At the time of our incarceration in Andersonville, the crisis of the war of the rebellion was reached. General Grant was fighting the great battles of the Wilderness in Virginia; the investment of Petersburg was about to begin, and General Lee was resisting the impact of the Federal forces with unsurpassed skill and heroism. General Sherman was also hastening his preparations to penetrate the vitals of the Confederacy by his famous “March to the Sea.”
Skirmishes by the contending forces were of daily occurrence, and frequently battles were fought that now loom large in history. To bury the dead was not difficult; but the care of the wounded was a grave concern to both armies. An affair of still greater magnitude was the gathering up of the captured officers[Pg 28] and soldiers, the transporting of them hundreds of miles, and the placing of them in prisons for safe keeping.
The Confederate authorities adopted a simple and logical plan. Foodstuffs for their armies could not be gathered in war-swept Virginia, nor to any great extent from the border States. In Georgia and Alabama, in parts of the Carolinas, Mississippi and Louisiana faithful slave labor produced an abundant supply of rice, corn and bacon, sweet potatoes and beans.
To transport these bulky materials to the armies of Lee, Hood and Johnson required every locomotive and freight car that could be mustered on Southern railroads. Hence the northward-bound trains were heavily laden. Those going southward were empty, and were available to carry away the thousands of Union prisoners. At several points in the South Atlantic and Gulf States, stockade prisons were set up, notably that in Southwestern Georgia, named after an adjacent hamlet, “Andersonville.”
[Pg 29]This celebrated place of confinement for Federal prisoners below the rank of commissioned officer was located about sixty-two miles from Macon. It consisted of a stockade made of pine logs twenty-five feet long, set upright in a trench five feet deep, inclosing some sixteen acres, afterwards enlarged to twenty-six acres.
This inclosure was oblong in form, with its longest dimension in a general north and south direction, and had two gates in its western side, near the north and south ends respectively. It was commanded by several stands of artillery, comprising sixteen guns, located at a distance on rising ground. From four directions the guns could sweep the prison interior with grapeshot or shells.
