Andersonville

by MacKinlay Kantor

  His giant’s stature began to tell on Willie Collins, to make him a marked man. If a shorn and bleeding sheep complained to the authorities that he had been pounded by a robber of enormous height and girth, the police (or such of them as could be persuaded by bribery) went seeking Willie. Thus he was charged with crimes he did not commit . . . he had committed many . . . he did not know how many men he had killed before he entered wartime captivity, he supposed a dozen or so. Several times he was imprisoned; once he escaped, once he bought his way to freedom, the other times he served the brief terms to which he was sentenced. He thought of leaving New York but New York was home, he did not know where else to go. The body which had once been his bonanza was now a positive handicap. At rare intervals fortune sent a rich weakling into his grasp, and then he made sure that no evidence would be given against him. . . . Willie flaunted new duds in Barney Bright’s Joy Mill where, according to the gilded sign outside, the mill ground out Joy, Joy, Nothing But Joy—and a little mayhem and venereal disease along with the Joy.

  He lived—bellowing, pompous, frightening, thick-headed. He leaned on the rail of an excursion craft off Bedloe’s Island and poked his shoulders and his whiskey bottle through the bunting in order to watch Albert Hicks, the high seas murderer, as Hicks fell through an open air gallows trap and struggled in strangulation. And if they ever come to hang me, howled Willie Collins, they’ll have to hang me twice! A well-fleshed woman cooed beside him and wiggled her hip against him; she wore red gloves and red stockings; faith, and she wore little bells on her garters, the bells tinkled when she moved. Willie lived . . . he lived eventually with the Bowery Boys, he had fought alongside them when they raided the Dead Rabbits at the election polls back in 1856, but it did no good: Fernando Wood was reëlected anyway. But it was a fine fight. And again he had contended against the Dead Rabbits in the historic Bayard Street riot of the following summer; and could you guess the man he met there, slugging in the ranks of the Dead Rabbits with a paving stone in one hand and a shoemaker’s awl in the other? Patrick Delaney it was, the erstwhile Honeymooner. They grappled in long anticipated rivalry . . . sure, and Willie was confident that Delaney died beneath the stamping of his brass-heeled boots. Willie lived!

  For a fact Paddy Delaney did not die. The next time the monsters met, it was on Rebel soil with Rebel guards rimmed beyond them. It might have been that the two roughs were rocked in the same cradle in a Dublin slum, if anyone ever bothered to rock babies in Dublin slums: they embraced like grizzly bears, they wept and swore their loyalty, they drank what smuggled liquor was available and brayed for more. Ah, and I thought I had kilt you surely that day at the Bowery and Bayard. . . . Willie darling, it’s me that was certain I was kilt; and months it took me to regain my strength, with half my ribs stove in.

  Willie came to the sad pass of Confederate prison life through a series of misadventures. He emerged from another type of prison in New York after the war had begun. A turmoil of alternate patriotic demonstration and felonious interference was ruling the town. It was hard for Willie to turn a dollar or even a dime. Though they had a wary respect for Collins’s proficiency the ruling gangsters held him to be bad luck and would have none of his services. He eked out an existence in Mulberry Bend, preying on the same sort of stumbling drunks and drugged seamen he had preyed on when he was a boy. In his late twenties Willie looked to be at least forty. The skin of his face and neck bore the coarse-seamed texture of middle age, there were stray shreds of glint in his ginger-colored beard, his hair-line receded. Soon he heard that he was being sought by the police again—something about a Norwegian cook who had been squeezed to death in a cellar, and the Norwegian ship’s master had friends among the new Metropolitan Police. There was nothing for Willie to do but enlist, which he did quickly, and then deserted just as quickly, bounty money sewn in his drawers. In this way he went from regiment to regiment. It had never occurred to him that he might be sent into combat, but that was what happened after he joined the Eighty-eighth Pennsylvania, before he’d found opportunity to take his usual French Leave.

