply never met the need. When scurvy began to present in late April, they collected and dried herbs as pathetic substitutes for proper antiscorbutics. But there was no abatement of prisoners daily pouring into the stockade, and the worse the conditions became with the unthinkable concentration of men, the more Dr. Stiles withdrew his family from the tentacled need of Andersonville.

  He did it in a calculated fashion. He began to collect less, speak of it less, and then collected nothing, and spoke not at all. The family was so occupied in other war efforts, this one dropped off and was all but forgotten.

  “Turpentine is all we have for some wounds.”

  “You said it was for varnishing the hospital barracks.”

  “I let you believe so. There are no barracks.” He wearily rubbed his forehead. “Where is your mother? Where is everyone?”

  “Grandpa Wrassey’s. Liberty calved today.”

  “Violet, it wasn’t as bad in the beginning.”

  “There was a beginning to that—? Such a place could only have its origin in hell.”

  And Dr. Stiles saw the first good sign since he arrived: a flush of color replaced the white.

  She finally looked up from the seashells. “The guards, Papa . . .”

  “They are informed before they come for dinner to never speak of the stockade.”

  “By you, or by that awful Captain Wirz?”

  “By me.”

  She nodded with the air of bitter understanding coming to one long deceived. He took her hand from the seashells and held it in both of his.

  He had a ten-mile carriage ride to leave behind all he saw, and bring none of its infamy to his doorstep. Any guest guard was forewarned that if he spoke a word of his vocation, he would never dine with the Stiles family again. Not upon his family, not on his bevy of precious innocents, would he allow a single word to conjure a single image. His family knew things were bad there, the whole town of Americus did; but unless they saw it, unless anyone saw it, they knew nothing.

  She slipped her hand away.

  “A man said you were in trouble, Papa.”

  “What man?”

  “At the depot. A big . . . warehouse. He said for you to be more careful. What could he mean?”

  “Why did you defy me, child?” Dr. Stiles said softly. “I left as soon as Captain Wirz sent for me. He was kind enough to—”

  “You would have me . . . occupied in . . . seashells.” Her breath came quicker. “In buttons.” She snatched a handful of seashells and flung it away. Some pinged off the iron rail, some set the bundles to swaying. “What a coward you must think me.”

  “There is nothing of the coward about you. And there is nothing you can do, Violet.”

  “But you do it!” She jumped to her feet, scattering seashells to the gray clapboards.

  “Indeed I have never felt more worthless, and I am a doctor. But I can’t do much without medicine and bandages and good food.”

  “We could hold another benefit! We could—”

  “My darling, this town is benefited out. And what is more, it won’t have it. Not for them.”

  A cry of impotent rage, and she pressed her fists against her eyes.

  “Come sit with me, my darling. Tell me what you saw,” Dr. Stiles said, knowing it was better to draw out infection than leave it be.

  “I saw a man,” she said behind the fists. “He was lying on the ground. He held out his hand, and I did not go to him. Worst thing I’ve ever done.”

  Dance raised his head at this. He looked as if he would say something, but said nothing.

  “Tell me what you saw,” Dr. Stiles said gently.

  “Some had their arms and legs drawn up, as if they were in a frozen fit,” Violet said behind the fists.

  “A manifestation of scurvy,” Dr. Stiles said.

  “Some crawled on hands and knees, their legs were so swollen.”

  “Edema, from scurvy.”

  “Some of their faces were black.”

  “That’s from the pine smoke, early on when they were issued wood rations,” said Dance, his voice low and gentle to accommodate the mood on the porch. Violet lowered her fists to look at him. “Those are the men who have been around longest.”

  Such a many-sided boy, this Dance Pickett, son of his wife’s cousin. He could command a table sober or inebriated. He could make Violet fume one moment and laugh the next. Though his classes were on hold because of the war, Dance was enrolled at the University of Georgia to study patent law; yet over the past few months they had known him, he had displayed an acumen of the times that Dr. Stiles had seldom seen in his contemporaries. Dr. Stiles wondered if this boy could not hold his own in Congress one day.

  It was no wonder that Andersonville affected him the way that it did, those occasions of drunkenness and temper—Dance saw it entirely. He saw it every day.

  “Why don’t they clean the black off?” Violet asked. She slipped back into her chair.

  “No soap. No clean water. Some use the sand to scrub, but even that is filthy. If it doesn’t have excrement in it, it has fleas or lice or maggots. They try to keep clean, but some have just given up.”

  Violet looked at her hands in her lap. “Is it a hog sty in there, Papa?”

  “It’s not fit for hogs,” Dance murmured.

  “My pass extends only to the Federal hospital. I’ve not yet seen into it.”

  “Papa, they have sores. Terrible sores. They were . . .”

  Likely filled with maggots. Dr. Stiles rubbed his forehead. “Gangrene,” he said heavily. “It is prevalent.”

  She raised her eyes to her father’s, and his heart missed a beat. Did he know this girl? This was a new expression. He’d not seen it when she lost her fiancé, or when her beloved Grandma Wrassey died.

