Surviving a Civil War Prison Camp

A couple years ago, I posted a blog entry about Edwin Chapman of the Ohio Voluntary Infantry, my great great great grandfather who fought in the Civil War and was imprisoned from June 1864 through the end of the war in April 1865. After his capture in Mississippi, he was transported to Camp Sumter near Andersonville, Georgia.

On a recent drive through Georgia, I decided to explore the site of the former prison, now preserved as a National Historic Site, National Cemetery, and Prisoner of War Museum.

Me, the author, with my mother, at Andersonville, 2015

The prison was constructed with slave labor and opened in February 1864 on a piece of land large enough to hold 10,000 men. It was expanded by 50% in June, but the prisoners kept arriving by the trainload in nearby Andersonville and were marched into the stockade. At its peak, 32,000 prisoners occupied the encampment, making it the fifth largest city in the Confederacy. The grounds quickly became overcrowded, and diseases ran rampant.

"As we entered the place, a spectacle met our eyes that almost froze our blood with horror, and made our hearts fail within us. Before us were forms that had once been active and erect;—stalwart men, now nothing but mere walking skeletons, covered with filth and vermin. Many of our men, in the heat and intensity of their feeling, exclaimed with earnestness. "Can this be hell?" "God protect us!" and all thought that He alone could bring them out alive from so terrible a place. In the center of the whole was a swamp, occupying about three or four acres of the narrowed limits, and a part of this marshy place had been used by the prisoners as a sink, and excrement covered the ground, the scent arising from which was suffocating. The ground allotted to our ninety was near the edge of this plague-spot, and how we were to live through the warm summer weather in the midst of such fearful surroundings, was more than we cared to think of just then." -Robert H. Kellogg, Sergeant Major in 16th Regiment Connecticut Volunteers,camp, May 2, 1864

Indeed, the conditions were deplorable with insufficient food supplies and a single tiny stream to serve as a source of water for drinking and cooking and also as a sink and a sewage system. Our visit to the museum included the viewing of a 28-minute video presentation about the prison, and we were saddened by the human suffering that took place here. Through good fortune and good genes, my forefather survived his incarceration. But nearly 13,000 of the 45,000 inhabitants of the Andersonville prison died there, primarily from dysentary and scurvy.

“Within the circumscribed area of the stockade the Federal prisoners were compelled to perform all the functions of life, cooking, washing, the calls of nature, exercise, and sleeping…[A] considerable breadth of land along the stream…was low and boggy, and was covered with the excrements of the men and thus rendered wholly uninhabitable…The pines and other small trees and shrubs…were in a short time cut down by the prisoners for firewood, and no shade tree was left in the entire enclosure of the stockade…[T]he Federals constructed for themselves small huts and caves and attempted to shield themselves from the rain and sun, and night damps and dew…The irregular arrangement of the huts and imperfect shelters was very unfavorable for the maintenance of a proper system of police." -Dr. Joseph Jones, Medical College of Georgia. (From his testimony at the trial of Captain Henry Wirz in John Ransom's Andersonville Diary by John Ransom, published by Berkley Books.)  

Many prisoners tried to escape by tunneling out, but almost all who made it were quickly recaptured. A fence row constructed 19 feet inside the perimeter of the stockade represented "the dead line." If a prisoner so much as touched the line, he was to be shot without warning by guards, typically boys and old men who were stationed in pigeon roosts atop the stockade. To make matters worse, a group of prisoners who called themselves "The Raiders" roamed the camp and used violence to steal anything of value from fellow inmates.

The Northeast corner of the camp has been replicated.

“[I] walk around camp every morning looking for acquaintances, the sick, &c. Can see a dozen most any morning laying around dead. A great many are terribly afflicted with diarrhea, and scurvy begins to take hold of some. Scurvy is a bad disease, and taken in connection with the former is sure death. Some have dropsy as well as scurvy, and the swollen limbs and body are sad to see.” -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.)

“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.” - John L. Ransom

The cemetery as it looked in 1864.

The war ended in April 1865, and and Edwin Chapman was freed along with his fellow survivors. Headstones in the cemetery numbering 1 through 12,853 mark the grave sites of those who were buried in shallow trenches. 

Andersonville National Cemetery, present day.

Edwin Chapman was just age 17 when he enlisted in the 72nd Ohio Voluntary Infantry in Fremont, Ohio in 1863. It's difficult to imagine the horror he experienced during the year and a half that ensued. Read more about Edwin's service in the Federal Army and his life after the war here, Edwin Chapman of the 72nd Ohio Infantry.

Corporal Edwin N. Chapman (1846-1913)

72nd OVI reunion, Dillon House in Fremont, 1908