Andersonville

The Last Depot

William Marvel

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780807866917
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Between February 1864 and April 1865, 41, 000 Union prisoners of war were taken to the stockade at Anderson Station, Georgia, where nearly 13, 000 of them died. Most contemporary accounts placed the blame for the tragedy squarely on the shoulders of the Confederates who administered the prison or on a conspiracy of higher-ranking officials. According to William Marvel, virulent disease and severe shortages of vegetables, medical supplies, and other necessities combined to create a crisis beyond the captors' control. He also argues that the tragedy was aggravated by the Union decision to suspend prisoner exchanges, which meant that many men who might have returned home were instead left to sicken and die in captivity.

1 I Find Me in a Gloomy Wood

As on any other day, the world spent Tuesday, November 24, 1863, spinning the thread of tomorrow’s events from the flax of yesterday’s. In Moscow a former political prisoner struggled to document the horrors of his experience; from Copenhagen a new Danish king evoked the wrath of the growing Prussian empire when he cast a covetous eye on two German duchies; at the mouth of the Seine a young artist who would help change the complexion of painting sketched the rugged coast of his native Normandy; off Japan a British frigate avenged the execution of a countryman with a surprise bombardment of the city of Kagoshima; in the wind-whipped autumn chill that reminded him of his Norwegian homeland, a laboring man in Winchester, Wisconsin, learned that his name—Knud Hanson—had been drawn that very day from a tumbler full of such names, and now he would have to fight in the war that raged across the American continent.¹

That same evening George Templeton Strong attended a lecture by Henry Ward Beecher at the Academy of Music in New York. The address benefited the U.S. Sanitary Commission, to which Strong belonged. When the Reverend Beecher ran out of words—a rare enough event in itself—he and the more prominent members of his audience adjourned to the home of the Sanitary Commission’s president. Beecher’s sister, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, offered her presence at this soiree, impressing Mr. Strong as a “very bright and agreeable” lady.²

In the wee hours of November 24 an Iowa farmboy, George Shearer, clambered down the bank of the Tennessee River under the eerie glow of a full moon and joined his comrades in the flat bottom of a square-ended pontoon boat. With surprisingly little noise beyond the dull clunking of poles and an occasional cough or sneeze, Shearer’s and many other boats glided across the shimmering water to a dark, indefinite shore, the passengers touched by the beauty and romance of the occasion in spite of their nervous anticipation. When the blunt prows grounded just below the mouth of East Chickamauga Creek, there came a hollow thudding of feet, like so many kettle drummers practicing the long roll, as the companies scrambled ashore and formed ranks in their azure, moon-painted overcoats. They marched to a stubbly cornfield in the shadow of a hill, where officers whispered that they might rest for a couple of hours. Their lines melted to the ground just behind the supine silhouette of the 5th Iowa Infantry, at the center of which lay Corporal John Whitten, clutching the furled red, white, and blue banner of the Hawkeye State. Shearer and Whitten curled on the cold earth and tried to sleep, for they had been awake all night now, but the thought of what was to come must have troubled their repose.³

Beyond the hill that hid the Iowans sat the extreme right flank of Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee. Six miles to the southwest, on the far side of Chattanooga, another Federal force waited to throw itself against Bragg’s left, on Lookout Mountain, and in the morning they would all move forward to settle accounts for the Union army’s humiliation at Chickamauga nine weeks before. The work would take two days; when it was over, George Shearer would lie in a field hospital with a bandage bound around the trough a bullet had plowed through his scalp, while John Whitten would no longer own either his flag or his liberty.⁴

Two hundred fifty miles south of Chattanooga, the citizens of Sumter County, Georgia, still reveled in the news of Chickamauga; not since Chancellorsville had such a victory swelled Southern hopes. Thirty months of war had begun to wear on the population. Prices seemed out of control, and some items could not be had at any price. Eggs, corn, and wheat flour periodically disappeared from village markets as farmers speculated in more profitable crops. The Sumter Republican, of Americus, joked about the wasteful habit of eating three meals a day, and praised the patriotic farmer who turned his cotton fields over to corn. A year earlier Sumter County farmers had tried to force the price of corn up by cutting production. They had had some success in their conspiratorial venture, so the 1863 crop had been a little more plentiful, but discontent still simmered in southwest Georgia’s piney woods. The farmers made plans to organize anew, and the Republican, which had just raised its subscription rate again, complained of hearing disloyal sentiments muttered on the dusty streets of Americus.⁵

One of the muttering men may have been Ambrose Spencer. Though he had been South many years now, Spencer was a genuine Yankee, born and bred in upstate New York. Always on the lookout for the main chance, he had come to Georgia hoping to join the planter aristocracy—perhaps as a means of restoring the dwindling dignity of the family name. His grandfather and namesake had been a prominent jurist, and his father had served as secretary of both the War and Treasury departments under John Tyler, but his brother had been hanged in the wake of the infamous Somerset mutiny and his father had resigned from the cabinet, never to hold public office again.⁶