  “Have I lost you?” Dr. Stiles wondered, a catch in his voice. Was this his little girl? Had these beautiful eyes truly looked upon such wretchedness? “I never wanted you to see. In that day I thought I’d die.”

  “Oh, Papa.” Violet took his hand.

  Keep it together, Stiles, he told himself. “Parents have a hard time, letting their children see. It is an awful world, Violet girl.”

  “Children have a hard time, too, letting their parents.” She kissed his fingers, and held them tight. She gave a small smile. “But you are here yet, and I am too. What will we do to help them, Papa?”

  “Violet—” he began, shaking his head.

  “What is the town doing to help those boys?” said Emery Jones, the new guard. Dr. Stiles had learned no more than his name.

  “Nothing, Alabama,” Dance said, as if thrice repeating himself.

  “Very little,” Dr. Stiles admitted.

  “Why not?” Emery said, looking from one to the other.

  Dr. Stiles sighed. “Mr. Jones, that is a difficult question to answer. It will take more than a porch conversation, and my family is coming back soon. You will have had to live here to understand the way of things.”

  “I live here, and I don’t understand,” Violet declared.

  “Men are dyin’—right in this town’s backyard!” said Emery.

  “Son, many do not know—”

  “They know, all right,” Dance muttered.


  “I didn’t know,” Violet said quietly.

  “I saw a passel of civilians at the Andersonville depot,” said Emery. “They were sellin’ vegetables and such to anyone gettin’ off the train. I bought some pecans and says to one of them, ‘You from around here?’ She says, ‘What, this jumped-up town? Heavens no, I’m from Americus.’ So how can you say, sir, this town don’t know about those men?”

  “Well, Alabama, there’s your problem,” Dance said, slapping his knee. “They are not men, according to General Winder. They are a species called ‘Yankee,’ and woe to the one who thinks he sees in them a form like unto humanity.”

  Emery took off his hat and rolled it between his palms. He put his finger through a hole, then clapped it back on his head. He got up and went to the rail. He leaned on it and flicked a dried bundle with his finger. It tick-tocked back and forth.

  “I put a good man in there today.” He gave another flick. “Lewis Gann, 12th Pennsylvania. He is a fruit farmer. Thirty-two years old. Wife named Carrie, four children.”

  “I liked him,” Violet said. To Dance and Dr. Stiles, she said, “I overheard them at the woodpile before he went in. What was the oath you gave, Mr. Jones?”

  He set the bundle to swinging again. “You are a first-rate listener.”

  “Now that I think of it,” said Dance, interested, “why should it take an oath to escort a prisoner?”

  “That’s between me and him.”

  “But you never told him,” Violet said.

  “I will, one day. We’re gonna meet up in Ezra. He’s gonna teach me how to fruit-farm.”

  “If he lives, that is,” said Dance. “Violet, you just save that look for Posey. I am tired of stepping around truth.” He didn’t quite look at Dr. Stiles. Then he softened somewhat. “I am sorry for your friend, Emery. But once he goes in there, you may as well know they only come out sick or dead. And very few of the sick survive that hellish hospital. Some have escaped by tunneling out, but most of those have been caught. Their only hope is exchange, and so far that’s a ship that won’t come. Until then it’s just plain survival until the war ends.”

  “They ain’t gonna have a chance for survival if they ain’t properly fed. Why is that so? Never saw the like, and I’ve seen other prisons. They were skinnier’n apple peels.”

  “The South is getting worn out with need,” said Dr. Stiles. “Sometimes there isn’t enough to stock the commissary, sometimes it’s fouled-up transportation that’s the problem. . . . You are a soldier, you know about supply lines. You’ve known hunger.”

  “Not that kind of hunger. I looked on them boys and felt such shame. There’s something deeply wrong there. How many are in there?”

  “Last count I heard was about twenty-two thousand. But that was a few weeks back, and more keep coming every day.”

  “There’s some twenty-eight thousand now,” Dance said quietly.

  Emery stared. “In twenty-some acres of ground?”

  “Twenty-six,” said Dance. “Used to be sixteen and a half. They enlarged it last month.”

  “Twenty-eight thousand men in twenty-six acres,” Emery said in awe. “More than a thousand men to an acre. I’d not believe it lest I seen it.”

  “Take out the swamp around the creek, and the space between the deadline and the stockade wall, you’ve got about seven or eight feet of living space per man. At the rate they keep coming in, that will drop to six pretty quick.” He hesitated, then said, “And August is the hottest month.”

  “I can’t imagine what conditions will be like then, or how many dead,” said Dr. Stiles.

  “I can,” said Dance.

  Emery was silent. He settled to flick the herb bundle again.

  “Papa,” Violet said, “Mother will be here soon, and everyone else, and I have to know before I leave this porch what we will do to help them.”

  “Nothing can be done. The scope is too big. The problems of administration . . . too vast.”

  “Maybe for us, but not for a town. They have a right to know what’s going on up there.”

  And Dr. Stiles felt the final push toward a confrontation he had long feared. It stood before the moldering evil that encompassed Andersonville and Americus, an evil that could not be defined. When Dr. Stiles had a difficult time explaining anything, he knew it was because something rotten entangled the details. Things should be able to be plainly discussed. There was nothing plain about Andersonville. There was something wicked in its enterprise.

