Andersonville—a name which has been stamped so deeply by cruelty into the pages of American history—is one of those miserable little hamlets, of a score of scattered and dilapidated farm-houses, which relieve the monotony of the wide and dreary level of sand plains, which, covered with immense forests, interspersed with fens, marshes, corn and cotton fields, stretch away, in unbroken surface, from Macon down to the Florida shores. The plantations, which were tilled by slave labor, are almost concealed in the recesses of the forests, so thickly wooded is the country. Here and there only, where the savannas are of unusual fertility, do the cleared lands give a wide and extended view of the landscape, but the primeval pines everywhere hide the distant horizon.
J. H. Bufford’s lith. Boston, Mass.
The song of the laborer rarely disturbs the silence, which is oppressive. Song is the impulsive outburst of a heart filled with joy and hope. The slave has neither. His voice is the cry of anguish, of a soul burdened and crushed, and is more like the moan of the winds than the accents of civilized man.
The physical aspect of the white inhabitant indicates the local impressions and inspirations—listless and apathetic in look, lank and haggard in form. There are countries, there are even limited localities, where the moral and mental faculties expand in accordance with external impressions. The laws of beauty and deformity are regulated by the condition and circumstances of the outward world to a remarkable degree.
The landscape, the sunshine, and the luxuriance at Corinth and Athens gave rise to the most beautiful flowers of art and love, and to that wonderful type of human beauty, which the world has since lost; but the rugged and stern defiles of the mountains of Calabria, of Albania, and the dreary marsh fens of the Campagna, or of the Netherlands, still produce characters that rival in ferocity the hyenas of the desert.
Nature appears to have selected for man the sites where are performed the noble acts which charm and enlighten the mind, or the dark deeds which cause men to ponder and regret the frailty of their organization. “It seems that the instincts of war conduct from age to age the armies of successive empires to the same rendezvous of contest, and that geography has laid off in advance certain fields of battle, as a sort of arena for these great immolations of humanity.” “Hungary,” said Sobieski, “is a clump of earth, which, if squeezed, would give out but human blood.” The name and look of Andersonville will always be synonymous with and suggestive of cruelty.
XI.
At the distance of eight hundred paces from the railway which connects the town with Central Georgia on the north and the Gulf of Mexico on the south, appears the Prison Stockade, which was located by the Winders of the Rebel army, at the suggestion of Howell Cobb, in 1863, and occupied for its specific purpose in February, 1864.