From the want of proper police and hygienic regulations alone it is not wonderful that from February 24th to September 21st, 1864, nine thousand four hundred and seventy-nine deaths nearly one third of the entire number of prisoners, should have been recorded. I found the stockade and hospital in the following condition during my pathological investigations, instituted in the month of September, 1864:
Stockade, Confederate States Military Prison.
At the time of my visit to Andersonville a large number of Federal prisoners had been removed to Millen, Savannah, Charleston and other parts of the Confederacy, in anticipation of an advance of General Sherman’s forces from Atlanta, with the design of liberating their captive brethren: however, about fifteen thousand prisoners remained confined within the limits of the stockade and Confederate States Military Prison Hospital.
In the stockade, with the exception of the damp low lands bordering the small stream, the surface was covered with huts, and small ragged tents and parts of blankets and fragments of oil-cloth, coats, and blankets stretched upon sticks. The tents and huts were not arranged according to any order, and there was in most parts of the enclosure scarcely room for two men to walk abreast between the tents and huts.
Each day the dead from the stockade were carried out by their fellow prisoners and deposited upon the ground under a bush arbor just outside the southwestern gate. From thence they were carried in carts to the burying ground, one quarter of a mile northwest of the prison. The dead were buried without coffins, side by side, in trenches four feet deep.
The low grounds bordering the stream were covered with human excrements and filth of all kinds, which in many places appeared to be alive with working maggots. An indescribable sickening stench arose from these fermenting masses of human filth.
There were near five thousand seriously ill Federals in the stockade and Confederate States Military Prison Hospital, and the deaths exceeded one hundred per day, and large numbers of the prisoners who were walking about, and who had not been entered upon the sick reports, were suffering from severe and incurable diarrhea, dysentery and scurvy. The sick were attended almost entirely by their fellow prisoners, appointed as nurses, and as they received but little attention, they were compelled to exert themselves at all times to attend to the calls of nature, and hence, they retained the power of moving about to within a comparatively short period of the close of life. Owing to the slow progress of the diseases most prevalent, diarrhea and chronic dysentery, the corpses were as a general rule emaciated.
I visited two thousand sick within the stockade, lying under some long sheds which had been built at the northern portion for themselves. At this time only one medical officer was in attendance, whereas at least twenty medical officers should have been employed.