Andersonville Revisited

No amount of historical markers can truly paint the picture of the horror that took place at Camp Sumter near Andersonville, Georgia. The Andersonville National Historic Site that I was visiting this day as part of a national tour around the country following the events of September 11, 2001 preserves an oxymoronic institution, a concentration camp in the United States of America. This is one of the largest and oldest in the country, operating from February of 1864 through to the end of the war in April of the following year. Both sides in the War Between The States were guilty of inhumane conditions as the war dragged on, certainly by the latter stages of the contest. Particularly in the south food and weapons for the front lines were hard to come by leaving even less for the care of POWs at places like Andersonville.

In a war no one expected to last all that long prison camps seemed initially to be an afterthought. Both sides figured they would fight a few skirmishes then life would get back to what each considered normal with everyone home in time for dinner. Didn't happen that way. And POW camps no one had a master plan for sprang up and, despite the best of intentions, broke down rapidly and appallingly. Early exchanges of prisoners fell apart over levels of authority and particularly over the status of Black soldiers, former slaves, that were captured in the south. It is not hard to imagine what the Confederacy wanted which in no way matched the Union desire to treat White and Black with no distinction. "Negros belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange," was General Lee's reply.

As bad as the outside forces were there was a unique troop at the camp known as the Andersonville Raiders. These were fellow inmates who bullied and killed other prisoners for the sake of food, tradable goods and other comforts before they were caught by an opposing group called "the Regulators" who sought justice such as it was available. Six of the Raiders were hanged for their crimes in a mock court of their peers while their captors looked on. Politics on both sides through intractable demands and poverty throughout the Confederacy combined to make conditions worse by the day and fueled a growing resentment up North towards the people of Dixie.

In a camp built for 10,000 there were three times that many enlisted men here after hardly eight months of operations. The cemetery to the north of the camp holds the remains of its victims, nearly 13,000 people, over 900 of those unknown. The six Raiders are here, too, though buried some distance away from the honorable dead. Of particular note to me are the markers of "USCT" troops buried here. "USCT" stands for United States Colored Trooper, a man on one side, returned property on the other. How they must have been treated by the guards.

Andersonville is yet another part of the Civil War that most in this country simply prefer to avoid discussing. The battlefields draw millions as do the museums but few travel to a place the combatants themselves located well off the beaten path even then. The history of the Civil War prison camp includes over 150 such camps, some probably worse than Andersonville, some with familiar names like Belle Isle in Richmond or Rock Island, Illinois, even Ft. McHenry in Baltimore, where Francis Scott Key wrote the Star Spangled Banner! Ft. Delaware, a union camp outside of Wilmington and Elmira, New York are both said to have rivaled Andersonville in nearly every respect except scale. Elmira charged 15-cent admission just to watch the prisoners mill around.

I joined the line of cars on I-75 north to Atlanta. Some of my fellow motorists might have been interested in the events that occurred less than 20 miles off the highway. Others roared past in a hurry no doubt to no place really that important. If asked they surely would have said "Such things simply could not have happened here."

Gotta go.

An American Concentration Camp

This man did not survive a concentration camp in Europe during World War 2. Andersonville is not even the first place that comes to mind when asked to name a concentration camp. The name alone is too Anglicized, most think, and certainly such a place could not have existed in the United States of America. Until the reality that it did exist in the U.S. sinks in the vast majority will insist on more well known places such as Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, Treblinka and Sobibor. During the Second World War those camps and dozens of others like them were used to eliminate or at least imprison political opponents, ethnic minorities, gays and the Jewish people. Soldiers were killed or left to die on the battlefields of Europe or in death marches across Southeast Asia. In 19th Century America slaves died in the fields and on the run while soldiers died in battle or in places like Andersonville.

Andersonville did not have gas chambers but it was a "konzentrationslager" in just about every sense of the word and, along with its sister camps in both the North and the South during the Civil War, it operated on American shores. "Camp Sumter" as it was officially known was built east of Andersonville in February of 1864 and would receive roughly 45,000 Union prisoners. In 13 months of operation the heat, humidity, starvation, parasites and lack of sanitation and poor treatment at the hands of the guards and each other contributed to outbreaks of scurvy, exposure, dysentery, diarrhea and other diseases led to the deaths of nearly 13,000 of those soldiers.

The entire camp is hidden behind tall trees as I drive up through the main entrance off of Pecan Lane and Georgia Highway #49. A massive field is dotted with memorials and other markers from the different regiments of the various states whose men were imprisoned here. Tall ones, short ones, squat ones and simple ones lay strewn around the grounds almost haphazardly, representing Michigan, Massachusetts and Rhode Island to name a few.

The grounds within Prison Site Road that rings what was "Camp Sumter" near Andersonville, Georgia appear well cared for and neatly trimmed which of course is what entices tourist from all over the world to visit the place. At the same time it does little to evoke the true squalor and conditions of the place when it was in operation. Part of the 15-foot high wooden stockade fence has been restored as have a few of the prison tents half-buried in the ground for temperature control along with some office buildings from the time. The stream that served as both water supply and latrine babbles bucolically downhill towards the southeast, fresh clear water gurgling and bubbling through its roughly ten foot wide pathway. There is no stench of feces, urine and decay, no swarm of blue flies that rose in to the air like a waving curtain of misery. There wasn't even much in the way of heat in the air given that this was early December when I rode through.

Rest assured, however, the camp sits in what remains rural Georgia cotton country so humidity is never far away.

Gotta go.