Spencer had not done well in his Georgia enterprises, and his wife, a Sussex-born immigrant, owned the property on which they lived. At the outbreak of war he tried for a direct commission in the Provisional Army, but failing that he attempted to raise an artillery company. The Confederate War Department declined to accept his battery without muster rolls naming the scores of recruits he claimed to have enlisted, refusing him a commission even when he implied imaginary service in the Mexican War, and for a time the disappointed Spencer acted like a man who wished to retire from society: he put his wife’s Starkeville Road home on the market, and when a Macon cleric bought that house Spencer moved his family out to a two-hundred-acre plantation he had convinced Mrs. Spencer to buy southwest of Americus. Through the Christmas season of 1862 the rebuffed patriot advertised that he wanted everyone who had borrowed books from him to return them. This November of 1863, however, he came out of his exile long enough to cast about, without success, for some sort of government sinecure that might support him better than the plantation did.⁷

November 24 found Shepherd Pryor, another Sumter County resident, in Richmond’s Chimborazo Hospital. A bushy-bearded captain of the 12th Georgia Infantry, Pryor nursed an ugly purple scar on his right leg, six inches above the knee. He had been in the war from the start, and had won his brigade commander’s praise at Gettysburg, but during the Bristoe campaign a piece of shell had laid him low as he led his skirmish line forward somewhere beyond Warrenton. Captain Pryor wanted to go home now, but his wound was nearly healed and he might soon have to return to duty: remembering that Georgia’s civil officers were exempt from military service, he decided to run for sheriff of Sumter County. Deputy Sheriff William Wesley Turner and one other candidate, a speculator, had already announced for the seat in July, and the election was only a few weeks away, but Pryor wrote to his Sumter County friends in the 10th Georgia Infantry Battalion and Cutts’s Artillery Battalion, asking for their support. As a battle-scarred veteran he had good reason to suppose that he could beat two men who had spent the war at home.⁸

Shepherd Pryor had sustained his wound in the last real offensive that Robert E. Lee’s army ever undertook. The contending armies in Virginia sat much farther south now, along the Rapidan River, and now it was the Yankees who proposed taking the initiative. Ira Pettit, a twenty-two-year-old farm lad from western New York, passed November 24 resting in camp at Paoli Mills with his company of the nth U.S. Infantry. Pettit, too, had fought at Gettysburg, though on the opposite end of the line from Captain Pryor, and his regiment had taken a fearful pounding. In a couple of days these Regulars would march south, for the Culpeper Ford of the Rapidan, bound for a place called Mine Run.⁹

At Morton’s Ford, on the same river, Colonel Edward O’Neal waited for the long blue columns with which Ira Pettit would march. At forty-five, O’Neal commanded the brigade that included his own 26th Alabama: he had led that brigade since the spring, through Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, in the same division as Shepherd Pryor, but when this Thanksgiving offensive was over he would be displaced by a junior officer promoted over his head. Thus robbed of his general’s stars, the proud Irishman would raise such a stink as to get himself and his regiment transferred elsewhere, but for now he rode conscientiously up and down his reach of the river, occasionally peering into the mists with his binoculars.¹⁰

That same day Hiram Jepperson, another Gettysburg veteran, walked a beat along a prison stockade on the mile-long spit of sand where the Potomac River emptied into Chesapeake Bay. Clam flats bordered either side of Point Lookout military prison, adding their saline pungency to the crowded peninsula where some eight thousand Confederates lived in drafty tents inside the pale; other prisoners, who had taken the oath of allegiance to the United States, populated a separate camp nearby. Jepperson’s 5th New Hampshire was one of three Granite State regiments that had just arrived to guard these Southrons. It was a monotonous duty patrolling the prison, but presumably it was preferable to the bloody career the regiment had followed since Hiram joined it in August of 1862: he had seen four major battles in his first ten months of service. Still, he did not seem inclined to go home if he could, for there was little left for him there. The illegitimate son of a Lisbon farmgirl, Hiram had lived most of his life with neighbors, as a hired hand, especially after his mother married. His grandfather acted as his guardian, but the only time he seems to have exercised that office was when he signed a waiver for the boy to enlist. Swearing to the minimum age of eighteen years (he was only sixteen, and at five-foot-two he had a few inches yet to grow), Hiram scratched his laborious mark on an enlistment certificate and turned his back, apparently forever, on the Connecticut River valley. One more battle still lay ahead of him this November 24, but as he paced his beat he was probably more interested in the meal his company would enjoy for Thanksgiving, two days away.¹¹

At that very moment another New Hampshire youth trod Morris Island, a similarly sandy outcrop about five hundred miles down the coast, at the entrance to Charleston harbor. Aaron Elliott plodded up and down and back and forth in the shadow of the abandoned Confederate bastion known as Battery Wagner, while his noncommissioned officers tried to imbue a new influx of recruits and substitutes with some basic notions of close-order drill. Each company of the 7th New Hampshire had drawn its share of 268 “fresh fish,” some of whom were a roughlooking lot. The new men nearly outnumbered the old. Siege guns hammering at the city and at Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie outplayed the beat of the drums, and the slippery sand threw even the most willing feet astray. Sergeants cursed, privates chuckled, and officers shook their heads.

