The Sentinels of Andersonville (2 page)

Q: From your observation of the condition and surroundings of our prisoners
 
—their food, their drink, their exposure by day and by night, and all the circumstances you have described
 
—state your professional opinion as to what proportion of deaths occurring there were the result of the circumstances and surroundings which you have narrated.

A: I feel myself safe in saying that seventy-five per cent of those who died might have been saved, had those unfortunate men been properly cared for as to food, clothing, bedding, &c.

 
—
TESTIMONY OF DR. JOHN C. BATES, FROM THE TRIAL OF HENRY WIRZ

JULY 1864

ANDERSONVILLE PRISON

Two men stood sheltered from the blazing sun in a sentry box at the top of the stockade wall. One thought of his rheumatic knee, and one thought of Violet Stiles.

Violet Stiles had large blue eyes and other features Dance Pickett could never remember, subjugated as they were by the eyes. So, wanting still to conjure her face, he allowed aspects of her nature to form the forgotten features: She was naïve, patriotic, self-righteous, kind (he allowed her that), and merry (he couldn’t be unfair, she had laughed heartily at the antics of the younger sisters at the Stiles dinner table last Sunday); but naïve, patriotic, and self-righteous were the overriding elements of her nature, and they fashioned a caricature image of a dark-haired girl with gigantic blue eyes and tiny everything else, including figure and feet. It was like looking through field glasses at the wrong end to find great, startling eyes, with all else crabbed and distant.

Violet Stiles represented all that Dance despised in Southern womenry. He didn’t despise women as a general rule, but he hated what the war brought out of them. Violet was like all the rest, a fire-breathing patriot determined to do her duty by any hapless Confederate soldier who had the misfortune to cross her path. Did she suppose men actually
wanted
to be fussed over and praised and
 
—worst of all
 
—
encouraged
for the Cause? She was so
meaning
and
feeling
and
earnest
 
—the most ignorant, galling, entertaining creature he’d ever met.

The guard next to him shifted, and Dance stopped laughing.

No wonder they didn’t like him. At least they left him alone. He touched the shoulder strap of his leather scrip. In there was a bit of his favorite Shakespeare, and he decided to indulge the fellow.

“Burr, hear me out, and I’ll confer on you something fine: The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the form of things unknown, the poet’s pen
 
—” Dance paused for dramatic effect, allowing, hopefully, his listener to form a pen in his mind
 
—“turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.”

“Pickett, I don’t know as I should hit you or treat you kindly,” said Burr. “If you was my boy, I’d beat you half to death and let the good Lord take care of the rest.”

The leather pouch had been a Christmas gift from his mother when he was a boy, carried in the Revolution, she said, by her grandfather. Dance had examined it for signs of Revolution. The nick on the flap, surely from a musket ball. Stains were surely blood. Mother seemed to know just what her son would do with it: make it into a sanctuary.

Early on he took particular care with the papers he put into the scrip. They were quotes and isms, poetry and prose, declarations and decrees and bits of airy nothing, and nothing could go in there indiscriminately.

The result was such that his scrip powered him through his first two years at the University of Georgia. It powered him through the patriotism of his father and the death of his mother. But it had no power here. He had not opened his scrip since the day he was posted to the garrison at Andersonville Prison, for the stockade was a different sort of sanctuary, and two sanctuaries could not exist in the same place. It was a law of religion or physics.

“Here they come,” Burr grunted.

Dance took his eyes from the men in the stockade to the men approaching the stockade, coming through the stand of pines from the Andersonville depot, a quarter mile distant. They came in long shambling columns, Captain Wirz riding his old gray mare alongside.

“Run, you fools,” Dance muttered.

They were two hundred or so, held in check by Wirz’s commands and curses and occasionally brandished pistol, as well as thirty or so armed members of the Georgia militia and any escorting regulars. Dance looked away.

He shifted his weight to the other leg, glanced from habit to his ancient musket propped at his side, and fell once more to the interesting ponderation of Miss Violet Stiles. Dance selected an early Stiles Sunday dinner and rolled it out on his mind’s stage.

Stiles Sunday Dinner. Volume Two.

Characters: The entire Stiles household, the mayor of Americus and his wife, Dance Pickett, and another member of the Georgia militia, an uncouth geezer on burial duty named Linney.

