CHAPTER LXV. ANDERSONVILLE. JUST across the railroad track below Macon, in a pleasant pine grove, is the Fair Ground, where was located that thing of misery known to us as the Macon Prison. It was the "Yankee Prison," down here. I visited the spot one bright morning after a shower, when the breezes and the sunshine were in the pine-tops overhead. The ground was covered with a thin growth of brown grass, wet with the rain: stepping along which I came suddenly to a quadrangular space, as arid as the hill of Golgotha. No marks were necessary to show where the stockade had stood, with its elevated scaffolding on which walked the Rebel guard. The stockade had been removed; but the blasted and barren earth remained to testify of the homesick feet that had trodden it into dreary sterility. A little stream runs through a hollow below the Fair Ground, carrying off much of the filth of the town. From that stream our prisoners drank. The tub set in the side of the bank at the foot of the hill, and the ditch that conducted into it the water for their use, were still there. Guarded, they came down from the stockade, to this tub, of the contents of which they were not always permitted to have enough. "I used to hear 'em yell for water," said a negro living near. “I was bad off as a slave, but I never begun to be so bad off as they was. Some of 'em had no shoes for winter, and almost no clothes." In the pine woods on the hill above the area of the stockade is "Death's Acre," the prison burying-ground, enclosed by a plain board fence, and containing little rows of humble graves marked with stakes, and numbered. I noticed num WIRZ, AND HIS GUILTY MASTERS. 469 bers as high as two hundred and thirty. How many national soldiers lie buried in this lot I do not know. I shall not dwell upon the sufferings endured by the inmates of this prison. They shrink into insignificance compared with the horrors of the great military prison of Georgia and the South. Neither of these do I purpose to say much. Enough, and more than enough has been spoken and written about them. The infamy of Andersonville is world-wide. Passing through Washington in August, 1865, I one morning looked into the hot and steaming court-room where Captain Henry Wirz was on trial. In a somewhat worn broadcloth coat, with his counsel at his side occasionally whispering him, his elbow on a table, and his thin uneasy hand fingering his dark beard or supporting his chin; attenuated, bent, and harassed with the most terrible anxieties, for, however in different he may have been to the lives of other and better men, there was one life to which he was not indifferent, and which was now at stake; down-looking for the most part, but frequently glancing his quick sharp eye at the court or the witnesses; there sat the miserable man, listening to minutely detailed accounts of the atrocities of which he had been the instrument. The cause he had served with such savage fidelity, had perished; and the original authors of the enormities he had been employed to commit, stalked at large, or lay in temporary confinement, confidently expecting the executive clemency; while this wretched hireling, whose sin consisted in having done their work too well, was to suffer, not the just for the unjust, but the guilty dog for the still more guilty masters. Fifty-eight miles below Macon, by the Southwestern Railroad, is the scene of the crimes against humanity for which Henry Wirz was punished with death. The place is set down as Anderson on maps and in guide-books; and that is the name by which it was known to the inhabitants of the country, until the immense hideous business the war brought to it dignified it with the title of ville. It is a disagreeable town, with absolutely no point of inter est about it except the prison. Before the war it had but five buildings a church without a steeple; a small railroad depot; a little framed box in which was the country post-office; and two dwellings, a log-cabin, and a house with a saw- and grist-mill attached. There were other dwellings within a mile. Such was Anderson. Andersonville contains some forty additional cheap-looking, unpainted buildings, of various sizes, all of which were constructed with reference to the prison; such as officers' houses, large or small according to the rank of the occupants, government storehouses, hospital buildings, (for the troops on duty,) and so forth. The hospital is now used as a hotel. The entire aspect and atmosphere of the place are ugly and repulsive. The village lies on the railroad and west of it. Between a third and one half of a mile east of it, is the prison. The space enclosed by the rough stockade contains twentyfive acres, divided by a sluggish stream flowing through it. It looks like a great horse-yard. Much of the land is swampy, but the rest is elevated, rising on the south side gradually, and on the north side quite steeply from the brook. It was from this shallow stream, defiled with refuse from the camp of the Georgia Reserves, which