Andersonville

by MacKinlay Kantor

  So Nathan Dreyfoos had mourned, seeking adjustment to new situation and recent tragedy . . . a town called Williamston, the prisoners resting in a pine grove, guards lounging about and some of them flirting with girls who came tripping fearfully in the crowd scampering to see the Yankees. The village postmaster, fat and old and pink-faced, came trotting up with his leather pouch like an amiable Saint Nick; he promised to mail letters for any of the prisoners who wished to write to the folks at home. Yes, sir, boys, them letters’ll be sent through your lines at the first opportunity. Don’t thank me, boys—glad to do it—my own Andy got took by your fellows up in Maryland and he’s still a prisoner of war; but once’t in a while we get a letter from him. Nathan Dreyfoos blinked away the tears which came suddenly, and smiled down at Saint Nick. I hope he’s keeping well, sir. Oh, yes, Sergeant, tolerable, tolerable.

  Nathan wrote hastily on half a sheet of paper, he gave the rest of his paper away to boys who had none. Dear Father and Mother, I trust this will reach you with the assurance that I am unwounded and in fine fettle. But there is sad news: Plymouth has fallen to the enemy and those of us who were not killed were taken prisoner. My friends Stevenson and Corley are among the dead. I do not know where we will be imprisoned; some say at Charleston or Savannah. If all our warders are as gentlemanly as our present guards and as the kind person who has promised to mail this, then shall we be well treated indeed. Please advise Halliburton of my situation; I think he is still at the Embassy in Paris— People in gray began ordering the prisoners into column; there was not time to write more; he scribbled, Y’r Devoted Son Nathan, and Saint Nick took the letters away in his pouch, and girls’ shrill voices began to sing in the grove, Hurrah, Hurrah, for Southern Rights, Hurrah, and the marching prisoners answered with a roaring We’ll hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree, until they were silenced by the guards. Tramp, march, stride, the long shadows on the dust, the long dusty blue column in rising dust, the dogs coming out to yap, the Negroes staring and laughing.

  They had some sickness that night; the Rebels put up a tent for the sick; the prisoners slept in a void something like bliss. At least nobody is a-prosecuting us, said one serious countryman from up the Hudson; and most of the others knew that he meant to say persecuting, and that was a joke, and they made much of the joke. They were filled with crackers and raw pork, and knew that they had nothing to fear from captors who would put up a tent to shield sufferers from the night.

  They lost their charitable North Carolinians at Hamilton the next day. A new band of Confederates succeeded them, but still there was no brutality; still appeared the nightly ration of black-eyed peas, meal and bacon. . . . The twenty-fourth was a Sunday, and before the prisoners were formed in column for the march to Tarboro a throng of them got together for prayers and Bible reading. They sang, Sweet Hour of Prayer, and Nathan hummed along with the rest for he did not know the words. . . . Should I chant Kol Nidre for them? I fear that I do not know that, either. Ah, my poor violin, neglected in its case in New York. Or is it in New York? Father said that he would keep it safe. I wonder where it is.

  The train at Tarboro, and striking the main road at Rocky Mount, and rattling on into the South to meet a warmer spring. . . . Now the men were weary of singing; there was a good deal of arguing and one fight in Nathan’s box car, a disturbance which he quelled with haste. Their guards were from the Twenty-eighth Georgia and a very stern officer of the guard—a captain named Johnson—ordered the doors closed at dusk. Then there was mashing and pressing and squeezing and jerking through the long noisy night. A drummer boy wept that he was being smothered.

  And I bet you wish you were home with your mother, Tyke.

  Yes, God damn it, I do!

  Well, so do I. So does every last man of us. So quit bawling, Tyke. It won’t help none.

