The outer wall of the stockade has but one entrance. Through this the newly arrived prisoners were marched, and along the space between the two walls, to one of two gates which gave admission to the interior of the prison. How many thousands of brave and stalwart soldiers entered these infernal doors, from which only ghostly skeleton-men, or the corpses of skeleton-men, ever issued forth again!
The prisoners were of course confined within the inner wall. And not only so, but they were prevented from approaching within twenty feet of it by the dead line. Or if not prevented,—for much of the way this fatal boundary was marked only by posts set at intervals of six or seven yards,—he who, in blindness and sickness and despair, perhaps jostled out of his way by the blind, sick, despairing multitude crowded within, set his foot one inch beyond the strict limits, as some Rebel on guard chose to imagine them, crack-went a musket, a light puff of smoke curled up from one of the birds’-nests, and the poor wretch lay in his blood, groaning out the last of many groans, which ended his long misery.
I learned that when the stockade was first built the ground it encloses was covered with forest-trees. Why were they not left—at least a few of them—to bless with their cooling shade the unfortunate captives, in the heat of those terrible prison summers? Not a tree remained. Near by were forests of beautiful timber, to which they were not even permitted to go and cut wood for fuel and huts.
One can imagine nothing more dreary and disheartening than the interior view of the stockade as it is to-day, except the stockade as it was during the war. The holes in which the prisoners burrowed for protection from the weather, have been mostly destroyed by the washing rains. Nearly all the huts are in ruins. The barrack sheds, in which but a mere handful of the thirty thousand prisoners could find place, still remain, marked with sad relics,—bunks with the names of the occupants cut upon them, or fragments of benches, knives, old pipes, and old shoes.
Between the outer and inner walls were the bakehouse, the pen for sick-call, and the log-sheds in which the stocks were kept. The cookhouse was outside.
Besides the great stockade, there was a small stockade for officers, and a hospital stockade containing some eight acres, and surrounded by upright logs ten or twelve feet high.
In pleasant pine woods, about a hundred rods north of the stockade, is the original burying-ground of the Andersonville prison, enlarged and converted into a national cemetery since the war. A whitewashed picket-fence encloses a square space of near fifty acres, divided into four main sections by two avenues crossing it and cutting each other at right angles. Two of these sections—those south of the east-and-west road—are subdivided by alleys into five smaller sections, where the dead lie in long, silent rows, by hundreds. Here are about seven thousand graves. The northeast quarter of the cemetery is undivided; and here, in a single vast encampment, sleep five thousand men. There are in all near thirteen thousand graves, each with its little white head-board commemorating the name, rank, company, regiment, and date of death, of its inmate. The records show that the first death occurred on February 27th, 1864, and the last on April 28th, 1865. From April 1st, 1864, to April 1st, 1865, the average rate of mortality was over a thousand a month. It sometimes reached a hundred a day.
Apart from the rest, in the northwestern corner of the cemetery, are the graves of the Georgia Reserves who died while on duty here,—one hundred and fifteen out of four regiments. The mortality among them appears also to have been great; and indeed one cannot conceive how it should be otherwise, living as they did within the pestiferous influence of the prison atmosphere.
At the entrance to the cemetery, on the south side, appears the following inscription,—the same I noticed above the graves at Spottsylvania, and which might with propriety be placed before every national soldiers’ cemetery:—
“On Fame’s eternal camping-ground