The Sentinels of Andersonville

by Tracy Groot

  “It is time to take it off,” Emery said, coming away from the rail to stand next to Violet. “We can do that. The F.A.P.—that sounds pretty good.”

  “Papa, I don’t want to make buttons. I want to take hold the hand of a dying man. I want to let him know someone is here, on the outside of his—” she wavered, but took hold of herself—“dreadful misery. That’s all he wanted to know—is someone there, and do they care?”

  Dr. Stiles regarded the three. Violet and Emery looked as if one word would set them to a flurry of activity. Dance had no eagerness about him. If he had articulated his dread with nothing more than I will not get involved, Dr. Stiles knew why. He looked toward the town.

  They would feed each other, and clothe each other, and comfort each other well. They loved their own, and loved them well. They were a fiercely loyal lot who had gone through much adversity. They came alongside loved ones and liked ones and even unliked ones to share their grief and shake fists at the North and at the sky because they loved their own. Blow after blow had rained upon the South, and now Sherman stood at Atlanta’s door. Americus had suffered, and feared what it would suffer yet. But they would hold fast together, no matter what the North sought to visit upon the noble South. To them, this enemy was surely different than the enemy Jesus talked about in the Gospels, for to feed this enemy was to not love their neighbor. It was, in fact, to hate him.

  Should he throw these young people to the ravenous wolves of love? For on behalf of every boy lost in Americus, the town would see these three torn apart.

  And then in the middle of this dark despair, a thought came sterling clear: it wasn’t up to him.

  His daughter was twenty-one. He thought he could shield her from the wickedness of attrition. He found that he could not, and knew he was wrong to try. This Emery had to be her age or older. Dance was twenty-three.

  “Papa? Will we help those men?”

  Let them find out about this town on their own. They would raise a hand to help the enemy and would learn what Dr. Stiles had learned. Let the learning be their own, not his.

  “We will help them,” Dr. Stiles said heavily, and bleakness settled in.

  Dance turned away.

  Violet seized her father in a fierce hug, then grabbed Emery’s arm and pulled him aside, talking a mile a minute.

  Dr. Stiles rose and went to Dance’s side at the iron rail.

  “I don’t know what you are about, sir.”

  Dr. Stiles smiled against the dread lodged deep in his heart. “I have come to love that forthrightness.”

  “When she sees this town for what it is, she will lose faith in humanity. What then, Dr. Stiles?”

  “I don’t know. But I was wrong to keep Andersonville from her. I have to let her go, Dance. It is a hard truth when you are a father.”

  “What will happen when she finds out they think her father is a Yankee spy?”

  “Has it come to that, then?” Dr. Stiles said. He lifted his eyebrows. “It is a remarkable thing to find myself disreputable. I have so long enjoyed a good reputation. I did not know it until now.”

  “Has your practice dropped off?”

  “It has.”

  “Have you lost friends?”

  “I have.”

  “Some think you a saint, and others a traitor.” He hesitated. “Those are the ones who worry me, sir.”

  “Me, too,” said Dr. Stiles.

  “I’m trying to say, you have made enemies. And now . . .” He didn’t quite look at Violet.

  “Dance, a few minutes ago a thought came. ‘It isn’t up to you,’ said that thought. And while it relieves some of my burden, and calls me to take my hands away, it leaves behind a question: Have I raised her right? Have I done my best by her? I’m not sure I have. I’m not sure any parent can give a full yes to that. So I will pray that my deficiencies will be filled in by God’s grace, and I will let her go. And if she . . .” He paused. “If she falls, and if she’s hurt, I hope she will not be turned back.”

  “Mother will want to join,” Violet complained, joining them at the rail. “There will be no stopping her. She will want to run things. That is why Emery and I have made you president, Dance, and just spare us your protestations—Mother respects you, and she does not respect Papa or me. You are the only way we can have her involved so that she won’t take over.”

