A week of rain. Five
hundred more prisoners, twenty being marines, captured as late as May 27th.
Since yesterday morning the number of deaths are put at 110 inside the prison.
They are being carried out on wagons six at a time, for burial. They are thrown
on as if they were logs of wood; the driver takes a stand between them and as
he moves, the limpsy bodies bump and knock about.
A wreckless tempered
man struck one of his companions with a club, inflicting a fatal wound on the
back of his head, fracturing his skull. The quarrel arose over which should
have the first right to the fire for cooking. The man is insensible. A crowd
gathered around the assailant and gave him a course of buck and gag, the same
club being used for the gag. Thirty of us go to the gate and ask permission to
go out under guard to get poles and brush to build shelter for the sick laying
on the streets and in the swamp in deplorable condition. We were refused,
harshly cursed and ordered away by Capt. Wirz. The opinion is strong that it is
the Confederate policy to destroy as many of us as possible, but in a way to
evade the censure of the world. There seems to be a studied disregard of the
rights of prisoners. It is said that Gen. Winder boasted exultingly that his
prison policy would kill as many men as Joe Johnston would in his opposition to
Sherman. The hot headed leadership of the South, the mad spirit with which they
plunged into war, the unholy purpose for which it is waged, furnish precedents
for such belief. The means is justified by the end, assuming that the end were
justifiable. At best the better instincts of humanity, or fear of the power of
civilization, seems to be all there is in our favor to save us from butchery or
utter starvation. The foulness of this physical corruption and the fiendish
conduct by which it is produced, fitly represent the animus of their cause. No
men were ever more implicitly trusted by the masses than the leaders of the
South; no people were ever more treacherously led to trouble. We can now see
how foolish and infernal human nature can be, how perverted man's sense of
right may be! We also see how men can be degraded, pressed to the very dust and
filth with worms, and still retain a sense of justice! Our hearts are void of
malice.
SOURCE: John Worrell
Northrop, Chronicles from the Diary of a War Prisoner in Andersonville
and Other Military Prisons of the South in 1864, p. 73
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