Act One: Dance must endure the patronizing efforts of Miss Stiles to engage Linney in conversation.

“I understand you are posted at the prison, Mr. Linney,” Violet said, her voice cultured enough to jelly eels. “How do you find the work?”

Linney stopped midchew, surprised and not altogether happy to find attention on him. They might, after all, see him slip biscuits
into his dirty vest. Linney gulped some wine and sent a look to Dr. Stiles, who was busy cutting meat for one of the younger girls and admonishing her to chew carefully.

“Reckon I find it all right. ’Cept I cain’t talk about it or I’ll git in trouble.”

“Your discretion does you credit. Security is very important, for Yankee spies abound. I understand General Winder has called down detectives from Richmond. Goodness, what an important job you have. You are certainly our protector.” She gave a little shudder, and Dance gripped his cutlery. She recovered from her theatrical musings, and asked brightly, “Where are you from, Mr. Linney?”

“Skull Gully. More of dem peas, ma’am. Some of dem biscuits.”

“Please,” Dance prompted.

“Please,” said Linney.

“Certainly, Mr. Linney,” said Violet with a frosty glance at Dance. “Tell me, Mr. Linney, where is Skull Gully?” said she, all melodic politeness once more.

“South.”

“It must be a very nice town.”

“It’s a swamp. More o’ dat wine, ma’am. Please.”

“But it isn’t polite,” protested the youngest Stiles girl. “You’ve already had three glassfuls. Mercy me.”

Dance choked on a biscuit. Violet’s gaze rained down violence on the girl.

“Why, certainly, Mr. Linney.” Violet reached for the wine.

“I won’t tolerate it,” the little girl said, and snatched the decanter. “He is being rude and we do not tolerate rudeness at this table.”

“Posey Stiles,” Violet breathed, eyes glowing red.

This time Dance couldn’t hide the laughter.

It caught the attention of the oft-distracted Mrs. Stiles, who smiled with bemused approval at her laughing guest and returned
to remonstrate with the other girls while keeping conversation with the mayor’s wife.

“Such a lovely brooch, Esme. It’s only a little gristle, Daisy, eat it. You should wear it more often, I’ve not seen it since the pink taffeta last Christmas. Rosie, wipe your mouth. I declare.”

“Say your name again to me,” Dance asked of the little girl with the decanter safely between her knees, “for you are my favorite Stiles, and I wish to remember it always.”

She smiled up at him, glorious in her defense of the family wine, triumphant that someone admired it.

“I am Posey Eden Stiles, called so because my sisters are Violet, Lily, Rose, and Daisy, and when I came along Papa said I made a posy. So though I am
officially
Pansy, I am
called
Posey and I like it right fine.”

“You like it very much,” Violet corrected severely.

“Mr. Linney said
right fine
a minute ago, and I liked it.”

“I like Posey right fine, too,” said Dance. “And you were entirely correct to waylay this man from drinking all your wine. Such rudeness should be corrected, and hastily.” He looked at Linney, who was slipping a spoon into his vest. “Linney, guardian and protector of genteel Southern womenry, I request that you apologize for your rudeness, and return to the table your recent acquisitions.”

That had been the first time he saw Violet mad. But Volume Eight was the memorable best. Dance had gloried to see that a methodical chipping away had at last revealed the true Violet. On that infamous evening he had seen in full what had only peeked from behind a well-bred cloak
 
—a tempestuous nature nigh unto feral, not at all civilly Southern as he was sure she had supposed. He didn’t trot out Volume Eight very often. He saved it for when things were especially bad. Today was tolerable. He couldn’t remember Volume Nine. It did trouble him some.

Violet Wrassey Stiles desperately needed guidance at this critical juncture in her young life.
Someone
needed to devote delicate method to make it clear that Volume Eight Violet was the one to be admired, not fought and subdued in favor of the other person he didn’t much like at all. Clearly Dr. and Mrs. Stiles had a handful with that one, and would not mind the kind intervention of a concerned distant cousin
 
—

“Strike me dumb,” said Burr. “Look over there.”

What Dance saw first made him squint, then made him lunge to the rail. A girl came out of the pines, following at some distance the columns of prisoners. He gripped the rail.