  “I best go in and tidy up before she comes,” said Dr. Stiles. “And I expect you’ll be wanted back at the garrison. Boys—thank you for taking care of my girl. I am deeply grateful.” He shook their hands. “Mr. Jones, I am sure Mrs. Stiles will want to thank you herself; do come for dinner this Sunday if you can. If we have no other guests that day, it might be a good time to begin discussion of this, well, new enterprise.” He kissed the top of Violet’s head, and took his leave.

  The three were left in a curious silence.

  Dance thought about his father and Dr. Stiles. They were very different men, and the chief difference was that he could have a conversation with Dr. Stiles and not want to kill either him or himself when they were through. Father’s answer to everything was to run roughshod over everyone; Dr. Stiles meant to make a man understand things. And what were those words that came out of his mouth? I was wrong to keep Andersonville from her. . . . ? I was wrong? Dance chuckled. Those words had never once passed his father’s lips.

  “Miss Stiles, you have shamed your gender,” Dance said, leaning on the rail. “Making me president because of your mother. Such mealy manipulation.”

  “Dance, please, please.” She put her elbows on the rail and rubbed her temples.

  “Did you tell her your plan, Alabama?”

  “No, I haven’t. Because I have a better one.” He pulled a dried stalk from an herb bundle and stuck it in his mouth. A slow and wily smile came.

  “Do tell,” said Dance.

  “Hickory Shearer says don’t use your wheelbarrow for a single stick. If you’re going to the woodpile, fill it up.”

  “Hickory Shearer should say it plainly.”

  “If bustin’ one Yank out of that prison should hang me . . . what’ll they do if I bust ’em all?” He grinned. “Hangin’ won’t be good enough. They will appoint unto me such fearsome tortures as have not yet advanced upon the mind of man.”

  “Now this is the first interesting thing you have said since we arrived. I all but despaired you were the same man I met in that brougham.”

  “What is going on?” Violet said, looking up from her temple rub.

  “And you, Miss Wonderful Stiles, have set up the perfect cloak for the progression of my scheme,” said Emery. “The F.A.P.: Friends of Andersonville Prison. Will anyone truly ken the depths of that name?”

  “Hold on a minute,” Dance said slowly. “You truly intend this.”

  “I keep my oaths.”

  “I see no water oak around here.”

  “That magnolia answered.” Emery took the straw out of his mouth, and peered at Violet and Dance. “We are Rebels, are we not? Then let us rebel against what is not us. Because that ain’t us, and it never was, and only by bustin’ out as many men as we can will we erase some of the shame on our heads.”

  His words found such resonance in Dance’s heart that for a second time in a month, he feared he might do something exceedingly stupid.

  Violet’s mouth was open for a long time before she said, “Can we feed them on the side?”

  And Dance did something exceedingly stupid.

  He pulled her close, but didn’t know what to do when she was there. He couldn’t kiss her in front of Emery, and she might not want him to anyway, so they looked at each other for a long moment until Dance finally let go.

  Violet stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek.

  “On Sunday we shall plan the demise of Andersonville Prison. Let us do so in such a way that all its suffering will be eradicated in totality. Good afternoon, gentlemen. Until Sunday.” She curtsied and went into the house.

  PART TWO

&n
bsp; Just as the Creek Indians had considered the area their granary, Sumter and surrounding counties were known during the Civil War as “Little Egypt” or the “Egypt of the Confederacy” because of their huge harvests. How, then, could hunger at Andersonville be so severe that thousands of men died of malnutrition and related causes?

  Uriah B. Harrold, a commissary for the Confederate government, reported that in the month of August he shipped to Andersonville the following supplies:

  113,000 lbs. Bacon

  90,000 bushels Meal

  1,000 sacks Flour

  10,000 lbs. Rice

  131 barrels Sirup

  20 barrels Whisky

  These supplies alone could have alleviated the desperate need within the post and prison, and Harrold was but one of fifty commissaries supplying them. The warehouses at Albany, forty miles from Andersonville and far larger than the one at Americus, were said to be taxed by the huge stores assembled there.

