This text is part of:
[148] on October 20, 1864. As the relief of the guard entered the prison in the afternoon, the prisoners by a concerted rush disarmed and killed some of them. Sentinels on the parapet raised the alarm and began to fire into the mass, and the cannon at one of the angles discharged grape and canister and did considerable execution. About fifty of the prisoners were killed and wounded. Escapes from Andersonville were not frequent. The triple stockade required such a long tunnel that many grew tired before it was completed, and many of the prisoners were too weak to do much vigorous work. Then, too, the pack of hounds kept outside the stockade was successful in running down some of the fugitives, though the stories of their ferocity have been much exaggerated. Usually they surrounded the escaping prisoner and prevented his further progress, but did not injure him appreciably. Warren Lee Goss tells of extending a tunnel from the side of a well abandoned because of lack of water. By night the men worked away, digging the tunnel and throwing the dirt into the well. By day they removed the dirt from the well amid the jeers of their companions, who did not believe that they would ever reach water. The tunnel was finally opened up, and about twenty passed through and scattered into small parties to increase the probability of escape. Living upon fruit and the flesh of a calf they killed, and aided to some extent by negroes, Goss succeeded in getting seventy-five miles away but was finally captured. Another story from Andersonville says that a tunnel once came to the surface in the middle of a camp-fire which the guards around the stockade had built. The prisoners sprang up through the fire, nevertheless, much to the alarm of the guards, who took to their heels, apparently thinking that the door of the infernal regions had opened. For a time, escapes from Camp Douglas, at Chicago, were frequent. Prisoners were sent to that point before a fence had been constructed
Review of Reviews. New York. 1912.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.