  Wicked? Truly, wicked?

  What else could answer?

  “They don’t want to know,” said Dr. Stiles at last. Many of those who did not want to know were his friends.

  “But they do, Papa!” Her lips trembled, but she seemed resolved to take herself in hand. She drew a steadying breath. “I would have wanted to know. There must be others like me.”

  “Your father is right,” Dance said with resignation. “You don’t believe it, but it’s true—they don’t care. They don’t want to care.”

  “You’re wrong!” She rose and went to the rail, opposite Emery.

  The Stiles home was situated at the end of Lamar Street. A quarter mile down the road was the town square. Dr. Stiles looked down that road. Some of the bitterest truth to bear about the Andersonville Prison was that Dance was right about Americus. They didn’t care. They didn’t want to care. And he knew his daughter. She would not believe anyone could be indifferent to suffering, because she was not.

  But Dr. Stiles understood this town, and what he understood that these young people did not was losing a child. George was three when he died of pneumonia. How many Americus boys had been buried since the war began? Less than half of their bodies made it home for burial. How many funerals had they attended? Silas Runcorn’s oldest boy. Judge Clayton’s son, Thaddeus. The beekeeper’s son.

  “If we gave them a chance,” said Emery, eyes on the town. He straightened. “If we got up a . . . committee. Folks in Huntsville are keen on committees.”

  “A society,” Violet said quickly. “A society to help the Andersonville prisoners.”

  “We could hold ourselves an indignation meeting,” Emery said, looking at each in turn. “We’ll make it known that men are starving to death ten miles away.”

  “There are good people in this town, Papa,” Violet said earnestly. “They need to be educated. Let’s do that, and give them a chance to help!”

  “Tell you what—all they gotta do is stand where Dance stands,” said Emery. “That’ll cure ’em. First they’ll wanna choke whoever let the place get that way, but after that, they’ll pitch in. Let ’em see for themselves, and there’ll be no stoppin’ ’em.”

  “Friends of Andersonville Prison!” Violet said. “The F.A.P.! We can hold meetings right here! We can organize! What do you think, Papa?” She began to pace. “We could put up handbills all over town. We could put them up at the Andersonville depot! Colonel Hancock can write an editorial for the newspaper. We can send one to the Macon Telegraph!”

  “Tell you what—you get a bunch of folks together, they’ll come up with ways to get them boys food.”

  “Massive amounts!” Violet rejoiced. “More than we could ever do! Remember the biscuits Ellen and Mother used to make for the ones in the hospital? Multiply that by thousands, Papa!”

  The light in her eyes. Would he dim it?

  Only Dance understood. There he sat, silent and sullen, with folded arms and hooded eyes.

  Was he wrong, laying the injunction upon this boy to never speak of the prison conditions? To bottle it up? To leave infection be?

  “Most important, we gotta get people down there,” said Emery. “Dance can show them.”

  “On Mondays, people could get into the habit of making extra biscuits,” Violet said, touching one forefinger to the other. “Tuesdays, extra corn bread.” She touched her middle finger. “On Wednesdays, we could go out to the farms and—”

  Dance stood abruptly, shoving the chair back. He said to Emer
y, “We best get back.” He nodded good-bye at Dr. Stiles, with a quicker nod and touch of his hat to Violet.

  He was down the stairs and a few steps past when Violet cried, “Dance Pickett, you come back here!” She pounded the rail. “You come back here!”

  He froze, standing hunched and fisted, and finally turned upon them a very dark and belligerent countenance.

  “I will not get involved in this. Not even for you, Miss Stiles.” A look of open hostility went to Dr. Stiles himself. “Not for anyone.”

  “All those figures you gave, sounds like you already are,” Violet snapped.

  “Those the calculations of a man who does not care?” Emery added.

  “Scientific observation. You can ask your father about that. They sent some doctors to study gangrene in the Federal hospital because of the reports of such uncommon amounts. Such is the fame of Andersonville. Boiled down to a study of misery.” He looked at Emery. “I never said I didn’t care. But I will not host a raree-show.”

  “I am not leaving here until I know we can help! No one is leaving! Let us have some resolution!” She came to Dr. Stiles in his chair and knelt. “I will die, Papa, if I cannot help those wretched men. Will you not give your blessing? Is it not Christian to feed our enemies?”

  “To feed these enemies is to forgive them,” said Dr. Stiles. “That, my girl, this town will not do.”

  Dance came up the stairs two at a time. His face had cleared completely of its pugnacity. “Yes, that’s it exactly! That’s the truth, Violet, that’s the answer—don’t get this town involved! But if you want to help, then—”

  Violet rose quickly and backed away from them. She looked from Dance to her father.

  “You kept me in the dark. What sin!” she hissed, clutching her skirts. “And yes, I will name it so!” She pointed toward the town. “I will not have them as blind as I was! I will sin against God and those men he created if I do!” She dashed angrily at tears. “Can you not see what great wickedness it is to keep us blind? To keep us from helping them?”

  Dance looked at Emery, and Dance’s shoulders finally came down. “A blindfold is a great wickedness.”