Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor



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.