“That a
woman
?” Burr said.

“It’s Violet Stiles,” Dance breathed.

“Uh-oh.” He had heard of the Sunday dinners. “What’s
she
doin’ here?”

“She can’t see this.” He broke and ran for the ladder.

“Where you goin’, Pickett? Pickett! Oh, let her see, I say! Don’t no one ever see. Fancy-pants what never put themselves in the way of mizry will find naught but mizry at the end.”

Burr suspected he had said something wise, thought it should be wrote down, set himself to memorize it on account he couldn’t write, then caught sight of a Yankee too close to the deadline and grabbed his musket. “I see you, Old Abe,” he bellowed down into the stockade. “Do not try me today, for I am in a foul temper’ment.”

A
MERICUS,
G
EORGIA,
in 1864 was a town proper with its post office, three churches, three newspapers, three general mercantiles, a couple of mills, a blacksmithy, two inns, a courthouse, and a few notable lawyers and statesmen; but Americus triumphed over other small communities in Georgia in that it boasted not only a train depot, when the Southwestern Railroad came through in ’54, but a telegraph office: that bustling junction of grave importance where mysterious electrical impulses rode along frightening snake-black wires to land upon official telegraph paper in portents of good or evil
 
—usually evil. Just such a paper was waved at Violet Stiles as she was passing the little office located outside the depot.

“Miss Stiles!” cried the telegrapher from within. “Oh, Miss Stiles!” He didn’t wait for her to come in, but hurried around the counter and out into the street.

Violet was surprised the young man knew who she was; she’d seen him, but they had never exchanged more than a polite nod. He was one of the many new faces in Americus, likely connected to military matters. And these days most matters were military.

“Reckon your package has come, Miss Stiles, but I reckon it got put off with some of your father’s stores at the Andersonville depot. Two boxes, two Stiles
 
—reckon it’s an easy mistake.”

Violet took the paper, the first time in her life a telegram had been addressed to her, and read as much as the young man had spoken.

She’d waited for the parcel of seashells like Christmas, the entire Stiles household had. The seashells were soon to be buttons, a scheme long planned and anticipated. A month earlier she’d told the family of her idea, and, apparently charmed and grateful for the diversion, Papa had written directly to his cousin in coastal Savannah.

The same blockade that caused a dearth of buttons had caused a dearth of thread, but Violet tirelessly collected thread from various ingenuities. She unraveled a barley sack, and rewound it over cards made of cut-up fans. She raided the ribbon box, and colorful silk-wrapped cards soon joined the burlap. She picked lengths of thread out of old quilting scraps, and painstakingly tied them together.

She arranged the threaded cards in a basket and brought them out for visitors to admire. She’d soon receive a parcel from Savannah filled with
uniform
shells, she told them, and the shells would be tightly wrapped with this good thread and sold very soon at the Americus Mercantile.

Violet’s zeal provoked good-hearted generosity, and neighbors dropped by with ragbag scraps for her to unravel. She received each item with great enthusiasm, and showered upon the giver praise to equal a gift of silver.

Her seashells
 
—so close! Ten miles close! What vex
ation
! She barely refrained from crumpling the paper into a ball. The temptation brought protocol to mind and she asked with a shade of reluctance, “Do I owe anything for this?”

“Payment is on the sending end, not the receiving end, unless the receiving end is manned by an immoral character.” The young
man drew himself tall, as if to assure her no such immoral character was in her vicinity. “You want I should send a reply with your instructions?”

As payment was on the sending end, she shook her head.

“Well, I reckon none is needed as they will surely have the doctor take your parcel home this evening.” He pulled off his hat, and his face reddened. “Say, Miss Stiles . . .” And he launched into a speech Violet did not hear.

It was
impossible
to wait until Papa came home. He came home
late
on Thursdays. She could not
endure
the thought of her shells
languishing
in
 
—

“. . . the dance next Saturday at the Millards’. I would be honored if
 
—”

She seized his arm. “When does the train leave for Andersonville?”

“I
 
—what? Oh
 
—maybe five minutes, maybe ten. I would be honored
 
—”

“Freight or passenger?”

“Passenger. But
 
—no, wait! Come back, Miss Stiles! It’s the one-fifteen and there’s no return today! You’d have to wait ’til your father comes back from the . . . Oh, doggone it.”