  He had done well enough at Belle Isle but here at Andersonville he was doing even better. There were vastly more prisoners to provide the luxuries of existence both directly and indirectly. Day after day fresh drafts were pushed into the stockade: there were riches to be had, a plethora. For indeed there were no police to bother! Once more Willie was marked, towering above the rest, but his marking was as great a benefit to him here as it had been a handicap in the city streets. By April he needed not to stir hand or foot if he did not choose to move; he grew fat; but it would take a long while for his grotesque thews to become so wadded in corpulence that they would not serve him. He kept his own band well under control—not too many of them, but whittled down to comfortable size. There were a round dozen sluggers, also the cooks and housekeepers—two of these latter were homosexuals whose affection some of his men enjoyed, but Willie himself did not crave such peculiar ecstasies, his laughter burst at the very idea. There was Lipsky the tailor, and a few other scrofulous hangers-on who served for one purpose or another. Collins’s Raiders were not the largest band in the stockade but they were feared above all others.

  Collins’s Raiders, Delaney’s Raiders, Sarsfield’s Raiders, Curtis’s Raiders. The name of Terence Sullivan was an imprecation; the names of Heenan and Pete Bradley and Dick Allen conjured obscenities; you shuddered as well when you thought of the Staleybridge Chicken or the Harlem Infant, for these creatures had been pugilists and brought their nasty experience like weapons into the stockade.

  The population swelled steadily through March, train whistles bleated at the station, the columns of rag-pickers toiled through the ravine to the North Gate; they had picked enough rags in Virginia, now they could pick them in Georgia. Stray infantry skirmish here, stray cavalry encounter there—the gaping blue-clad flat-hatted seamen from an unhappy sloop, the battery men gathered in by the Rebs when they were still limbering up to flee: all appeared. All had a certain small wealth in their pockets or on their backs or in the very clothes which dressed them. The raiders took what they wished, and were seldom disappointed. Their victims lost anything from their buttons to their lives.

  A hopeless teeming disorder was apparent in this polluted rectangle from the very first. In tag-end days of February the initial thefts were committed under cover of darkness or behind tumbled wafers of clay and pine-roots: you knew that something bad was happening, it had happened at Belle Isle and Danville, it had happened to some degree in all the Virginia prisons, you didn’t see it happening often, it happened out of sight, it was treacherous and to be feared.

  What was the need of waiting for night? At first Willie Collins and those like him had a notion that guards might shoot. They recalled the death of Tomcat O’Connor, they saw no reason to die jumping as he had died. But one morning John Sarsfield himself, with his minions, was standing near the North Gate when a small detachment of Westerners (they included pickets gobbled up by a swift Confederate movement in northwest Georgia) found themselves staring at Andersonville for the first time. These people had not been robbed of their blankets. As did many folks from the West, they wore blanket rolls in Confederate fashion, they carried no knapsacks. The blanket rolls seemed bulky to Sarsfield’s practiced gaze. He shouldered forward and wrenched the roll away from the nearest prisoner. The man hallooed, Sarsfield knocked him flat, the balance of the fresh fish leaped toward Sarsfield, Sarsfield’s Raiders swatted, stabbed, kicked. This fight was over in less than a minute. Six of the Westerners lay on the ground and the rest had fallen back into the watching throng—several others shy of their blanket rolls, as was the first man. All of the new-come prisoners were bleeding, two were unconscious. Sarsfield’s Raiders were the richer by eleven blanket rolls filled with combs, socks, extra shoes, Bibles (these could be bartered), gilt melanotypes, housewives, knives, eating utensils and name-it-if-you-like. The guards on the parapet stations had not fired
a shot; they watched idly or in downright amusement; they said, Look at them Yanks a-fighting like a lot of dogs, just look.

  Willie Collins and Pat Delaney lifted a leaf from Sarsfield’s book. Sarsfield was intelligent; it was said that he had read law, had served three years in the army, had been wounded, his wound had healed, he had been promoted First Sergeant and later commissioned; his commission had arrived but he had not been mustered when he was captured. Hence he’d landed here with the enlisted men. Folks said that a bright fellow like Sarsfield had known all along that the guards would not fire. Or perhaps he had made a private agreement with the guards; and now guards might profit from each robbery occurring before their eyes and under the muzzles of their unfired muskets. No longer could the vice be relegated to darkness. It was here in daylight, stalking; it was an animal grown tall as the Methodist Church steeple back home, it was Force and Force only, it could and would maul you to a wet bloody rag if you lifted your fist in protest, or sometimes even if you lifted your voice.

