“Can see the dead wagon loaded up with twenty or thirty bodies at a time, two lengths, just like four foot wood is loaded on to a wagon at the North, and away they go to the grave yard on a trot. Perhaps one or two will fall off and get run over. No attention paid to that; they are picked up on the road back after more. Was ever before in this world anything so terrible happening? Many entirely naked.”
— Brigade Quarter Master John L. Ransom, 9th Michigan Cavalry and prisoner at Andersonville. (From John Ransom’s Andersonville Diary by John Ransom, published by Berkley Books.)
“I have read in my earlier years about prisoners in the revolutionary war, and other wars. It sounded noble and heroic to be a prisoner of war, and accounts of their adventures were quite romantic; but the romance has been knocked out of the prisoner of war business, higher than a kite. It’s a fraud.”
—John L. Ransom
Well, I have to say that I have my PowerBall numbers for the foreseeable future. I wanted to write about the battle at Brice’s Crossroads on the anniversary of the day it happened, June 10th, 1864, or 6-10-1864. Great-Great-Grandfather Private James Foley was 19 when he signed up to go to war with Company H of the 72nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry.
151 years ago from my 64th birthday, on 6-10-51. My fighter squadron was VF-151. My favorite rum is Bacardi’s 151. So, that yields a sequence of 6, 10, 18, 19, 51, with the PowerBall number being 64. If we hit it, we can split it, I promise.
But that gets to the nature of luck, and by any standard I am among the luckiest of humans. I live in America, and grew to manhood at the zenith of that lucky nation’s status and well being. That is part of the luck of the Irish, for Great Great Grandfather was lucky not to have been killed outright or captured by the implacable Nathan Bedford Forrest on the pell-mell fifty-five mile retreat from Guntown, or the Battle of Brice’s Crossing as it is known.
Starting with a muster list of nearly 900 men in 1861, the 72nd regiment lost a total of 298 soldiers during it service in the War Between the States. That is nearly one of out three, and included 4 officers and 56 enlisted men killed or mortally wounded, 2 officers and 236 enlisted men died of disease.
(GENERAL STURGIS. MEN OF THE 72ND OVI DESPISED HIM FOR HIS FALURE AT BRICE’S CROSSING AND THEIR SUBSEQUENT MISERY).
It is that last bit of brevity that covers a more important fact, the reason why troopers of the 72nd were never able to forgive their General that day, Samuel Sturgis. An otherwise model officer, his failure against Nathan Bedford Forrest lead to casualties that included 223 killed outright, 394 wounded, and 1,623 missing, for a total of 2,240. The “missing” may include some Union soldiers who ran off the battlefield and went home. Mostly though, considering they were marching through the heartland of the Confederacy, they were captured.
As we discussed in “Parole,” that was not necessarily a bad thing. Great Great Uncle Patrick was paroled twice (three times if you include the pass to bury his Colonel after the Battle of Raymond) and he survived relatively unscathed. The prisoners at Brice’s Crossing were not so fortunate, and that is the reason that many of the 72nd OVI blamed General Sturgis for their being sent to Hell on Earth.
Hell on Earth in 1864 was a place near the village of Andersonville, or Camp Sumter as it was known officially. It held more prisoners at any given time than any of the other Confederate military prisons. It was constructed in February of 1864 after Confederate officials decided to move the large number of Federal prisoners in and around Richmond to a place of greater security and more abundant food. During the 14 months it existed, more than 45,000 Union soldiers were confined here. Of these, almost 13,000 died from disease, poor sanitation, malnutrition, overcrowding, or exposure to the elements.
The prison pen was surrounded by a stockade of hewed pine logs that varied in height from 15 to 17 feet. The pen was enlarged in late June 1864 to enclose 261/2 acres. Sentry boxes—called “pigeon roosts” by the prisoners—stood at 90-foot intervals along the top of the stockade and there were two entrances on the west side. Inside, about 19 feet from the wall, was the “deadline,” which prisoners were forbidden to cross. The “deadline” (origin of the term) was intended to prevent prisoners from climbing over the stockade or from tunneling under it. It was marked by a simple post and rail fence and guards had orders to shoot any prisoner who crossed the fence, or even reached over it. A branch of Sweetwater Creek, called Stockade Branch, flowed through the prison yard and was the only source of water for most of the prison.
In an emergency, eight small earthen forts around the outside of the prison could hold artillery to put down disturbances within the compound and to defend against Union cavalry attacks.
The first prisoners were brought to Andersonville in late February 1864. During the next few months, approximately 400 more arrived each day. By the end of June, 26,000 men were penned in an area originally meant for only 10,000 prisoners. The largest number held at any one time was more than 33,000 in August 1864. The Confederate government could not provide adequate housing, food, clothing or medical care to their Federal captives because of deteriorating economic conditions in the South, a poor transportation system, and the desperate need of the Confederate army for food and supplies.
These conditions, along with a breakdown of the prisoner exchange system between the North and the South, created much suffering and a high mortality rate. “There is so much filth about the camp that it is terrible trying to live here,” one prisoner, Michigan cavalryman John Ransom, confided to his diary. “With sunken eyes, blackened countenances from pitch pine smoke, rags, and disease, the men look sickening. The air reeks with nastiness.” Still another recalled, “Since the day I was born, I never saw such misery.”
When General William T. Sherman’s Union forces occupied Atlanta, Georgia on September 2, 1864, bringing Federal cavalry columns within easy striking distance of Andersonville, Confederate authorities moved most of the prisoners to other camps in South Carolina and coastal Georgia. From then until April 1865, Andersonville was operated in a smaller capacity.
One hundred of the total casualties to Great Great Grandfather’s regiment happened at Andersonville. It was Hell on Earth.
When the War ended, Captain Henry Wirz, the prison’s commandant, was arrested and charged with conspiring with high Confederate officials to “impair and injure the health and destroy the lives…of Federal prisoners” and “murder in violation of the laws of war.” Such a conspiracy never existed, but public anger and indignation throughout the North over the conditions at Andersonville demanded appeasement. Tried and found guilty by a military tribunal, Wirz was hanged in Washington, D.C., on November 10, 1865. Wirz was the only person executed for war crimes during the Civil War.
—With thanks to the Civil War Preservation Trust (of which I am a proud member) and Adapted from National Park Service brochure “Andersonville”
Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.om
Twitter: @jayare303