Trailing Spouse's Trail Ends at Andersonville

Cousin Bob is a Civil War History Expert. He spends much of his free time doing historic talks and re-enactments of the Civil War. So it was a natural for us to drive a couple of hours up Route 19 to make a pilgrimage to Andersonville.

Visiting Andersonville reminds me of our trips to Dachau and Nordhausen in Germany. Near the end of the Civil War - the Confederates kept 42,000 Union prisoners inside a stockade fence here. There were no sanitary facilities - the water was infested with bacteria - and there was no protections from the elements. 12,000 rotted away from lack of food and disease. When the prisoners died - they were simply dumped into trenches like cord wood and covered over with dirt.

Prisoners arrived at the train station in town in freight cars. They were paraded about a quarter mile to a gate in the stockade. When they entered through two sets of double doors - they were greeted by prisoners that looked like walking skeletons. Any personal effects they had were stolen by the mob.

Dante wrote, "All hope abandon ye who enter here" back in the 1300s in a poem about entering hell. There could not be a more fitting epitaph to be written above those gates.

Today - Camp Sumpter is a serene and beautiful place. A peaceful spring and stream run where it was once a swamp of human waste. If one sits quietly on the rolling meadow - one can hear the cries of horror from the prisoners and catch a whiff of the stench that rose from this hell. Imagine taking a crowd of 50,000 people - like the crowd from a FSU football game - and squeezing them into a pasture the size of 4 football fields - not just for a 4 hour football game - but for over a year. Instead of having a hot dog and beer - imagine living on a couple of spoonfuls of rice a day - and drinking water from the stream that you used as a bathroom. This was Andersonville.

A few stockades have been restored to show where the locals would climb to a balcony dressed in their "Sunday best" to get a chance to gaze into this chasm of torment. One does not have to venture far to see what war does to human beings. Brother fought brother to the death. We have not learned a thing from Andersonville.