Sultana

by Alan Huffman

  August 12: “Made some rice soup for Emery, which he ate and liked, but he seemed to be worse after that, and he lay quiet until afternoon, when he was taken worse and was pressed for breath. He ate no supper, and continued to fail. I was very sick all night, vomiting. I asked him towards morning if he felt as though he could stand it long. He said ‘No.’ I asked him if he had any word to send to his folks. He said ‘No,’ and I left him. Things go the same as ever, no parole yet, and all our comfort is in Hope.” The next day Emery died, leaving behind a wife and four children back home.

  August 15: Another friend died. “I never saw men slip off so easy as they do here. They die as easy as, as can be.”

  August 27: “This is a cool, beautiful morning. As Handy is very sick and probably won’t survive long, there is another good man going to die in this horrid place.” Handy died two days later.

  September 3: Two more friends died. “How I would like to see Dow and my folks.”

  September 4: “After all the morning, I sold Emery’s shoes for $1.”

  September 5: “When I get to London with Dow I guess we won’t starve like this!”

  September 7: “Today I met with an accident that I was awful sorry for. I never felt so bad about anything. I lost my pocket book with my gold pen in it, that I prized, for Dow, Page, & I had used it for two years, a lock of John’s hair, and some pretty pictures that Dow made. I want Dow to make me a present of one when I see him, which I hope will be in two weeks.” By now prisoners had begun to be removed from the camp.

  September 10: He wrote of how much he enjoyed hearing the rail cars leave in the night, loaded with prisoners. He noted that his friend Edward Holt had a sore throat, and “I am afraid it may be bad. How I long for the Stars & Stripes! How I long to meet Dow!”

  September 11: Holt’s throat was worse. The next day he died. “He died about dusk, very hard indeed, choked to death.”

  September 13: Melvin was finally among those being removed, but the train wrecked only four miles from camp. “My car was badly broken,” he wrote, “but the Powers that Be saved me.”

  September 14: “This morn I could hardly stand.” With the help of a friend he made it as far as the depot but had to be taken to the hospital. “It is an awful, nasty, lousy place, and I am disgusted,” he wrote. “My diarrhea is very bad and will soon carry me off, if it is not checked, I am afraid. It is too bad, for I should hate to have my anticipations fail now, for they are so near, their termination or beginning.”

  September 15: He had no appetite, and what he ate went right through him. He had yet to see a doctor. “I am lying in a tent on my rubber blanket, with an old Irishman next to me. Can’t make him hear anything. He is most dead with the diarrhea. The next is a Dutchman, most dead with scurvy. And then the tent and blankets are just as full of lice and fleas as ever can be. As things look now, I stand a good chance to lay my bones in old Ga., but I’d hate to as bad as one can, for I want to go home.”

  September 25: Melvin died and was buried at Andersonville in grave No. 9,735.

  Chapter Ten

  RELEASE

  IN SEPTEMBER THE PRISONERS SAW THE FIRST SIGNS that their long ordeal was coming to an end. The odds of survival increased with every trainload of prisoners that left the Andersonville stockade, though it would be months before all of them were released.

  The reason for the initial removals was not the long-sought exchange of prisoners but Sherman’s occupation of Atlanta, which increased the threat of a Union raid. In response, the Confederate military began moving most of the prisoners from Andersonville to other camps in South Carolina and coastal Georgia. Among the prisoners, jubilation over their release was muted by uncertainty over where exactly they were going—and by past experience. They had seen their hopes dashed before.

  John Ransom was among those who chose to revel in the moment. After hearing that seven detachments were to be removed from the camp, he wrote on September 6, “Hurrah! Hurrah!! Hurrah!!! Can’t holler except on paper.” The next day, the buzz was wearing off. The prisoners were told that those who were unable to walk had to stay behind.

