Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor, 1955,
Won
Pulitzer Prize in 1956
Andersonville is a book I remember my father, Herbert Isakson,
reading in the 1950’s, soon after it was published. I have been interested in it ever since I saw
Dad reading the book but it has taken me a while
to get around to it. I also greatly appreciate my father's example of one who read great literature. He passed on to me a love of reading and my life has been wonderfully enriched because of reading.
Andersonville is a historical novel of
the Confederate prisoner of war camp in Anderson, Georgia. Kantor had studied the Civil War and
Andersonville for 25 years prior to writing the novel. He states in his five-page bibliography
that…” Andersonville is a work of
fiction, but is presented as an accurate history of the Andersonville
prison…” I am very impressed that Kantor
would devote the time and effort to learn what happened in Andersonville and
then tell the story in a compelling, meaningful way.
The story of Andersonville prison is told from
the perspective of many individuals and
families, probably fictional, who were involved as neighbors to the prison,
prison adminstrators, guards, and physicians, and many of the Union
prisoners. This approach made the story
of Andersonville come alive as Kantor created characters who represented what
must have been the experiences of the people most affected by the prison. There are many great books written about the
Civil War including Pulitzer Prize winner The
Killer Angels by Michael Shaara.
Most books that I am aware of describe the battles and tell moving
stories about horrible cost in human lives of the War Between the States. However, Kantor chose to tell the story of
the infamous Confederate prison in Andersonville. At first I thought this would be a less
interesting story than those told about the battles. I was wrong in this assumption. Andersonville
tells of the tragedy that occurred after Union soldiers had been captured and
sent to prison in Andersonville. It may
be that the North had prisons just as bad as Andersonville but I have not heard
of those prisons. What we do have is a
carefully researched novel about conditions in Andersonville.
Andersonville prison was built
later in the war, sometime after the battle of Gettysburg. It was built in the little town of
Andersonville, close to a rail line. The
owner of the nearby plantation, Ira Claffey, is a central character in the
novel and we see the prison from beginning to end through his eyes. Ira is there to see a beautiful pine forest
with a stream of fresh water running through it turned into a crude stockade
surrounding about 20 acres. He watches
the trees being cut down by slave laborers who then placed the trees on end in
a trench to form a 20 foot high wall. The first prisoners arrived in February 1864 .
Kantor does not spare the reader the horrors
that were documented in Andersonville. The
prison was designed to hold about 10,000 prisoners but by the end of the war,
it held over 30,000 men in absolutely terrible conditions. After the walls of the stockade had been put
in place, nothing else was provided for the prisoners. There were no shelters for the men except the
tents they could make out of their coats or scraps of canvas. Food given the men was minimal rations of
cornbread. No vegetables or meat were
provided. Water was not provided except
for the little stream that ran through the stockade but it quickly became
horribly polluted. No toilets were
provided. Nearly all of the prisoners
suffered from dysentery and scurvy.
Their teeth fell out when they tried to eat their hard cornbread after
the scurvy became advanced. If they got
scratched, they often got gangrene infection and had maggots crawling through
their rotting flesh. The neighbors
around the prison suffered from the stench of the open sewer and dead bodies.
Kantor also does a fine job of portraying
humanity at its best and its worst in Andersonville. In one very touching section of the book, Ira
Claffey organizes some of his neighbors to share their excess garden produce
with the prisoners. They haul wagon
loads of vegetables to the stockade only to be turned back by order of the
commander of Confederate prisons, General John Winder. Winder castigated the townspeople for not
bringing the vegetables for the Confederate prison guards and questioned their
loyalty to the Southern cause due to their compassion for the Yankee prisoners. This incident was included, in my opinion, to
communicate that some in South had compassion for the prisoners while there
were others who were determined to see the Yankees suffer and make their lives
unbearable. Another story symbolic of
the humanity and the healing that would need to follow the war involved a young
former Confederate soldier who lived nearby the prison. He had lost one foot in battle and now
hobbled around with a crude crutch, embittered by his loss. While out hunting one day he came across an
escaped Northern prisoner who was trying to steal the hawk the Reb had just shot. The Yankee had lost one of his
arms in the battle when he was captured.
To stay alive, he had escaped from Andersonville but had no means of
finding shelter or food. Rather than
turn in the escaped Yankee for a reward, the Reb helped him find a place to
hide and brought him food. As the two
became friends, it came out that the Yankee had worked in a shop where
artificial limbs were crafted. I will
let you find out what happens between these two young casualties of the war. I believe Kantor wanted to convey the spirit
of healing and cooperation that was needed between North and South after the Civil
War.
The impression I came away with
after reading Andersonville is that
there were no real winners in the American Civil War. Freeing the slaves and preserving the United
States were causes that made the War worth fighting but the cost was enormous
in terms of lives lost and the human suffering that resulted from the
conflict. Andersonville helped me better understand the degree of suffering
inflicted on captured Northern soldiers. Kantor conveyed that there were many among the Andersonville prison administration and guards who wanted to punish the Yankees and were not unhappy to see them die.
Toward the end of the War, when Andersonville came into being, the South
was desperate for resources, both human and material. Maybe they could not provide shelter, water and food
for the prisoners but I believe conditions were worse in Andersonville than
they had to be and Kantor seems to be making that point. I am glad that I read Andersonville and I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about
this unfortunate chapter of Civil War history and learn about the people who were
affected so greatly by it.