  —Americus through the Years: The Story of a Georgia Town and Its People, 1832–1975 BY WILLIAM BAILEY WILLIFORD

  6

  WHEN THE BULLET took Lew at Gettysburg, he didn’t know where he was hit, or, for a time, that he was hit. It spun him around and he fell, not of his own free will. He was aware that something bad had happened, but for a moment, didn’t know what. And that is how he felt when the gate closed behind him at Andersonville.

  For a few moments the incoming men hesitated at joining the prison population. They were not assigned barracks. They were supposed to stick to their detachment of ninety, and what that meant, no one was sure; the Federal sergeants assigned to the detachments seemed as unsure of immediate direction as their charges. It was strange to be cut loose after days or weeks of Rebs telling them where to go and what to do. The men at the front of the incoming group began to spread out, and Lew went forward with the rest for his first size-up of the prison and its captives.

  Lew tried to get some bearings, but bearings wouldn’t be had. A massive congregation of faces stared back as if he were a preacher on a pulpit and had come with something to say, faces and faces in myriad shades of dust and gray and grime and sunburn, most of those faces blank with mild interest, a few with smiles of welcome and bitterly wry commiseration.

  He didn’t know where to go, but he wanted out of this pulpit. He thought he heard his name and turned around to see, but sun and sound and faces confused him; so he squared himself and stepped into the crowd, doing his best to keep to its edge.

  “What news, boys? Sherman taken Atlanta, yet?”

  “Any o’ you with the 19th Michigan Infantry? How’d old Thomas do on Hood? Lick him at Peachtree?”

  “You boys step on over—you ain’t gonna find a better place to trade than at Fetchner’s stand. Right this way.”

  “Anyone with the 19th Michigan?”

  “Fair trades, and double return on greenbacks. Right this way.”

  “Don’t listen to him, boys, you steer clear of Fetchner’s—bunch of sharpers and swindlers!”

  “Pay no attention to that man!”

  “19th Michigan?”

  “That is a fine way to treat a 12th Pennsylvanian.”

  Lew stopped, but he didn’t seem to know the fellow who stood grinning at him. When he did, it was past time to cover for his shock. “Well, you are not Harris Gill.”

  “It is he. Reduced.”

  Had he served with this man for three years to barely know him now?

  Had he come to such a state in only a month?

  “Thought I was rid of you, boy-o,” Harris said, coming forward with his hand out. Lew took it, and Harris gripped tight. “Been lookin’ for you every day, hopin’ I’d never see you.”

  “You been here since Kennesaw?”

  “Aye. Where you been?”

  “Sick.” He looked down at the bullet flap, a relief from Harris’s distressing appearance. “Took a bullet and took some infection, but she’s pretty well cleared up.”

  “That’s good. You don’t want to come in here with any weakness. It’ll attack there first.”

  “What will?”

  “Andersonville.”

  Harris Gill was Irish. He came as a boy with his family to America on the heels of the potato famine. He worked with his brothers at an ironmongery in Pittsburgh. His last name was McGillicuddy, but in a farsighted move he had mustered in as Gill to make roll call easier, as most of the men calling roll tended to chew names whole.

  He made corporal soon after mustering in with Lew and the rest, but he soon owed the regiment fund seventeen dollars for cussing, one dollar per word. As privates were not fined, he committed an infraction to send him back to ranks (a cordial invitation to a major to kiss his backside), thus saving his paycheck in another farsighted move.

  Harris Gill once saved the unit’s colors, and for it received a medal for honor. He had traded it for some pickles and a stack of dime novels at a camp store near Gettysburg.

  “You’ve lost some weight,” Lew said lightly, in the biggest understatement of his verbal history.

  “The South seeks to cure me of gluttony.”

  “Is there a place we can . . . ?” He looked about.

  “Aye. You’re in it.” Men in front, men behind, men on both sides, jostling, pushing past. “There’s no gettin’ out of it, Lew. There’s only gettin’ used to it. Come—I’ll take you to Hotel Ford. You can mess with us, as one of our members was paroled last night.”

  “Paroled?” Lew began hopefully, but Harris shook his head.

  “He’s dead. Come, I’ll give you the lay of the land.”

  —

  “Don’t take it in all to once,” Harris advised as they threaded through the crowd. “You must take time to accustom.”

