Martyria; or, Andersonville Prison

by Augustus C. Hamlin

An eminent statistician has stated that mortality is in direct ratio to the density of population, and that superficial area is as essential to health as cubic space. To the writer’s mind, the overcrowding of the men, and their exposure to the variations of heat and cold, the influence of moisture, and the foul emanations of the infected soil, were sufficient to cause great destruction of human life; and when combined with the deficient dietary, the imagination can hardly conceive of a better field for disease and death than the condition of this swarming pen. All the elements and combinations of physical destructiveness were here in full play. “Losses by battle,” says Sir Charles Napier, “sink to nothing, compared with those inflicted by improperly constructed barracks, and the jamming of soldiers—no other word is sufficiently expressive.” “Diseases,” states the French Inspector Baudens, “slay more men than steel or powder, and it is often easy to prevent them by a few simple hygienic precautions.”

In all campaigns where the care of the soldier is left to the military man,—who is educated for destruction, and has not been taught in the economy of life,—we see in the mortuary and non-efficient lists a disgraceful and culpable array of thoughtless routine, vulgar prejudices, and systems. In our Military Academies the elements and the means of destruction are taught, but not a law unfolded that relates to the principles of health, strength, and life. To alleviate the burden of the military list by sanitary measures is an idea unheard of, or at least unnoticed. “For these works,” writes Chadwick, in his papers on “Economy,” “a special training is needed for our military engineers, whose present peculiar training is only for old works for war, and for those imperfectly,—works for the maintenance of the health of an army being necessary means to the maintenance of its military strength.

“The one-sided character of the common training of our military engineers was displayed in the Crimea, in the proved need of a sanitary commission to give instruction for the selection and the practical drainage of proper sites for healthy encampments, for the choice collection and the proper distribution of wholesome water, for the construction of wholesome huts, and the proper shelter and treatment of horses as well as men.”

XII.

In this enclosure, during a period of twelve months, from five thousand to thirty-six thousand human beings ate, slept, and drank, whilst the piles of filth were constantly accumulating, and the germs of infection silently at work. There was no regularity in the arrangement of the interior. Men collected in groups in the day time, and they lay in rows, like swine, at night.

The stream, which with little ingenuity could have been turned to a blessing for the prison, was allowed to be obstructed by the heaps of grime; and enlarging its area, it assisted in forming the extensive quagmires, which were several acres in extent. So little care was observed for the comfort or the health of the prisoners, that all the washings of the bakery, all the filth of the out-houses of the workmen, were allowed to pass down and mingle with the current of the stream only thirty feet above the point of entrance into the stockade. The traveller can observe to-day that this malicious act of refined cruelty, or fatal error in hygiene, was really perpetrated.

Besides this, the drains of the camp and the town above emptied themselves into this stream which supplied the prison with water.

XIII.

The bakery was located on the west side of the stockade, about equidistant from either line of palisade. It was of rough boards, and but one story in height. Its interior disclosed two rooms, one of which communicated with the two ovens, which were built of common brick. These two ovens—fourteen feet in length by seven feet in width, and with one kneading-trough fifteen feet long, and less than three feet in width—supplied the prisoners with all the bread they obtained; and so far the writer has not learned that there was any other source of supply.

These same ovens, kept red hot, and worked night and day, to the fullest capacity, by the commissary bakers of the United States service, could not have produced but eight thousand rations of white bread, and but nine thousand six hundred rations of corn bread. This is the extreme limit; and regarded by the workmen, who have made the calculations, as almost an impossibility. The ordinary capacity of this establishment was probably about four or five thousand rations of corn bread. This quantity, divided daily among thirty thousand men, would give but a small morsel to each one; and this gives the appearance of truth to the statement, that from two to six ounces of corn bread were furnished as rations to the prisoners.