  George Weiser was circumspect about the news. Noting that the longed-for exchange had still not come, he wrote, “It appears that the federal government thinks more of a few hundred niggers than of the thirty thousand white here in bondage.” Three days later he was more optimistic. On September 7, he wrote, “Hot. Thank God I have lived to see a day of rejoicing for at least a portion of the miserable wretches whom I call my fellow prisoners. Ten detachments have gone out of the stockade and are being shipped on board the cars.” No one was sure where the trains were headed. Some of the guards said the prisoners would be paroled, but the prisoners correctly speculated that they were simply being moved because the Union Army was advancing into Georgia.

  On September 10, Weiser’s detachment of a thousand men was removed from the stockade and taken north by train. Only then did he allow the gravity of his imprisonment to fully sink in. All of his shebang mates had died, he had endured worse than he could have ever imagined, and he was wary of the future. “Now I was very sad indeed,” he wrote. If nothing else, Andersonville was now the known. Weiser had trouble rebuilding trust in the future.

  On September 12, William Farrand Keys wrote, “Four Detachments left this morning. We lay in the sun among the fleas till near dark and then left also. My emotions at passing out the gate were not what they would have been if I had been sure of a speedy transit to the federal lines…They have given us three days of rations of cornbread & bacon, and we are moving, but our destination is unknown.”

  Watching the departures was disheartening for those who remained behind. After the exodus began, George Hitchcock wrote, “It seems lonely and drear to see the thousands of deserted burrows and dens.”

  Keys, who was still inside the stockade on September 26, wrote that the weather was “splendid” but added, “We seem to be cut off and forgotten both by our friends and enemies left to linger on, to suffer, to die and sink in oblivion under the great ocean of existence. Well, let us endure while we can.” He did: Keys would be paroled the following February.

  Hitchcock, who was still inside the stockade two months after the first trains left, wrote, “Shepard and his crowd left us. It did me good to see him go, though my heart sank to feel that I must always be left behind.” He finally left on November 22 and was taken to Savannah, where, he wrote, “Citizens have been bringing in food and clothes all day, but I am not smart enough to get any.” A week later he bought some straw with borrowed $5 Confederate scrip and mended his clothes, which he wrote “are in a miserable condition: The sleeves of my blouse and shirt are almost entirely gone, showing some skeleton arms, the backs of both garments are as thin as gauze, while my pants are worn from the knees down, entirely away, and my cap is two simple pieces of cloth sewed together.” He proved to be among the lucky ones. On December 8, after he and a friend found out they were finally to be paroled, he wrote, “Too overjoyed to think of anything else, we clasped each other’s hands and cried like babies.”

  Weiser was first taken to Florence, South Carolina, where, he wrote, “Trading and talking with the guard is freely permitted, and rings, knives, jackets, boots, shoes, and clothing of all kinds is bartered for sweet potatoes, grapes, apples, etc., etc.” Still dubious about what the future held, he later managed to escape near Wilmington, North Carolina.

  Thomas Newton ended up in a camp on Charleston’s horse-racing track. “Our treatment there was a great improvement on Andersonville, we receiving more rations and better,” he wrote. “The citizens showed us a good deal of sympathy, furnishing clothing and provisions, all they could, although contrary to orders. The ladies would come near enough to the camp to throw us from one to half a dozen loaves of bread at a time. I trust they had their reward.”

  By October Newton was in Florence, “which for cruel torture compared to the number there, was not much, if any improvement on Andersonville. The
cold was worse to endure for many of us than the heat; we had more space to the man, a little more water, a little more wood, but our rations were more limited than at Andersonville.” While in Florence he estimated that three-fifths of the prisoners came down with fevers. “I was carried out by my comrades, as they supposed to die, to what bore the name of hospital,” he wrote. “The first thing was to cut my hair short, causing me to get a severe cold. I recovered somewhat, so in about nine days was sent into camp. It seemed as if I would starve quicker in hospital than in camp; but caught another severe cold, which caused a severe pain in my right side which has clung to me in some positions ever since.”

  On the day after Christmas, Keys wrote, “Rainy. No comfort to be found either in retrospection, anticipation or the contemplation of the present.”

