May 10, 2013 Andersonville, Georgia

     Leaving beautiful Savannah behind, we motored half-way across the state to visit Andersonville, the site of the most notorious prisoner-of-war camp of the Civil War.   I began to stiffen my resolve as we got closer and closer.  I knew this would be grim.   I'd seen the movie.   Rationalizing I told myself it couldn't be as bad as the movie portrayed, surely Hollywood exaggerated for effect.  As it turns out, the movie was exceptionally accurate.  Fortunately, what was a hell-hole is now a grassy field. 

 

This was the entrance gate to the stockade (prison yard).  The platforms at the top are guard towers.

 

 

This is the "deadline", so named because if you crossed it you were immediately shot.  It ran the interior perimeter of the stockade.

 

 





The stockade was a 20-acre grassy field with a polluted stream running through it.  There were no dormitories, no bathrooms, no shelter except what the prisoners could build.   Peter's smile belies his appalling condition.  Wet and mud-encased when it rained, freezing cold when it snowed, bug encrusted and blazing hot in the summer.  These makeshift tents were called "shebangs" as in, "it's the whole shebang."

 

Andersonville was open for 14 months.  During that time 45,000 Union soldiers were imprisoned there.  Because of over-crowding and the squalid conditions, 12,920 (29.9%) of the soldiers died there.   They were buried in trenches.  These markers give, in stark terms, a visual of the carnage.  This is one fourth of the markers erected to mark the passing of the dead at Andersonville.

 

 

On a final note, the prison and cemetary are not the only sites.   Andersonville is now home to the Prisoner of War museum.   It tells the story of what happens to people captured during wartime, from the Revolutionary War all the way to Iraq and Afghanistan.   It contains video of former prisoners of war talking about their experiences and the effect the internment had on their families and themselves. 

 

Mind you, none of this was uplifting, but . . . . insightful?   depressing?     angry?    resigned.