Diary of Corporal John Worrell Northrop: Monday, June 14, 1864

Northeast storm badly affects weak men. I know of twenty who since yesterday have sunk to utter helplessness; others have died within a few hours. Their clothes are besmeared with wet sand and soaked with water. The sand where we lay is wet as dough. Our rations are so insufficient that we are continually hungry. Got boiled rice again at night, totally unfit to eat. Several bushels are poured into large kettles, greasy and nasty, and cooked with less care than if it were hog feed. I believe hogs would loathe it. If it is merely economy to feed us so, it is crowding them down closely to the provision line. Rumors of the renomination of Lincoln and the nomination of Fremont on a side line. It is a Rebel lie or a Yankee blunder, much talked about. If it is so, the action of the Fremont wing is disapproved. I never strongly believed in Fremont, but the cause he essayed to represent, he will not see sacrificed for per

Northeast storm. Badly affects weak ultra anti-slavery men add themselves to the pro-slavery party North, and defeat the policy of the government? They cannot succeed; they can only defeat. The feeling here is for Lincoln. Twelve men escape; it is reported six guards are gone. Tunnels are found and being filled. Rice and meal rations.

SOURCE: John Worrell Northrop, Chronicles from the Diary of a War Prisoner in Andersonville and Other Military Prisons of the South in 1864, p. 74-5