  In a cruel twist, many of the prisoners were eventually sent back to Andersonville. Chester Berry, who had been sent by train to Savannah in October, marched with a large group of prisoners overland back to Andersonville, where he arrived on Christmas Eve “with scarcely a ray of hope.”

  J. Walter Elliott remained at the prison in Macon during the forced wanderings as the prisoners were shunted around Georgia and the Carolinas. He offered no explanation why, and there is no indication that he was too sick to be moved, as were the majority who remained, but he stayed in Macon until March 1865. About five thousand other prisoners were still inside the stockade, where he was eventually transferred, and when word came that the prisoners would finally be exchanged, “Oh! the joyous shout that made the castle walls ring out,” Elliott proclaimed. “How each of us laughed and cried, shook hands with and hugged his fellows, and joining hands in a circle, in good old Methodist campmeeting-alter style, as we all joined in singing ‘Rally Round the Flag, Boys.’ The joy of that good hour more than repaid all past tribulations.”

  As he waited at the depot with about six hundred officers and enlisted men who had been inside the stockade, Elliott continued to gather information, noting that the men “were begrimed and blackened by exposure, without a pretense of protection from summer’s sun or winter’s rain; all weak and lean from starvation; many, too feeble to take care of themselves, were literally encased in scales, beneath which were myriads of living vermin eating all vitality away. Two I saw doubled up and scarred all over, having been literally torn in pieces by the dogs, because they attempted to escape from the devil’s domain.” He quoted a prisoner from inside the stockade describing the entrance of Wirz through the gates on a white pony to announce the exchange: “Behold death on a pale horse.”

  The two armies had reached an agreement in February 1865 to release their prisoners to neutral ground until an official exchange could be worked out. For the captives who were from the Midwest, that meant relocation to Camp Fisk, a neutral holding pen for prisoners of war, four miles east of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Prisoners who originated from the East Coast were to be transported to coastal sites. Newton was officially released in February 1865, near Wilmington, and wrote, “emaciated as I was, I felt almost as if I could jump clear over the flag that stretched across the street.”

  Elliott and Berry were among those sent to Camp Fisk. They made the trip partly aboard trains and steamboats and partly on foot. The journey itself was in many ways an inauspicious end, with many prisoners dying en route of disease and injuries, including from several train wrecks. “We left a good many poor fellows dead along our entire route,” Elliott wrote. “Thrice derailed, twice we had two cars wrecked, crippling a good number of the boys.”

  Joseph Taylor Elliott, who was no relation to J. Walter, wrote that at each station the train passed, a few bodies were left behind. “How hard to die on their morning of deliverance, with all the bright hopes of meeting father, mother, wife or children,” he observed.

  After reaching Montgomery, Alabama, by train, the prisoners were taken by steamboat to Selma, then by train to Demopolis, during which the derailments occurred. Men injured by the wrecks were impeded on the final leg of the journey. Upon reaching Jackson, Mississippi, the Rebels “simply turned us loose, and directed us to the road to Vicksburg,” Joseph Elliott wrote. A cold rain began to fall the morning of March 29 and continued all day. The men walked seventeen miles that first day, to near Bolton, Mississippi.

  After crossing the Big Black River, the prisoners made their way to the sprawling encampment of tents known as Camp Fisk, which straddled the rail line into Vicksburg. There they exchanged their dirty rags for clean clothes, wrote letters, rested, and gorged themselves on hardtack and boiled cabbage. Soon the rations would be limited because a few prisoners died and many were sickened from overeating. As J. Walter Elliott recalled, the men “ravenously devoured the cabbage and licked the vinegar from our fingers, the sweetest dainty to my bleeding gums that I ever tasted. We feasted on pickles.”

  Elliott wrote that he cried when he saw the United States flag flying on the opposite bank. “Out from the gates of hell—out of the jaws of death—going home.”