She ran down to the end of the depot, up the stairs, and past the depot office to the platform, where Silas Runcorn was pasting a label on a crate.

“Mr. Runcorn! I need a lift to Andersonville. I cannot pay, but the train is going there anyway.”

“Miss Stiles, that kind of reasoning will bankrupt the Southwestern line.” Mr. Runcorn replaced the brush in the glue bottle and straightened. “So you got a telegram. Could have told you myself. Wasted paper is an outrage these days. Silas Junior wrote to us on wallpaper. Yankee wallpaper, Mrs. Runcorn informs me, for it was ugly.”

“I see it this way,” Violet said. “The railroad has cost me a fearful inconvenience, and likely profit, as by now I would be making my buttons and they would be for sale far earlier. Among my multiple early orders, your own wife has ordered a set of green silk buttons which I had planned to augment with an
extra
black thread at
no additional charge
to ensure a lovely contrast with Mrs. Runcorn’s green brocade; but I grieve to say that this delay will cost your dear wife some early happiness. As we all know, happiness these days is a commodity
 
—”

“Make hers first and I’ll find you a seat.”

Violet beamed. Then she quickly looked about for a young personage she could send home with a message, and found it in little Jupe, the Negro belonging to one of the absentee station owners.

“Can I borrow your boy, Mr. Runcorn?”

“Make it quick, Jupe. No dallying.”

Clearly glad for the diversion, Jupe set his broom outside the office and came running. He likely knew that any errand for the Stiles family ended in something good.

Violet bent to him. “Shall you be rescued from this work fit for only women and girls?”

The child nodded.

“Shall I entrust to you a man-sized errand from which I am not at all sure you will return? For I tremble at what sort of reception my message will have.”

She held up the telegram. Her voice lowered. “When Mrs. Stiles reads this and discovers that I have, in fact, gone to Andersonville without prior consultation as to her wishes, why, child . . .” and she shook her head slowly, the child soon doing the same. “Have you ever seen Mrs. Stiles in a temper?”

He continued to shake his head in mute awe.

“It may be worth the journey entire. You may lose your life.
Perhaps only a leg. I am sure a lemon tart, which Ellen is currently baking with some leavening gotten from an unscrupulous blockader, surely a shady deal to send us to prison and endure agonies unknown, may be of
some
comfort should you live to eat it; but
 
—! Should you find yourself on your deathbed at the hand of Mrs. Stiles, be consoled in the singular knowledge that
you
 
—” she poked his chest
 
— “are one of the celebrated few to have witnessed
 
—”

“Miss Stiles, you will not hold up my train,” called Mr. Runcorn from the platform.

Violet straightened. “Thank you kindly, Jupe. You go see Ellen. She’ll fix you up right fine.”

Solemn little Jupe took the telegram, broke loose the sweetest smile sure to get two tarts from Ellen, and dashed away.

 
—

Camp Sumter was the official name of the prison for Federal soldiers, though no one called it that. They called it by the name of the nearest town. Trains did not stop at Andersonville in the early part of the war. It was only a whistle stop then, barely a town, with only a few scattered farmers. Now, with the construction of the prison early this year, it had military buildings near the depot, connected with business at the prison stockade a quarter-mile march past the depot through the pines. Some of the buildings were commissary warehouses, some were offices and accommodations for the officers assigned to the prison. A dry goods store lay not far from the depot, the only private business in Andersonville.

When Andersonville had been selected as the site of a Federal prison camp, a hue and cry went up in Americus not seen since the passage of conscription. No one wanted a stockade full of murdering Yankees only ten miles off. Who could sleep at night? One little prison break and they were dead in their beds
 
—and likely to
get
that way through vile ordeals unimagined. Despite a ruckus much publicized and editorialized by the papers in Americus, plans went through, and the prison opened to receive its first group of five hundred prisoners in February.

The train carrying Violet Stiles thundered into a crowded depot. As Violet had spent the journey vision-dazzled with cards of buttons replacing cards of thread, she’d only been vaguely aware of occasional gusts of fetid odor, as if the train had gone over a foul swamp. The smell persisted, however, and finally made its way into Violet’s notice, for as the iron horse reared to a stop in a spray of cinders and soot, it was as if the train had come
in
to the smell. As she stepped down to the small platform, she dug into her pocket for a handkerchief and pressed it to her nose.