it received before entering the stockade, that the thirty thousand prisoners, who were sometimes crowded into this broken oblong space, drew their chief supply of water. There were a few little springs in the banks, very precious to them. The walls of the stockade are of upright logs about a foot in diameter, twenty feet high above the ground, in which they are set close together, deep enough to be kept firmly in their position. There are an outer and an inner wall of this description, with a space some fifty yards in breadth between them. There were sentry-boxes for the soldiers on guard, hung like birds'-nests near the top of the inner wall. These were reached by ladders. For further security, the stockade was partly surrounded by a deep ditch; and on portions of two sides there is an unfinished third line of upright logs. The outer wall of the stockade has but one entrance. Through this the newly arrived prisoners were marched, and along the space between the two walls, to one of two gates which gave admission to the interior of the prison. How many thousands of brave and stalwart soldiers entered these infernal doors, from which only ghostly skeleton-men, or the corpses of skeleton-men, ever issued forth again! The prisoners were of course confined within the inner wall. And not only so, but they were prevented from approaching within twenty feet of it by the dead line. Or if not prevented, for much of the way this fatal boundary was marked only by posts set at intervals of six or seven yards, he who, in blindness and sickness and despair, perhaps jostled out of his way by the blind, sick, despairing multitude crowded within, set his foot one inch beyond the strict limits, as some Rebel on guard chose to imagine them, crack went a musket, a light puff of smoke curled up from one of the birds'-nests, and the poor wretch lay in his blood, groaning out the last of many groans, which ended his long misery. I learned that when the stockade was first built the ground it encloses was covered with forest-trees. Why were they not. left at least a few of them-to bless with their cooling shade the unfortunate captives, in the heat of those terrible prison summers? Not a tree remained. Near by were forests of beautiful timber, to which they were not even permitted to go and cut wood for fuel and huts. One can imagine nothing more dreary and disheartening than the interior view of the stockade as it is to-day, except the stockade as it was during the war. The holes in which the prisoners burrowed for protection from the weather, have been mostly destroyed by the washing rains. Nearly all the huts are in ruins. The barrack sheds, in which but a mere handful of the thirty thousand prisoners could find place, still remain, marked with sad relics, - bunks with the names of the occupants cut upon them, or fragments of benches, knives, old pipes, and old shoes. Between the outer and inner walls were the bakehouse, the pen for sick-call, and the log-sheds in which the stocks were kept. The cookhouse was outside. Besides the great stockade, there was a small stockade for officers, and a hospital stockade containing some eight acres, and surrounded by upright logs ten or twelve feet high. are In pleasant pine woods, about a hundred rods north of the stockade, is the original burying-ground of the Andersonville prison, enlarged and converted into a national cemetery since the war. A whitewashed picket-fence encloses a square space of near fifty acres, divided into four main sections by two avenues crossing it and cutting each other at right angles. Two of these sections - those south of the east-and-west roadsubdivided by alleys into five smaller sections, where the dead lie in long, silent rows, by hundreds. Here are about seven thousand graves. The northeast quarter of the cemetery is undivided; and here, in a single vast encampment, sleep five thousand men. There are in all near thirteen thousand graves, each with its little white head-board commemorating the name, rank, company, regiment, and date of death, of its inmate. The records show that the first death occurred on February 27th, 1864, and the last on April 28th, 1865. From April 1st, 1864, to April 1st, 1865, the average rate of mortality was over a thousand a month. It sometimes reached a hundred a day. Apart from the rest, in the northwestern corner of the cemetery, are the graves of the Georgia Reserves who died while on duty here, one hundred and fifteen out of four regiments. The mortality among them appears also to have been great; and indeed one cannot conceive how it should be otherwise, living as they did within the pestiferous influence of the prison atmosphere. At the entrance to the cemetery, on the south side, appears the following inscription, the same the same I noticed above the graves at Spottsylvania, and which might with propriety be placed before every national soldiers' cemetery: "On Fame's eternal camping-ground Their silent tents are spread, And Glory guards with solemn round |