The Reeds were in Georgia last week, and though we had to detour from our original plan, we ended up spending Memorial Day in Andersonville, GA -- home to one of the largest Civil War POW camps, now a National Historic Site and home to the National Prisoner of War Museum.
During the Civil War, approximately 45,000 Union soldiers were held at some point at Andersonville prison. Due to overcrowding, poor sanitation and lack of food and supplies, 12,913 of those soldiers died (the largest number and proportion of deaths of American POWs ever).
The cemetery is sobering. This is only a fraction of the nearly 13,000 graves, many buried shoulder to shoulder.
I was struck by one story there.
A Private in the Union Army, Dorence Atwater was caught and imprisoned as a POW at Andersonville when he was 19 years old. While there, he was assigned to record the names and numbers of the dead. Fearing the federal government would never see the list after the war was over, he secretly wrote his own copy of the list, and when the war was over and the camp closed, snuck it out. He was eventually able to join with Clara Barton (the founder of the American Red Cross) and return with her to Andersonville to properly mark the graves of the dead. Because of his list, fewer than 600 of the nearly 13,000 graves are marked as 'Unknown Soldier'.
Nothing he did changed the course of or conditions at Andersonville. But, at 19 years old he recognized an injustice within his small sphere of influence and did something remakable -- make sure that fallen soldiers had a name and that thousands of families knew where their sons were buried.
2 comments:
i'm fairly sure you & sarah vowell would get along famously if you ever met
That sounds like a good Reed family vacation. While you were there I was touring a fort on Georges Island in the Boston Harbor that was once a prison for confederate soldiers. I thought of you many times on our trip and I'm glad to know our family vacations were parallel!
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