  A twenty-year-old named John L. Ransom, Ninth Michigan Cavalry, wrote in his diary: Colonel Persons commands the prison, and rides in and talks with the men. Is quite sociable, and says we are all to be exchanged in a few weeks. He was informed that such talk would not go down any longer. We have been fooled enough, and pay no attention to what they tell us.

  John Ransom wrote in a sodden notebook that said Pickell & Co., Commission Merchants. Chicago. Ills., on the cover in faded gilt letters. Get almost enough to eat, such as it is, but don’t get it regularly; sometimes in the morning, and sometimes in the afternoon. Six hundred more prisoners came last night. . . . We have no shelter of any kind whatever. Eighteen or twenty die per day. Cold and damp nights. The dews wet things through completely, and by morning all nearly chilled. Wood getting scarce. On the outside it is a regular wilderness of pines . . . can just see the cars go by, which is the only sign of civilization in sight. Rebels all the while at work making the prison stronger. Very poor meal, and not so much today as formerly. . . . Prevailing conversation is food and exchange. A good deal of fighting going on among us. . . . Prison gradually filling up with forlorn looking creatures.

  Johnny Ransom had a broken stub of pencil, and he chewed the pencil and made it smaller and found difficulty in writing with it; but he was determined to write a diary. Well, well, my birthday came six days ago, and how old do you think I am? Let me see. Appearances would seem to indicate that I am thirty or thereabouts, but as I was born on the twentieth day of March, 1843, I must now be just twenty-one years of age, this being the year 1864. Of age and six days over. I thought that when a man became of age, he generally became free and his own master as well. If this ain’t a burlesque on that old time-honored custom, then carry me out—but not feet foremost. . . . The pine which we use in cooking is pitch pine, and a black smoke arises from it; consequently we are black as negroes. Prison gradually filling from day to day, and situation rather more unhealthy. . . . It is a sad sight to see men die so fast. New prisoners die the quickest. . . . It’s a sickly dirty place. Seems as if the sun was not over a mile high, and has a particular grudge against us.

  There was a dull man named Dawson who rose each day during that first month of the prison’s existence and made his comment about the weather. If the sun came clear, ready to accumulate and radiate the fierce stout heat of a Georgia sun in spring, the dullard would declare, Well, Old Sol the Haymaker is going to get in his work on us again today. And if—as came about more often in March—the skies were cased with zinc and ready to leak or burst, Dawson called the skies and the day Old Boo. Well, Old Boo gets us again today. The terse keen wisdom of the ages can be recollected and quoted by a few; it is the dunces who conceive or incubate the old saws, the slang, the common parlance. Dawson stood daily and turned his bleared gaze upward, and spoke his piece. In no time at all most of the men capable of observing an anecdote were talking about Old Boo. Dawson fell sick, he died, he smelled badly, he was lugged away, no one cared much about him, he was not missed. Months later new prisoners would enter and soon would hear about Old Boo, and they would laugh about Old Boo and in time would shrink in their terror of Old Boo; and then like Dawson they would go down to death, blaming Old Boo; or if they were more fortunately tougher they might survive, and thus live to procreate, to have their children procreate, to sit one day in a rocking chair out on the shady grass under maple trees and tell their grandchildren about Old Boo; and then the grandchildren would go to bed, and cry out in the middle of the night with bad dreams, and when Mother came soothing they would say, He was going to get me, he was going to grab me. Who was going to grab you, dearie? Old Boo! Now, there is no such thing as Old Boo; I never heard of Old Boo; that’s just silly. Say Now I Lay Me again, and go to sleep, and don’t dream about Old Boo any more because there isn’t any such thing.

  Johnny Ransom took the wet stub out of his sore mouth and wrote painstakingly: Seems as if our government is at fault in not providing some way to get us out of here. The hot weather months must kill us all outright. Feel myself at times sick and feverish with no strength seemingly. . . . Raiders getting more bold as the situation grows worse. Often rob a man now of all he has, in public, making no attempt at concealment. In sticking up for the weaker party our mess gets into trouble nearly every day.

