Andersonville: A Story of Rebel Military Prisons — Volume 1

At dawn we were gathered together, more meal issued to us, which we cooked in the same way, and then were started under heavy guard to march on foot over the mountains to Bristo...

The night had been the most intensely cold that the country had known for many years. Peach and other tender trees had been killed by the frosty rigor, and sentinels had been fr...

Few questions intimately connected with the actual operations of the Rebellion have been enveloped with such a mass of conflicting statement as the responsibility for the interr...

Early on the tenth morning after our capture we were told that we were about to enter Richmond. Instantly all were keenly observant of every detail in the surroundings of a City...

As the Autumn of 1863 advanced towards Winter the difficulty of supplying the forces concentrated around Cumberland Gap--as well as the rest of Burnside's army in East Tennessee...

The Winter days passed on, one by one, after the manner described in a former chapter,--the mornings in ill-nature hunger; the afternoons and evenings in tolerable comfort. The...

We roused up promptly with the dawn to take a survey of our new abiding place. We found ourselves in an immense pen, about one thousand feet long by eight hundred wide, as a you...

For weeks we rode up and down--hither and thither--along the length of the narrow, granite-walled Valley; between mountains so lofty that the sun labored slowly over them in the...

I began acquainting myself with my new situation and surroundings. The building into which I had been conducted was an old tobacco factory, called the "Pemberton building," poss...

But, to return to the rations--a topic which, with escape or exchange, were to be the absorbing ones for us for the next fifteen months. There was now issued to every two men a...

Before going any further in this narrative it may be well to state that the nomenclature employed is not used in any odious or disparaging sense. It is simply the adoption of th...

One of the train-loads from Richmond was almost wholly made up of our old acquaintances--the N'Yaarkers. The number of these had swelled to four hundred or five hundred--all lea...

The rations diminished perceptibly day by day. When we first entered we each received something over a quart of tolerably good meal, a sweet potato, a piece of meat about the si...

As each lagging day closed, we confidently expected that the next would bring some news of the eagerly-desired exchange. We hopefully assured each other that the thing could not...

There were two regiments guarding us--the Twenty-Sixth Alabama and the Fifty-Fifth Georgia. Never were two regiments of the same army more different. The Alabamians were the sup...

As the next nine months of the existence of those of us who survived were spent in intimate connection with the soil of Georgia, and, as it exercised a potential influence upon...

The emptying of the prisons at Danville and Richmond into Andersonville went on slowly during the month of March. They came in by train loads of from five hundred to eight hundr...

The official designation of our prison was "Camp Sumpter," but this was scarcely known outside of the Rebel documents, reports and orders. It was the same way with the prison fi...

A low, square, plainly-hewn stone, set near the summit of the eastern approach to the formidable natural fortress of Cumberland Gap, indicates the boundaries of--the three great...

The night that followed was inexpressibly dreary: The high-wrought nervous tension, which had been protracted through the long hours that the fight lasted, was succeeded by a pr...

In February my chum--B. B. Andrews, now a physician in Astoria, Illinois --was brought into our building, greatly to my delight and astonishment, and from him I obtained the muc...

The stockade was not quite finished at the time of our arrival--a gap of several hundred feet appearing at the southwest corner. A gang of about two hundred negros were at work...

perfectly and evenly, because all the parts are put in motion, and kept so in such a manner as to promote the movement of the blood to every extremity. They do not strain one se...

exertion of great strength does not favor circulation. It rather retards it, and disturbs its equilibrium by congesting the blood in quantities in the sets of muscles called int...