  A man stumbled into Lew and moved on. Lew noticed a few vermin on his sleeve from the encounter and quickly brushed them off. “I am not sure I wish to.”

  “First day is bad, next are worse, but after that you fashion tactics. Don’t try first thing to see the place as a whole. You’ll set a course for despair. I’ve seen it happen to men I thought possessed of strong inward constitution. You got to make friends early with an old-timer; he’ll steer you right. For now, you be as a stone skippin’ off water, boy-o, and don’t sink in just yet. Get them blinders up a spell.”

  “Where are the barracks? Where are the tents?”

  He spread his arm. “You’re lookin’ at ’em. Take it as is. Speculate later.”

  Any “tents” Lew saw were low-slung affairs of sun-bleached pieces of calico or burlap, shirts or coats, strung together and pitched on sticks. A quick guess said maybe one of every ten men had shelter. The “tents” were scattered about, no rhyme nor reason in their placement. It was nothing like a camp or bivouac. There were no orderly rows with tents laid out in lines and men walking along paths or avenues. The impression clung, and it troubled him almost more than the men he passed who showed clear signs of starvation. There was no order. Everywhere he looked was thick disarray, and it made Lew’s mind see not individual men, but a spikey brown mass of confusion.

  A skipping stone, he told himself quickly. He averted his eyes.

  “Some of the guards are good men, especially army regulars. But it’s mostly militia now, and they’re not worth half a plug. They’re mostly old fellas or young fellas, trigger-happy and green.”

  “Trigger-happy . . .”

  “Aye. I have to talk to you about the deadline.”

  He steered Lew to the outer edge of the crowd. A thin split-rail fence held up by posts ran all along the perimeter, twenty feet from the stockade wall.

  Harris pointed to one of the sheltered sentinel posts, small booths spaced at intervals along the top of the stockade, all the way around. “See them boys? Mark ’em. They have orders to shoot if you go under that rail, and they’ll do it. I make it my duty to tell newcomers about it; if a lad hadn’t told me, I’d be dead. I was at the creek and he fetched me back just as I was dipping for cleaner water on th
e other side of the line. He pointed, and I look up and see a boy young as Charley Reed with a gun trained on me. He had an idiot grin I would’ve given a French leave to wipe off.”

  “I don’t expect they give French leaves around here.”

  “I haven’t seen a woman in a month,” Harris sighed.

  They began to thread their way north along the deadline path. Other than the “street” that opened into the stockade from the north gate, this path seemed to be the only sort of order.

  They came to a man lying in the path along the deadline. Lew knelt to check him. “Harris—I think he’s . . .”

  “Just keep walkin’, Lew,” Harris said softly. “They’ll collect him. Sometimes I just about envy ’em.”

  They walked on.

  “What about exchange?”

  “Oh, and exchange is a precarious topic. It’s all we talk about, and it’s our only hope. Yet I have seen no evidence of it. Some old-timers say there hasn’t been a man exchanged yet. I don’t know if it’s true or not. One thing you’ll learn about the pen—rumors are the great entertainment. You don’t know what to believe. I’ve learned to confine belief to what I see.”

  As they progressed, Lew tried to keep his blinders up as Harris had advised. He did all right with the great brown mass, but wondered how exactly he was supposed to avoid noticing the wretched man they had stepped over or the appalling smell, now so bad that Lew tasted it. Hardest of all was to avoid noticing Harris himself.

  Harris and Lew met when mustering in at Philadelphia, had served in the same regiment, same company for three years—they were messmates; and Lew had walked right past him, so changed were his form and face. Last Lew had seen him, Harris probably weighed 170 pounds—he must have lost 30 of those. How was that possible in one month? His cheekbones stood out, his jaw cut a profile it never had before. It was unnatural. To see it in men he did not know was one thing, but to see it alter a man he knew brought it home. Harris’s face, with the fair complexion of the Irish, had taken a sun beating like nothing Lew had ever seen. The sun had burned and blistered and reburned the blisters, leaving a red corrugated ridge on his forehead and cheeks. But the sunburn wasn’t the worst.