The reader can imagine that such water was rank poison. The water in the ditches of the Carolina swamps was loaded with decayed vegetable matter; slimy snakes and filthy water reptiles crawled and swam in it, and taken all together it was not much better than the fetid waters of the Danville canal.
Our guards, after leaving Petersburg told us we were on our way to a new prison which had been made at Andersonville, Ga. They cheered us somewhat, by saying it was a large stockade, and that we would have plenty of room, wood and water, and more rations. Anything seemed better than Danville to us, and visions of a camp with tents for shelter, good water, more and better food, and opportunity to exercise, floated through our minds, and we thought that our situation would be more tolerable.
From Augusta we went to Macon, thence to Andersonville, where we arrived on the 22d of April 1864.
Andersonville is in Sumter county, Georgia, sixty-four miles southwest of Macon, on the Macon & Albany Railroad. The country through all that region is a sandy barren, interspersed with swamps which were filled with rank growths of timber, vines and semi-tropical shrubbery.
They were the home of serpents, and reptiles of all kinds indigenous to that latitude, and of many kinds of wild animals. The land was rolling but could not be called hilly.
The timber was mostly southern, or pitch pine, with the different varieties of gum. In the swamps, cypress abounded, from the branches of which the grey, or Spanish moss hung like the beard of a Brobdignagian giant, through which the wind sighed and soughed most dismally.
My impression, received at the time I was in prison, was, that it was the most God-forsaken country I ever beheld, with the exception of the rice swamps of South Carolina. South Carolina however, had a history running back to Revolutionary times, while that portion of Georgia had no history, but has acquired one which will last as long as the history of the Spanish Inquisition. And yet at this time, Southern Georgia is redeemed somewhat, by being the location of Thomasville, the winter resort of some of our citizens.
The Prison Pen, or Stockade, was located about three-fourths of a mile east of the station, on the opposing face of two slight hills, with a sluggish swampy, stream running through it from west to east and dividing the prison into two unequal parts, the the northern, being the larger part.
The Stockade was in the form of a parallelogram, being longest from north to south. I estimated that it was fifty rods east and west, by sixty rods north and south and that it contained eighteen acres, but from this must be subtracted the land lying between the Dead-line and Stockade, and the swamp land lying each side of the little stream, known to us as “Deadrun,” leaving, according to my estimate, twelve acres available for the use of the prisoners.
The author of “Andersonville” gives the area of the prison as sixteen acres and the amount available for prisoners twelve acres.