“I don’t know for whom I am keeping this Diary,” Corporal Samuel J. Gibson (1833–78) wrote on August 12, 1864. “I still have hope that I will yet outlive this misfortune of being a prisoner but I am not made of iron.” A veteran of Company B, 103rd Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, Gibson penned these lines while a prisoner at Camp Sumter in Georgia, a Confederate-run prisoner-of-war camp better known by its geographic place name, Andersonville.
Until mid-April 1864, Gibson primarily recorded the weather, his daily routine and observations of camp life in Plymouth, North Carolina. He had decided on January 5 not to re-enlist when his term of service ended and was counting the months until he returned home. On April 18, however, his regiment encountered Confederate forces, and “after a night of terror” the enemy surrounded them. After “a most terrific street fight” on the morning of April 20, Gibson became a prisoner of war and arrived at the military prison in Andersonville, Georgia, on May 3.
On June 12, 1864, Gibson penned a letter to his wife, Rachel, in Pennsylvania. He assured her that while his condition at Andersonville was “by no means a desirable one,” it “might be a great deal worse.(?)” He and his comrades were “in tolerably good health” but suffered “a good deal from the hot weather.” “Give yourself no uneasiness concerning me,” he wrote to allay his wife’s fears. “I can live where any other man can.”
