Guest speaker Charles Brown shared a little-known story about the Civil War at the McDonald County Library in Pineville on Wednesday, Nov. 6.
The story was about events that happened at the Andersonville Prison in Andersonville, Ga. Brown reported his great-great-grandfather joined the Union Army in 1861, and every member of his regiment was a pastor. They thought the war would be over in a few weeks. Brown found a letter stating that Nathaniel was at the prison, but he later learned that, during the war, Nathaniel caught typhoid and got mustered out and died. The more he studied, he learned it wasn't Nathaniel but actually his brother, Daniel, who stayed at the Andersonville Prison.
During the war, 65,000 prisoners were received at the prison. Of those, 12,913 died. The prison was on 16.5 acres of land. Capt. Henry Wirz was the commander.
The prison camp had an outer wall and an inner railing system. The space in between was called the dead zone. There was a rail 19 feet from the fence, and if anyone reached past the rail, they were shot. This was to deter escape attempts.
There was a hospital, a "dead house" where the dead were collected and a cemetery. One man secretly kept records of who was buried there. All but 400 prisoners were identified.
Conditions inside the camp were bad. They died at about 180 men per day. Brown shared photos of skeletal figures from the camp. Lice were rampant. One account stated that a healthy man might only have a couple of tablespoons of lice, whereas the sick who could not get them off would have many more. Latrines were overflowing into the camp. Rations were usually cornbread, and toward the end of the war, the cobs were ground in with the corn to make the rations go further. The cobs irritated the intestines of the men who were starving, Brown said.
Attempts at escape were made by digging tunnels. This was difficult because, for one thing, the tendency to curve to the left when digging with the right hand. One report said a group of men had dug for twice the length they thought the needed to escape and were baffled when they did not reach outside the fence. A man fell through the ground one day, and they wondered if their tunnel had anything to do with it. They discovered that their tunnel had become horseshoe-shaped. Brown reported that of 328 attempts to tunnel out of the prison, only 176 were successful.
Raiders were a threat to soldiers living in the prison camp. Raiders were a group of Union soldiers who banded together to survive by attacking others and taking anything of value. In 1864, six of them were hung. The rest of the 70 had to run the gauntlet.
Brown shared a story about a miraculous event that took place at the prison. He said it was hot and there had been no rain. A group of men gathered to pray near a large stump. They met from Monday through Thursday. It rained on Thursday for five days. It rained so heavily that men who were too weak to move drowned from lying still with their mouths open. Then lightning struck near the stump and opened an underground spring. The spring was in the dead zone, but nevertheless, the Confederates had slaves come in and build a chute into the camp. The spring put out 10 gallons a minute and still puts out 10 gallons a minute today, Brown reported.
The camp only lasted four or five months after that, he said. Today there is a monument on the site to Providence Springs.
General News on 11/14/2019