  All right, Corporal Reeves. Sniffle, snuffle. I’ll quih-hit—

  Pikeville, Goldsborough, Wilmington with its lean blockade runners lying silver gray by the docks. There was some firing out at sea, the prisoners crowded hopefully against their ferryboat’s rail and soon were rewarded by observing the return of a steamer which had tried to run the blockade. Yeh, yeh, yeh, the men yelled. Try again, Johnny—better luck next time!—but the crew of the steamer could not hear them, and a few sailors waved affably, and shouted jocular insults across the water, or appeared to be shouting them. . . . The new train had platform cars. Various men whispered about jumping off and striking for the woods, but the armed Georgians beside them looked as if they could shoot so no one made the attempt. Younger prisoners waved and hooted at the people, black and white, in every village which the train went smoking through. Cinders came back to sting their eyes, and sometimes glowing flakes were lashed out of the air to sting and burn; but still it was better than being crushed in box cars. . . . In Charleston the ropy beards of Spanish moss swayed dreamily, the flowers were magenta and pink and gold; in Charleston an old Negro came up to the cars with a bucket of hot fried shrimps to sell and his bucket was emptied in a twinkling.

  Look at those women. Picking peas in their garden.

  Man alive! Wait’ll I write Pa about that. Up home I don’t think he’ll have the peas scarcely planted.

  They changed trains again at Savannah and only thirty-five men were put into each box car. There was room to stretch out. It was good to lie down, even though the cars did seem to run on square wheels, even though grit came flying in all night and the sound of hammers deafened a fellow’s ears. The next day they stopped in a wilderness where there was a shack marked Station Number Thirteen, and here the prisoners were marched to an adjacent stream and permitted to wash.

  ...I’ll be beat, Lewis. You know, my brother Lafe was in a prison pen in Virginia, up until he got exchanged, and he said they never had a chance to wash. So they got lice all over themselves. This is pie. If this keeps up we won’t be doing badly at all.

  ...And, Sim, look at the rations they’re issuing, up ahead. Looks like soft tack and fresh pork. And beans. By gum, so tis!

  ...Well, if this be a sample, bring on your hippypotymus. Georgia for me!

  That night they were marched into the Andersonville stockade; and so they woke up staring, and they could not believe, they could not believe.

  Nathan Dreyfoos said, It was too good to last.

  But, Sarge, they can’t mean to keep us here.

  Look at the other prisoners, Allen.

  But they must have made a mistake. Maybe they sent us to the wrong place. Maybe this is a punishment camp. Eh, Sarge? Oh, for God’s sake, Sarge, please do ask the guards if there hain’t been a mistake! A man can’t live in a place like this.

  A great many of them don’t, said one of the blackened hairy creatures who stood watching and listening.

  What say?

  A great many of them don’t.

  The boy who had been pleading with Nathan Dreyfoos buried his head in his arms and began to blubber.

  Nathan sat quietly in the bright stinking sunshine for a while, trying to decide what to say to Private Allen. At last he put his arm around the boy’s shaking shoulders and said, Don’t do that if you can help it, Allen. Weeping is the easiest but the worst thing that any of us can do here.

  Yyyyeh.

  You still have your strength. We have arrived at this ugly place in splendid condition. Instead of indulging in tears, we must keep our spirits up and our wits alive. There may be some way out.

  Yyyyeh, Sarge.

  Perhaps you can escape. Perhaps many of us can.

  The man who had said, A great many of them don’t, moved off slowly through the crowd. He thought of Nathan, He talks like an officer, but is only a sergeant like me. He oughtn’t to delude himself about escape. . . . Oh, well, I used to try to escape, myself. Eventually I learned that it was wiser to devote myself to the science of living here, living as well as possible and as long as possible. . . . I wonder w
hat that big Jew has got in his big knapsack? Maybe we can make a swap.

  The man’s name was Seneca MacBean, and he came from Galena, Illinois. He was long a prisoner, shrewd in experience with mankind before he became a prisoner, shrewder now a thousand fold. MacBean had served with the Eighth Illinois Cavalry until that storied afternoon of July first, 1863, when dismounted troopers of Gamble’s Brigade went stringing east from a certain bullet-pocked seminary building, still firing their carbines if they had any rounds left to fire. In the town beyond they ran down this street and that, hunting for a way to safety, darting across backyards, trampling the rhubarb and onion tops and moss roses. Eventually the way behind them was barred by panting gangs of strangers in sweat-drenched gray shirts and undershirts, and the way ahead was thronged with other sweaty people who advanced on them meaningly with muskets at the ready.