  “I never experienced a happier day in my life than I did when we marched under the old Stars and Stripes at the Big Black river bridge and drew my first cup of coffee and a single hard tack,” Chester Berry wrote, adding, “I have seen many beautiful things in my life, but never anything that looked more beautiful than the flag of my country did upon the 1st day of April, 1865.”

  Sergeant John Clark Ely, an Ohio infantryman, wrote of his arrival at Camp Fisk, eight miles west of the Big Black, “Oh this is the brightest day of my life long to be remembered.”

  EVERYTHING CAME TO A HEAD at Cahaba in March, when the Alabama River jumped its banks. The winter of 1864 and 1865 had been particularly rough, and it would have been hard to imagine how the situation could possibly get worse before the water started to rise.

  The prisoners could not see what was coming, though they may have heard from the guards. It had been raining hard for weeks, and the compound was already a muddy mire, tracked by the feet of thousands of wet and restless men, when the river began seeping into the low places along the edge of the stockade at about the first of March.

  The first pool slowly crept across the yard. As the men moved warily away, more seepages appeared elsewhere along the stockade wall, and within a few hours the flood manifested itself, pouring its turbid excess through the compound. By midnight the water was three or four feet deep. No one knew how high it would get, and there was no place to go.

  The men were alert to any sign of new trouble and had learned that mortifying moments had a way of surpassing themselves, but the flood brought many to the breaking point. As the water rose, the ever-present campfires went out. Some prisoners crowded into the higher bunks or climbed into the rafters of the warehouse, but the rest had no choice but to stand in the very water that everyone was urinating and defecating in. To make matters worse, they had to drink it. Fingers and toes shriveled. Their only hope, other than for a retreat of the flood waters, was that the long-rumored exchange of prisoners of war would miraculously come.

  Jesse Hawes recalled that the odious Colonel Jones, who had been left in charge while General Henderson, the commandant, was away, visited the flooded prison at the request of a group of prisoners and, when asked if they could be moved to higher ground, replied, “Not so long as there is a God-damned Yankee’s head above water can you come out of that stockade.” According to Hawes, Jones said they were only looking for an opportunity to escape, which under the circumstances seemed both warranted and implausible. “The whole country was flooded,” Hawes wrote. “The whole prison was without shoes to their feet or covering to their backs. If they had been turned loose with permission to walk unmolested to their own armies, there were not twenty men in the whole three thousand who possessed enough endurance to have accomplished the feat.”

  About sixty sympathetic prison guards signed a petition asking Jones to allow the prisoners to be removed to higher ground, but initially he balked. Three days later he seemed to have a change of heart and al
lowed a few prisoners out of the compound, under guard, to gather logs and other debris to build platforms above the level of the water. Soon he allowed about seven hundred men to be transferred to Selma, but he left the remaining twenty-three hundred stranded for a week longer. The foul water exacerbated a perennial problem among the prisoners: Diarrhea, which compounded itself again and again. Hawes wrote that every man he knew was suffering from diarrhea, and whenever a weakened man cried out for a drink, the water “was dipped from its filthy pool to moisten a pasty mouth.”

  At one point a Confederate officer rode into the flooded stockade, and his horse fell into a submerged cistern with a splash. This caused a roar of laughter to sweep through the compound. Hearing it, the townspeople—with the obvious exception of Amanda Gardner and a few others who knew better—concluded that the prisoners were doing well despite the flood.

  The water was cold, and although a few prisoners managed to fashion minuscule hearths from skillets and pans balanced precariously on debris, most had no way to build fires to cook on or keep warm by. For ten days they subsisted on crackers or raw cornmeal and bacon washed down with sewage-laden water. Hawes wrote that many men whose constitutions were strong enough to endure the preceding months began to break down physically, emotionally, and mentally, and some never recovered. Many would nurse their tormented bodies for the rest of their lives, however long that might be.

  Even before the flood, men had spent countless hours engaged in useless calculation of their chances of survival, devising strategies and considering the factors that came into play: The force of their own will, the power of religious faith, the usefulness of remaining focused, of not giving up. But it was impossible to know which factors would determine the outcome, assuming any of them would.