Submitted by guest author, Max R. Terman.

An excerpt from Chapter 16 of “Hiram’s Honor: Reliving Private Terman’s Civil War” by Max R. Terman.     Dr. Terman’s ancestor (Private Hiram Terman, Company F, 82nd Ohio Infantry) was captured at Gettysburg July 1, 1863, survived 17 months as a prisoner at Belle Island in Richmond and Andersonville and miraculously made it home to Mansfield, Ohio in January 1865.   Writing as if he were his ancestor, Max Terman reveals the conditions at Andersonville by telling of a fellow soldier’s death in March 1864, just the beginning of greater horrors to come.

Kevin Frye, an Andersonville historian and Dr. Max R. Terman, author of Hiram's Honor, in front of the Ohio monument at Andersonville National Historic Site, Andersonville, Georgia where 1055 Ohio soldiers died. Nearly 45,000 Union soldiers stepped into the darkness of Andersonville in the Civil War and approximately 12,913 perished there.

As the numbers rose, we began to see men die in considerable numbers just as at Belle Island. The dead were hauled out to near the South gate and laid in a row. From here the bodies were carried by friends of the deceased to a “dead house” to be taken to a nearby graveyard and buried by slaves and burial teams of prisoners. One day in March, James Barker of our Buckeye Manor came back from being on a burial detail. He had broken out in a cold sweat and was vomiting. Through his wrenching, he was able to talk.

“Boys, I never saw such sights as I saw today, even at Belle. Some of those dead men were actually rotten they had been left so long. The skin came off as you tried to move them. Lord knows what foul contagions I got from being out there. If you can get out of it, don’t ever get on a burial detachment. The cabin bed, double rations, and even the whiskey they give you are not worth it.”

East view of the prison at Camp Sumpter, Andersonville, Georgia taken from the stockade, August 17, 1864 (Ohio Historical Society Collections)

With a groan, he crawled to his bed of now dry and crackly pine needles and tried to sleep despite constant shivering, diarrhea, and dry heaves. We tried to get James down to the sinks at the east end of the stockade stream when he had an attack but found that he could not make it. Eventually we dug a hole by the hut for his use.

This practice was disdained by the neighboring messes because it fouled the grounds. “Can’t he hold it till the sinks?” asked a German soldier of the 26th Wisconsin.

“Not hardly Fritz! Let’s see how you do when you get the screamers.”
His thirst became severe over the next days. The pure rainwater we had collected in our clay pots was soon exhausted and we went to the Stockade stream for more. The stream was by now contaminated by the growing number of prisoners and unsanitary conditions but was the only water we had to give him. It only hastened his demise.

All of our attempts at finding a cure were to no avail. Clay tablets, pine bark, sassafras, and other concoctions failed. We thought about taking him to the hospital tent on the far south end of the stockade but he would not go. We had all heard how the hospital was the worst place to go, everyone taken there seemed to wind up dead.

Within a week, we carried James Barker’s body to the south gate where he himself awaited burial while others assumed his prior duties. As Seth and I stood over his body guarding it from others who wanted to take it out, our sadness almost overwhelmed us. This was the first death experienced by the Buckeye Manor. We had all survived the severe test of the winter at Belle Island, had built a good shelter here at Andersonville, had been able to get vegetables, and thought ourselves as rather well off compared to many others. The stiffened body and yellow, pallid face of James destroyed any thoughts of invincibility and death became a real possibility for all of us.

National colors of the Ex-Prisoners of War. Text on flag reads: Andersonville, Libby, Belle Isle, Florence, Salisbury, Danville, Millen, