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been taken to secure a daily diminution of the strength of the victims.
As at Libby, so on Belle Isle, food and clothing sent to the captives, by friends, were withheld, and often appropriated by the Confederates.1 “As the weary months drew on, hunger told its inevitable tale on them all. They grew weak and emaciated.
Many found that they could not walk; when they attempted it, a dizziness and a blindness came, and they fell to the ground.
Diarrhea, scurvy, congestion of the lungs, and low fevers set in. And what was done in prison and hospital to our private soldiers on Belle Isle, and to our officers in Libby, was done nearly all over the South . . . The very railroads can speak of inhuman transportations from one point to another of the sick, the wounded, and the unwounded together, crowded into cattle and baggage cars, lying and dying in the filth of sickness, and the blood of undressed wounds.”
2
But we will consider the revolting picture of atrocities at Libby Prison and Belle Isle no longer.
It remains for us only to briefly notice Andersonville Prison, the most extensive, as it was the most infamous, of all the prisoner-pens into which Union captives were gathered.
It was in an unhealthy locality,3 on the side of a red-clay hill, near Anderson Station, on the Southwestern railroad, in Georgia, about sixty miles south from Macon, and surrounded by the richest of the cotton and corn-growing regions of that State.
The site was selected, at the suggestion it is said of Howell Cobb, the commander of the District, by Captain W. S. Winder, son of the Confederate Commissary of prisoners.
It comprised twenty-seven acres of land, with a swamp in its center.
A choked and sluggish stream flowing out of another swamp, crawled through it, while within rifle-shot distance from it flowed a large brook fifteen feet wide and three feet deep, of pure, delicious water.
Had this been inclosed within the pen, the prisoners might have drank and bathed as much as they pleased.4 As that would have endangered the success of the murderous scheme of the Conspirators, it was not included.
Another comfort was denied.5 The spot selected for the pen was covered with pine trees, which would have made a grateful shade for the captives.
Winder gave orders for them to be cut down.
When a spectator ventured to suggest that the shade would alleviate the sufferings of the captives, that officer, acting under higher authority, replied: “That is just what I am not ”
1 Colonel Ely, of the Eighteenth Connecticut, saw one of his men, a school-mate, and highly respectable citizen of Norwich, starving, and was permitted to throw him a ham. When the poor fellow crawled to get it, the rebel guard charged bayonets upon him, called him a “damned Yankee,” and took the ham themselves. This is only a single item of like testimony of a cloud of witnesses examined by the Committee of the Sanitary Commission.
2 Report of the Committee, &c.
3 “It is said to be the most unhealthy part of Georgia, and was probably selected as a depot for prisoners, on account of this fact.” --Report of Captain James M. Moore to the Quartermaster-General.
4 Report of an Expedition to Andersonville, by Miss Clara Barton, for the purpose of identifying and marking the graves of the dead prisoners there. The labors of that remarkable young woman, during the war, in acts of benevolence and humanity, in hospitals and on the field, can scarcely be appreciated.
5 A most curious circumstance, attested by many eye-witnesses, occurred in that prisoner-pen during its occupation. The stream that moved sluggishly through the pen, and which was made a noisome cess-pool by the guards outside, was the only water the prisoners were allowed to drink. They dug some shallow wells, and thus obtained a little water that, for awhile, was somewhat purer than the surface pools. At length, one night the captives had a prayer-meeting around a large stump of a tree. A thunder-storm soon followed. On the following morning a spring of delicious water was found flowing out of the ground from near the stump, and continued to do so during the remainder of the confinement of the prisoners there It was a fountain of unspeakable blessings from the hand of God. Miss Barton, in her Narrative, says, it “broke out from the solid ground. near the foot of the northern slope, just under the western dead-line. It is still there — cool and clear — the only pleasing object in this horrid place.”
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