A little stream runs through a hollow below the Fair Ground, carrying off much of the filth of the town. From that stream our prisoners drank. The tub set in the side of the bank at the foot of the hill, and the ditch that conducted into it the water for their use, were still there. Guarded, they came down from the stockade, to this tub, of the contents of which they were not always permitted to have enough. “I used to hear ’em yell for water,” said a negro living near. “I was bad off as a slave, but I never begun to be so bad off as they was. Some of ’em had no shoes for winter, and almost no clothes.”
In the pine woods on the hill above the area of the stockade is “Death’s Acre,”—the prison burying-ground, enclosed by a plain board fence, and containing little rows of humble graves marked with stakes, and numbered. I noticed numbers as high as two hundred and thirty. How many national soldiers lie buried in this lot I do not know.
I shall not dwell upon the sufferings endured by the inmates of this prison. They shrink into insignificance compared with the horrors of the great military prison of Georgia and the South. Neither of these do I purpose to say much. Enough, and more than enough has been spoken and written about them. The infamy of Andersonville is world-wide.
Passing through Washington in August, 1865, I one morning looked into the hot and steaming court-room where Captain Henry Wirz was on trial. In a somewhat worn broadcloth coat, with his counsel at his side occasionally whispering him, his elbow on a table, and his thin uneasy hand fingering his dark beard or supporting his chin; attenuated, bent, and harassed with the most terrible anxieties,—for, however indifferent he may have been to the lives of other and better men, there was one life to which he was not indifferent, and which was now at stake; down-looking for the most part, but frequently glancing his quick sharp eye at the court or the witnesses; there sat the miserable man, listening to minutely detailed accounts of the atrocities of which he had been the instrument. The cause he had served with such savage fidelity, had perished; and the original authors of the enormities he had been employed to commit, stalked at large, or lay in temporary confinement, confidently expecting the executive clemency; while this wretched hireling, whose sin consisted in having done their work too well, was to suffer, not the just for the unjust, but the guilty dog for the still more guilty masters.
Fifty-eight miles below Macon, by the South-western Railroad, is the scene of the crimes against humanity for which Henry Wirz was punished with death. The place is set down as Anderson on maps and in guide-books; and that is the name by which it was known to the inhabitants of the country, until the immense hideous business the war brought to it dignified it with the title of ville.
It is a disagreeable town, with absolutely no point of interest about it except the prison. Before the war it had but five buildings: a church without a steeple; a small railroad depot; a little framed box in which was the country post-office; and two dwellings,—a log-cabin, and a house with a saw- and grist-mill attached. There were other dwellings within a mile.
Such was Anderson. Andersonville contains some forty additional cheap-looking, unpainted buildings, of various sizes, all of which were constructed with reference to the prison; such as officers’ houses, large or small according to the rank of the occupants, government storehouses, hospital buildings, (for the troops on duty,) and so forth. The hospital is now used as a hotel. The entire aspect and atmosphere of the place are ugly and repulsive.
The village lies on the railroad and west of it. Between a third and one half of a mile east of it, is the prison.
The space enclosed by the rough stockade contains twenty-five acres, divided by a sluggish stream flowing through it. It looks like a great horse-yard. Much of the land is swampy, but the rest is elevated, rising on the south side gradually, and on the north side quite steeply from the brook. It was from this shallow stream, defiled with refuse from the camp of the Georgia Reserves, which it received before entering the stockade, that the thirty thousand prisoners, who were sometimes crowded into this broken oblong space, drew their chief supply of water. There were a few little springs in the banks, very precious to them.
The walls of the stockade are of upright logs about a foot in diameter, twenty feet high above the ground, in which they are set close together, deep enough to be kept firmly in their position. There are an outer and an inner wall of this description, with a space some fifty yards in breadth between them. There were sentry-boxes for the soldiers on guard, hung like birds’-nests near the top of the inner wall. These were reached by ladders. For further security, the stockade was partly surrounded by a deep ditch; and on portions of two sides there is an unfinished third line of upright logs.