She had never been to Andersonville alone. She had never been anywhere alone, not by rail, and though the town was only ten miles northeast, it occurred to her what a fine, daring thing she had done. She fastened her bonnet strings and set her chin as if she knew exactly what she was doing and where she was going and stepped into the crowd.

The fine feeling soon began to crumble, and not because she couldn’t decide which building was the parcel warehouse in the thronging confusion of men on the platform and all about the depot; not because of the pervasive odor she tried to keep at bay with a press of thin linen; not because it finally came upon her that she would have to spend the entire day here, without food, until Papa came for the horse and carriage provided by the benevolent Maxwells, which took him home every Thursday to Americus. It was because she was suddenly aware that she was the only woman in the biggest collection of men she had ever seen, and because most of those men, she realized with a thrill of horror and shock, were Yankees.

 
—

“Not much longer, Lew. You get to reunite with your men and put up your heels while the rest of us poor devils see this thing through.”

Lew Gann did not answer. He studied the landscape rolling by at all the speed the train could muster, maybe six or eight miles an hour. The terrain, endless stands of pine trees and corn, was a different sight from northern Georgia, where the mountains reminded him of home. The view was interesting to a farmer in love with the land, but interesting too because Lew had never been so far south; before the war he’d never been farther south than Maryland, and then he’d only stepped over the line to say he had been out of state.

“I could do for a rest m’self,” Emery Jones commented in that easy, pleasing way of Alabamian speech: soft
r
’s, extra syllables, and no hurry to go anywhere. “No rest for the weary. Or is it the wicked? I mix that up.”

The train shuddered over a length of track warped out of alignment, and righted itself before too much brain rattling had occurred. From the Battle of Kennesaw, as they were now calling it, it had been a long, weary journey on rolling stock because the so-called axle grease, a fly-specked concoction which smelled like rendered hog, had to be applied ten times as often as proper grease. The Confederate army had commandeered all the grade-one grease for the hotter spots of the war to keep supply lines intact; and just how did this make sense, Lew wondered, this close to Atlanta? They didn’t consider
this
area hot? Well, they didn’t know old Billy T. then, did they. Maybe Sherman hadn’t done so well at Kennesaw, but a few flanking moves and before you could say Jefferson Finis Davis he’d be on Atlanta’s front porch sipping lemonade.

Lew decided to keep that last thought to himself, and found it easy; the farther south they went, the less he talked. Yes, Lew had
heard of Andersonville, and so had Emery, but grim as it sounded it didn’t mean much to Lew right now. All he knew after three years of fighting was the cold reality of war, and cold reality said he’d never see Emery Jones again. It hit him as hard as losing a man from his company.

“You once said you have two boys and two girls. Yet you do not know the name of the last. How can you know if it is boy or girl, yet not know the name? I have thought on this for a month.”

A whole month they had been together, where Lew almost died, and then he lived, and then they started their journey south on a series of miserable train trips: Kennesaw to Atlanta, Atlanta to Forsyth, Forsyth to Macon, and Macon just about to Andersonville. All that time, they talked.

They talked religion and politics, army life and women, peacetime and war, and they let each other in on the curious ways of the North and of the South. They argued and debated the reasons for the War of Northern Aggression
 
—as Emery put it
 
—a usual thing for soldiers around a campfire but far less usual if campfiring with the enemy. They talked even when Lew was delirious with fever in a Negro cabin near Atlanta, and then, Emery told him, conversation was interesting indeed.

It was an uncommon friendship, and both knew it.

“I lost some of Carrie’s letters in a battle,” Lew finally said, after regaining his balance from a particularly hard jolt. “She’d told me the baby’s name, but I couldn’t remember it. I was too ashamed to own it to her, so I took to calling him Little Mite. ‘How’s Little Mite?’ I’d say in a letter, and here’s the funny part: she’d answer, ‘Little Mite’s just fine.’ Never said his name again like I hoped, because the nickname stuck. What is more, I’ve received letters from my mother, and guess what she calls him? Little Mite. It is a hard thing, Emery, to not know the name of your own child. He’s almost a year old.”