  Drop that carbine, Yank.

  One man tried to get away by climbing a brick wall, and several guns banged, and the man fell into a tangle of tomato vines. This is futility, said Seneca MacBean, imagining that he was setting the word in Italic antique boldface; it was an odd trick, emphasizing words in that manner, but he was a printer by trade; he had been a printer’s devil at ten. He called to those of his men who were near, ordering them not to resist. Forms all locked up, he said. We’ve gone to press, gentlemen. The cavalrymen did not know exactly what he meant by this, but the example of Sergeant MacBean was unmistakable: he had dropped his carbine, and was holding up a yellow bandana in lieu of a white flag. . . . At Belle Isle he tried to escape by swimming the James River but was picked up by Home Guards on the Richmond side and returned to the Island. Here at Andersonville he had tried to escape by tunneling, along with a great many others; some dogs scouted him out, less than an hour after he left the tunnel. Seneca MacBean was resting, exhausted, on a cypress knee in the nearby swamp. My tongue, he told his friends later, was hanging longer than the dogs’. He spent a week in the stocks, which he endured stoically, and was then marched back into the pen.

  Wirz remembered him well, because of his height (his rangy body towered four inches over six feet) and the circumstances. So, Henry Wirz would say each time he encountered the bony Illinoisan, Maybe you want you should go back in the stocks, nein?

  No thanks, Captain.

  Then no more tunnels you make, you bad sergeant, you!

  Nope. I won’t.

  MacBean sustained himself at Andersonville by conducting a laundry. He had two wooden buckets which he cared for lovingly in order to keep them from springing leaks. He had no soap, but ashes and sand served. He’d made himself a scrubbing board, buying the end of a wide planed plank of hardwood, and this piece of plank he had grooved diligently. It did not work as well as his grandmother’s well-remembered scrubbing board, back home at the shady end of Bench Street, but it worked.

  Often he thought of his grandmother; he could see her scrubbing under a morning-glory arbor as she had scrubbed when he was small—when his grandfather lost his job, when Gran MacBean took in washings, when Seneca MacBean drew those same washings—pressed beautifully by Gran’s hot irons—back to the tall homes of the Campbells or Gratiots or Kittoes on his squeaky-wheeled wagon, or sometimes in winter on his sled.

  Senny, did your Gran say how much it was, this time?

  Yes’m. She said she guessed a shilling.

  Wait till I get my purse. . . . Here it is, in fractional currency. Count it carefully. Or can you count, yet?

  Yes’m. I can count to a hundred.

  What are you sniffing at, Senny? Those muffins Ellen is baking for tea?

  Yes’m.

  You shall have one. Ellen, fetch a strawberry muffin for the MacBean child. Fetch two. . . . And little Mrs. Gratiot smiled down at him, and he thought that she was beautiful.

  It had been a good childhood, marred only by trivial matters like poverty, like being an orphan, like having a grandfather who often lay on his bed for days at a time . . . mumble, mumble, mumble, sometimes in English, sometimes in the Gaelic which John MacBean couldn’t recollect when he was sober. Then, at the age of fifty-nine, John MacBean signed The Pledge. I’ve never gone back on my word, he told the plain-faced woman who loved him devotedly. No more do I intend to go back on this word I’ve given now. He did not go back on his word; he never took another drink, and repeatedly counseled Seneca never to take The First Drink.

  It was drink that took that fine handsome father of yours, laddie, and, in a way, it was drink that took the fair young mother who bore you, for she had not the will or strength to survive. Never take The First Drink.

  Seneca did not, until he was seventeen. Then, while working across the big river in Dubuque, he fell in with a riotous crowd of Irishmen, and attended a pic-nic where the whiskey called forty-rod was flowing. He took The First Drink, the second, the third and more. He became furiously drunk, scrapped with the Irish, thrashed several of them, was himself thrashed by the survivors. He throbbed to wakefulness in the middle of the night, pounded, aching, black-eyed, scratched. He lay abandoned in that same horrid grove, lying in his own vomit.