More than two years before, on his sixteenth birthday, Aaron Elliott had left his Goffstown home for the abutting town of Manchester, where he enlisted in the regiment with which he now served. His father not only allowed him to go, but permitted his older brother Warren to join him when the 7th left the state. That deprived Mr. Elliott of his only two farmhands: of his other four children, two were too young to be of any help and the other two lived in the private, tragic world of deaf-mutes. For months Warren and Aaron supplemented their family’s income with their army pay, but that source had been cut in half since July, when Warren was killed in the ill-fated assault on Battery Wagner.

At last the drill sergeants gave up for the day. Recruits and veterans alike found cool spots to sit, for even late November can be uncomfortably warm on the sea islands, and there they contemplated their empty pockets and the crates of canned chicken the sutlers had stocked for the holiday. The native Yankee that he was, Aaron Elliott would probably not go into debt for delicacies, so there would be no sutler’s wares for him.¹²

While Elliott lounged on the Carolina sand, Thomas Genzardi writhed on his cot in a Richmond prison hospital along the James River, not far from Captain Pryor’s ward. His intestines seemed alternately to twist and explode within him, curling him up like a caterpillar, and whatever nourishment he took soon came surging back up. The roving ward surgeon diagnosed it as cholera morbus, but by November 24 Genzardi had lain in the hospital twelve days and it was beginning to look as though he might pull through; he had begun to absorb at least some of the liquids the nurses fed him, and the doctor saw that as a good sign. Another week would say for certain whether he would live.

In the past two years Genzardi had nearly completed a broad circuit of the United States. His real name was Salvador Ginsardi, and he had been born in Boston in 1843, shortly after his family arrived from Italy. By 1850 his mother was dead, and his father supported him by playing a flute in a Charlestown band, but music made for a precarious living. Pedro Ginsardi eventually took his son to New York, and there they finally parted, but not before Anglicizing their names slightly: in August of 1861 Pedro enlisted in the 12th U.S. Infantry band as Peter Genzardi, leaving Salvador to drift into the American West as Thomas Genzardi. The son also played an instrument, but the frontier saw little call for orchestral woodwinds, and late in the autumn of 1862 the unemployed musician enlisted as a private in the 8th Kansas Infantry, at Fort Leavenworth.

Genzardi’s company had served on detached duty at Fort Kearny, Nebraska, but more recently it had been fighting Confederate guerrillas. Three months after he enlisted, “Thomas” boarded a steamboat with four companies of the 8th Kansas, and in the spring the reunited regiment joined William Rosecrans’s army in Tennessee. With that army the Kansans marched into northern Georgia, and there, on September 19, Peter Genzardi’s only child saw his first and last battle. Early that afternoon his brigade swept across the Lafayette Road and past a log schoolhouse, where several Georgia regiments battered the point of the Federal spearhead and drove it back, pinching off a couple of dozen of the foremost Yankees as prisoners. Thomas Genzardi huddled among those two dozen, and that is what had brought him to Richmond. A prisoner exchange and another hundred miles would have taken him to Washington, closing the missing length of his loop around the contiguous states.¹³

In the woods less than a mile north of the spot where Thomas Genzardi became a prisoner, the same Confederate onslaught nearly encircled a fought-out brigade in John Palmer’s division. One by one the Union regiments ran out of ammunition and withdrew, until the 84th Illinois stood alone against a relentless tide of grey uniforms that washed inexorably around its right flank. At last the Illinois colonel pulled his regiment back, leaving behind his dead and a few of his wounded. One of those unfortunate few, a loquacious former gardener named Thomas Herburt, had fallen behind when a bullet clipped his right leg. The on-rushing Confederates bounded over him, ignoring him for the present, but later the provost guards came along to gather him up. Confederate surgeons tried to save his leg, but infection set in after they transported him to Richmond. By November 24 he had begun to suffer great pain in the wound, but prison doctors were too overworked and their hospitals were too crowded for timely treatment. New patients could only be admitted as others died or were discharged, and not until December 20 would a bed open up in Hospital 21: a surgeon would put Mr. Herburt on his table while the steward wiped off the saw, and when the leg was gone they would carry him to a cot in the teeming wards, where he would spend the next seven weeks regaling his annoyed fellow prisoners with endless renditions of his last battle. The hooknosed Canadian never seemed to shut up, and the other patients might have wished for the return of Patrick Delany, the burly, bullying Irishman whose discharge from the hospital had made room for Herburt.¹⁴

Elsewhere in that same hospital lay a young German who had just arrived in America, only to be swept up by scavenging substitute brokers who dubbed him George Albert, enrolled him in the 52nd New York, and promptly relieved him of most of his substantial bounty. Barely two months had passed since he donned his uniform, but he had been six weeks a prisoner already. He fell il...