For 14 months late in the Civil War, Andersonville was probably the worst place on earth, a horror show from beginning to end.
Alpheus Pike of Bloomington spent more than three months at this Confederate prison camp in southwest Georgia. Late in life, he authored a lengthy sketch of his Civil War experiences. The typed version runs nearly 60 single-spaced pages, the bulk of which is devoted to Andersonville.
Almost 13,000 men died at Camp Sumter (better known as Andersonville), a figure representing about 40 percent of all Union deaths in Confederate camps. With a high of 32,000 prisoners in August 1864, it had become, population-wise, the Confederacy's fifth largest city, albeit one with no sanitation, clean water or permanent structures save makeshift "tents."
Pike enlisted in the Thirty-Ninth Illinois Infantry Regiment at the age of 15, and was captured in mid-May 1864 at the Battle of Drury's Bluff, Va. He arrived at Andersonville on June 1, 1864 with nothing except the ragged clothes on his back-no blanket, no haversack, no overcoat. Once inside, prisoners were left to their own devices, and life was nasty, brutish and short.
People are also reading…
To Pike's surprise, the camp's thousands included his brother Ivory of the Sixteenth Illinois Cavalry, who had been captured five months earlier. "I'm damned glad to see you, but damned sorry to see you here," were Ivory's first words. It was like old home week, because Alpheus also met Jasper M. Stine, a boyhood friend from Bloomington.
Hunger was a cruel fact of camp life. Normal rations consisted of rough cornbread, peas intended as feedstock and dried or salted bacon. "Tainted or rotten" hams were also distributed to prisoners. "I have seen these hams so far decayed that the rind would almost slip off itself, but when taken off there was exposed underneath one solid mass of cooked maggots," recalled Pike.
The lack of water was another nightmarish aspect of Andersonville. "How we longed for pure cold water those hot summer days, no tongue can tell," Pike wrote. A despicably foul creek running through the camp served as drinking water, which meant dysentery (the "destroying angel") and death from diarrheic dehydration. "It was sad to see those poor emaciated fellows going to their death and still calling for a drink," Pike wrote, "and all we had to offer was the miserable water, which was like adding fuel to the fire."
A rare bit of good fortune arrived when, during a rainstorm, a spring broke on a camp hillside. "Sure if God ever did anything in these modern days it was done then," he added.
Scurvy, caused by a lack of vitamin C, or ascorbic acid, was another major camp killer. Symptoms included bleeding gums, loss of teeth and large purple-black bruises under the skin. "Oft times the feet would swell up and burst and rot off," related Pike, who went on to say that John James of Minonk died in this manner.
He also detailed the thuggery of some prisoners who formed gangs to prey on their weaker fellows. Andersonville had more than its share of "thieving and robbery," Pike said. Some of these "raiders" had their own gang nicknames, such as "40 Thieves" and "Mosby's Gorillas" (or Guerillas).
In response to these cruel depredations and murders, law-and-order "regulators" took matters into their own hands and hung some of the worst offenders. When the rope snapped for one of Mosby's Gorillas, he was strung up a second time. "The begging and imploring offered up by this man I shall never forget to my dying day," Pike wrote. "But the answer was as before, 'You killed our comrades and now it is our turn.'"
Pike spent his 18th birthday, August 14, 1864, in Andersonville. Less than a month later, with the threat of Union forces moving on the prison, the Pike brothers and thousands of others were relocated to a new camp in Savannah, Ga.
In November 1864, Alpheus and Ivory Pike gained their freedom as part of a prisoner exchange.
Alpheus Pike returned to Bloomington and finished school before finding employment as a conductor for the Chicago & Alton Railroad. He spent his last 15 years in the confectionary trade in Chicago, dying on Thanksgiving Day 1892. Buried at Evergreen Memorial Cemetery in Bloomington, Pike will be featured in the McLean County Museum of History's annual Discovery Walk this fall.