Passing Through Plains

Plains, Georgia just happened to be near my real destination as I drove north in to Georgia from Central Florida. I'd just witnessed a shuttle launch for the first and probably only time of my life and, imbued with a new found spirit following the recent events of September 11th, was back on my journey of discovery, finding my future through the history of this great nation called America. I never bothered to clock the miles I'd driven since leaving Chicago and swinging through the upper Rockies and Texas before stopping last in Florida. That might have been an interesting number to track but I just wanted to get away with no rules or requirements. After Mt. Rushmore and the plains of Texas I was now zeroing in on the headquarters of the Peanut Campaign.

Jimmy Carter came literally out of nowhere from this small farming town in Southwestern Georgia. He demonstrated an early temerity to defy the Washington establishment by running his campaign from a railway station that ran through the town known previously for its cotton and peanut farms. After his one arguably disastrous administration he retreated to the area with his entourage including Rosalynn, arguably the most gracious First Lady in contemporary history, his mother Miss Lillian and good ol' boy brother Billy. He and Rosalynn still call the area home where he teaches Sunday School at a local church whenever he's not rescuing hapless Americans from Korea in his capacity as elder statesman and Most Congenial ex-President of the United States.

It was unnerving to roll through acres of cotton still on the stalk waiting to be picked. I didn't want to think about who actually did this backbreaking and historically cruel and menial labor today. I didn't see any peanuts and wasn't looking for any, either. Carter's compound off of Church Street is well protected by trees and fencing, leaving very little of the main house to see from the road and, after a stop at the town cemetery to see Miss Lillian and Billy, pretty felt the tour of Plains was wrapped up. I remember as a teenage in 1977 that something about Mr. Carter didn't settle with me, the first stirrings of political activism. I just didn't like the guy and didn't really know why. After four years in the White House I was able to more clearly articulate why my first gut instincts were right. Time to leave.

On the same side of I-75 running north between Tampa and Atlanta, on the west side about 20-25 miles off the interstate and just north of Americus, the next biggest town to Plains is Andersonville. What? Where?

As a child of the military fortunate enough to live overseas I was well acquainted with the concentration camp history of the second world war. It wasn't until later that I discovered the concentration camp went back in American history to the Civil War and on both sides. Of these camps Andersonville has been acknowledged as the absolute worst of them all. No wonder few people hear of it today or stop to visit at least while on the way to somewhere else. Since we don't openly discuss the Civil War in polite conversation today it remains all too easy to dismiss, deny and diminish such atrocities on our own shores.

It is better not to talk about it people say. Which is exactly why I decided to come and see for myself.

Gotta go.

A Man and His Mountain

April 4th was a Thursday that year in what is arguably the single most violent year in the domestic history of the United States after the Civil War. My mother watched the television news in stunned silence that evening, refusing to move or to receive friends in the house. Conventioneers screamed in horror as word was announced towards the close of the agenda. As if suffering from a massive cold of conscience the entire nation held its breath as a fever of riots broke out in more than a hundred cities across the land.

I wasn't even five years old at the time, as oblivious to the events of the outside world as any small child should be while simultaneously enjoying the early fruits of those very same struggles. My family had comfortable housing, there was always food on the table, my sisters and I fought and played with equal fervor and our friends in the neighborhood shared popsicles, frogs and the latest gossip from Romper Room as if nothing else mattered. The world I grew up in was made possible in large measure by the man who died that afternoon and I didn't know his name and surely wasn't too concerned about his passing.

On a road trip through the South that included parts of Florida and rural Georgia I stopped in Atlanta to visit a few days with a cousin of mine new to the area. While she made her home in Little Five Points to the east the major item on the agenda was the neighborhood of "Sweet Auburn" just across the interstate from the State Capitol Building and site of the Martin Luther King Center for Non-Violent Social Change, now simply called "The King Center." My quest was to finally pay homage to the living man who didn't know my name any more than I knew his that dark day in 1968 but who literally gave his life for me just the same.

The complex is situated between the home where Dr. King was born to the east and the original Ebenezer Baptist Church where he and his father both preached. This church would see dual tragedy for the King family as the site of Dr. King's funeral as well as the assassination of his mother while seated at the organ. Across the road and situated well back behind landscaped grounds and artwork is the new and larger facility which also houses a comprehensive Civil Rights Movement exhibit that includes artifacts, photographs, writings and clothing worn by Dr. King during the period.

A bookshop at the complex offered music, books speeches and video footage from the movement but I found it at the time to be somewhat light on its offerings. Offices on both ends complete the complex but clearly the centerpiece is the memorial pool and fountain complex fronting the Freedom Walkway colonnade. In the center of the pool is the small round island that now houses the remains of Mrs. Coretta Scott and Dr. King but for me then was only him. In a moment of sheer beauty as to not be able to look directly upon it and grief overwhelming such as not to look away I gazed upon the white stone crypt at the words uttered by the man in life that so strongly yet peacefully beatify us all in death.

Behind those words lay the man himself. Where an Honor Guard watches over the Unknown Soldier only the shallow water of the pool surrounds the resting place of this great American. A few signs point out the obvious request for respect but the air is so charged with the power of King's vision and presence that not even the most anti-social and unrepentant of haters would dare to wade across to disturb him.

Like so many others around me, I stood at the edge of the pool and bowed my head in prayerful thanks before backing away to the low wall at the edge of the area and.....sat. Personal reflection, atonement, grief, disbelief, joy and contentment washed over me as one might experience at an intense funeral or long-awaited reunion. It was not possible or safe to walk lest I collapse in stride for not allowing every feeling to completely consume and wash over me in its own good time.

Where I have only traveled Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. has been to the mountaintop. I am truly a better man for it.

Gotta go.