ILLUSTRATIONS
| The Author: As Prospective Soldier. As Present Writer. |
| Plan of the Prison Pen. |
| View of Interior and Foreground. |
| A Dream. |
| The Broken Stockade. |
| The Spring and Women of the Relief Corps. |
| Adventure in Wilmington Hospital. |
| The Beloved Teacher. |
| The Michigan Monument in Andersonville. |
| The Andersonville Cemetery. |
A Personal Foreword
The establishment and perpetuity of our Union have been secured by the sacrifices of war. The Declaration of Independence preceded seven weary years of conflict, whose culminating sufferings were experienced in the British prison ships and in the winter camp at Valley Forge. In this contest the patriotic soldiers of the north and of the south made common cause, and what they did and what they suffered indicates a measure of the enduring worth of our national life. The story of revolutionary days finds an enlarged counterpart in the sufferings of the civil war.
A phase of the great struggle is recalled in the following narrative of events, which belongs to a rapidly receding past. Soon no survivor will be left to tell the tale; hence the desirability of putting it into permanent form before it fades altogether from recollection. To some the story of the breaking out of Providence Spring may seem to have been given undue prominence in this record; but it is around that event that these reminiscences gather, and the circumstances attending were so indelibly stamped upon the memory of the writer that they call for expression. Probably he was the youngest of the group of Andersonville prisoners who participated in the concert of prayer that preceded the unsealing of the fountain, and on that account he may be the only survivor.