  So indeed did the boys of John Ransom’s mess; so did many others. But their resistance (heroic in starved slight youths who battled against a vast anonymous cruelty) was ineffectual. There was no concert in action, no assembling of a force sufficient to cope with well-fed enemies most of whom had practiced the arts of subjugation from infancy. Charity, Christianity, eagerness, righteousness: these were lame swords with which to be armed no matter what the Scriptures had to say on the subject. History had taught a million lessons, history would teach a million more; few might profit from the teaching. Angry and continually apprehensive, the prisoners said, If we all get together . . . take a hundred men, every man jack of them carrying a club; why, we ought to be able to— No one mustered the hundred, no one prepared the cudgels. Say, fellers, we’ll make agreement with you folks in that Ohio tent; we’ll swap protection with you. If any raiders tackle you, we’ll join in; and you got to swear you’ll side with us if we get jumped. How about them new folks yonder in the next shebang? Hellfire, twon’t do no good to even ask them. Seventh New Hampshire, the whole boiling, and you know what that means: bounty jumpers who enlisted for the heavy pay. Not a true New Hampshireman in the lot, and I vow they’d turn tail in the first pinch.

  The frantic disorder pertaining to housing—such as it was—and rations—such as were furnished— Disorder, crowding, the speedy rise of disease and resultant mortality: these ills worked for the raiders’ benefit. One noon news came skimming through the mobs: smallpox—didn’t you hear? It’s rife. No, I didn’t see the sick ones; but a boy from the next mess seen them: all blotched up and feverish, and itching like the Old Harry. Tis said the Rebs are going to vaccinate us. Well, by mighty, they’ll have to cinch and hog-tie me before they’ll get their rotten horse-piss into my arm! I seen a nigger man up in Virginia, and he lost his arm because of that damnable vaccination, and like to lost his life as well.

  One day, urged by the bayonets of a seedy regiment marched inside for the purpose, the seven thousand men assembled in the stockade were walked to one side of the creek and made to return by slow files while the few contract surgeons scraped vaccine into their arms as they passed. Once beyond the surgeons, there was a growing rush to the marsh and boggy creek despite the fumes which now smoked above each turgid pool. People feared the vaccine more than they feared this noxious ooze—many of them did. They scrubbed madly at their abraded flesh, washing with mud and slime, trusting that they were expelling tainted medicament. There followed numerous cases of swelling and local putrefaction, with amputation and sometimes death as the logical result. Men who had bathed their vaccinations developed enormous sores, men who had not
bathed their vaccinations developed enormous sores. There were as many theories about the sores as there were sores; some believed that the vaccine had been adulterated deliberately with blood taken from syphilitic invalids. The surgeons exhausted their store before half the men had been treated; the threat of later vaccination was another of the clouds lying above the stockade.

  It was a community demoralized in its inception, demoralized through rapid growth, exploded into wreckage as each cap was detonated by a falling hammer: the cap of starvation . . . bang! and more lives flame out . . . the cap of illness, the cap of chill at night . . . bang! Bang . . . the dread of a beating, the water poisoned by human filth . . . Godsakes, Piper, I dipped out a half-canteen of that stuff and lifted it up to drink and— Godsakes, there was a turd floating right under my nose! . . . The hammer of the rifle falling, the fresh cap exploded spitefully . . . bang . . . the trigger pulled by an unseen finger, by a finger far away, by a finger inert, by a finger fumbling.

  In such a teetering confusion there were crops to be gathered by savage simple people who knew but enough to strike a blow and had the power to strike it. Willie Collins was happier in Andersonville than he had ever been before. Other toughs emerged from their brutal obscurity—a man in sailor’s dress named Rickson, another alleged sailor named Munn. They had been worms in the outer world; there they stood in secret dread of manacles, a flogging, in dread of discipline itself. Here there was no discipline except such as the Goliaths chose to inflict upon their subordinates. Among themselves they brawled for fun, and to reassure themselves constantly as to their status as chieftains. The handsome Munn scowled his ponderous way among shebangs; weaker prisoners hurriedly freed a pathway for him. The heavy-fisted Sarsfield commanded more power than he would have commanded as the officer he never became in fact. Charley Curtis reminded some prisoners of the orangutans pictured in books of travel . . . low-browed, massive, his voice was a grunt, he had a trick of tearing the ear off any victim who offered resistance.