  He washed in the first stream he came to, and tottered back to his lodging house where he wrote out a pledge for himself and signed it with a quivering hand. In the morning he looked at that pledge and could scarcely make out his own signature, so he signed it again. Like his grandfather and the other storied MacBeans whom he had never seen but of whom he had heard much, Sen MacBean did not go back on his word. He owned immeasurable strength. Sometimes he felt that he needed all of it, to keep going in Andersonville.

  Seneca was proud of his sign and pleased often by his own humor. In early March, when there was still an abundance of forest trash all over the place, he had amused himself by hunting for curly splinters, chips and other morsels of pine wood or roots which had dried into the shape of letters. At first he tried merely to assemble an alphabet; then he got the idea of a sign to advertise his laundry. He had assisted another man periodically in washing the prisoners’ clothes at Belle Isle; but now the other man was dead, so Sen went into business for himself. He pulled little nails out of a pair of wornout boots which he acquired, and tacked the rustic letters on a branch suspended above his hut. Since Illinoisans were often called Suckers, he had a name ready-made for this concern. Sucker Laundry & Cleaning Co. read the sign, S. MacBean, Prop. Only the k, two a’s, the b and one p (and the & sign) had needed to be cobbled together a bit. The rest of the letters were natural, just as he had found them, and Seneca MacBean was fond of pointing this out. In time he met a few fellow printers, and they had discussions as to the type style of the various letters—Gothic, Tudor black, German text, and so on.

  He prospered if anyone could be said to prosper in the stockade. The more intelligent and resourceful prisoners recognized that cleanliness would aid in their survival; scrubbing would allay the activities of vermin; it was as simple as that. But few owned the facilities for even an attempt at washing their clothes, and many did not own the strength to try. Seneca MacBean accepted any currency, for he could barter away things which he did not need. Except corn bread (later)—he would not accept that. He would take wood, clothing, buckles, vegetables, bones, pieces of string, buttons, fragments of reading matter—any and every object—in payment for his services. His arms and shoulders were powerful, even after the Belle Isle winter. He ate sparingly, he ate not to allay his hunger for that was impossible; but he ate only those materials which he thought would be good for him; if he thought that something might make him sick he would not feed on it, no matter how hungry he was. He drank only water from wells dug on the higher ground of the North Side; this he received as laundering pay from the proprietors of the wells. He weighed in the neighborhood of a hundred and eighty pounds at the time of his capture, went down to perhaps a hundred and fifty on Belle Isle; now at Andersonville he managed to hold this weight very well, it even seemed that he had put on a few poun
ds, or was he dreaming?

  Collins’s Raiders had begun operations the moment they entered the stockade; Sarsfield’s Raiders and Curtis’s Raiders and the rest were not far behind with thefts and incursions. If there was any man whom Willie Collins feared that man was Seneca MacBean. Collins never attacked Seneca, and discouraged those of his herd who suggested it. The man named Tomcat O’Connor, who was shot by Father Time on Belle Isle— He was a former member of the Daybreak Boys in New York City, who found as much delight as actual profit in overhauling a weaker man. A few days after he reached the Island, O’Connor attempted to remove from Seneca MacBean’s finger the old seal ring which had belonged to John MacBean’s father’s father, in Glasgow. Perhaps Tomcat outweighed Seneca by twenty-five or thirty pounds. A starved assemblage actually left the ration wagon to watch the beating which MacBean awarded to Tomcat O’Connor.

  People screamed, Kill him, kill him! You should have killed him. You could have killed him—

  Yes, I think so, said Seneca, and licked his raw knuckles. Along with the raiders he recognized that this was a violent world, and violence was a necessary adjunct to reaching a desired end. The difference was that the gangsters and he had different conceptions of what might constitute a desired end. They were selfish and avaricious; Sen was not. He enjoyed serenity, but (like so many Scots before him) he was willing to engage in conflict to attain serenity. We shall have Peace if we must fight for it was a philosophy jested about through the generations, but to Seneca MacBean this seemed not incongruous.