Sunday, August 12, 2012

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.


4 comments:

  1. I bought this book at a thrift shop some years ago as something I thought I should read, because it was considered a classic. I finally got around to it this summer, and I knew as soon as I started it that it was going to be a wonderful book. The subject matter is ugly, but the story telling is superb. The descriptions of nature as seen by Ira Claffey are passages I would love to read aloud to someone as examples of great literature.
    The characters are so well defined. I am about halfway through it, and I know that when I finish it I will be sad to leave them behind in the books pages.

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  2. Great review. Have been to the site 4 times since my Grandmother was born 40 miles away in Parkerville, Georgia which no longer exists. The National POW museum is based there and is a must-see for any POW or descendant of one. They proudly sell copies of the book in the gift shop. It is the best Civil War novel in my opinion, better than Gone With The Wind. Scarlett's beloved Tara was the Taj Mahal by comparison to the horrific prison pen at Andersonville. The site is the most solemn and lonely of 26 Civil War sites I have visited and when you move from the prison area to the national cemetery which contains the graves of 17,000 Yankees who died in 8 months time, prepare to be brought to your knees. I was overcome by the graves and wept openly in front of others. Thank you for keeping the flame on this largely forgotten masterpiece.

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  3. If you want to download Andersonville novel in PDF format you can visit this novel.

    http://pdfbookhub.com/2016/07/03/3899/

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  4. I am from Bangalore, India and I had bought the book from a second had store without knowing it was a Puitzer price winner. It was a riveting book. The characters are so well etched that they remain fresh in my mind after almost 43 years. Especially the one whom we come to love and meets a tragic end. I am from Bangalore, India and I had bought the book from a second had store without knowing it was a Puitzer price winner. It was a riveting book. The characters are so well etched that they remain fresh in my mind after almost 43 years. Especially the one whom we come to love and meets a tragic end. The review was helpful in rekindling the memories and to share the book with my grandchildren

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