MOVE TO PRISON
ANNEX—HOW WE CELEBRATE.
The addition to the stockade is finished. An aperture, ten feet wide,
is left in the old wall at the north of the old ground. Thirteen thousand are
ordered to move through (my detachment is one designated) in three hours. The
weather is very hot and that mass of men moving without order over ground
already crowded with those who are to remain, is horribly fatiguing. This time
is given us to get on the ground or no rations will be given these detachments;
so we strove at the walls like a crowded flock of sheep escaping through a hole
in a fence, being obliged to jump a trench five feet deep, three wide with a
bank of dirt on the opposite side. Never did men work more earnestly for a
prize than we for a little course Indian meal to appease our terrible hunger.
But it smelt so good, the green stuff that had been growing, that we felt
rejoiced and thrilled at the sight of Nature's face yet undefiled, but soon to
be desecrated by the foulness of disease and decay. A score of men fell into
the trench in clambering through the stockade, and had to be helped. Fragments
of trees lay about over which men strove to obtain fuel and shelter. The
average number of deaths per day is estimated at 70.
SOURCE: John Worrell Northrop, Chronicles from the Diary of a
War Prisoner in Andersonville and Other Military Prisons of the South in 1864,
pp. 82-3
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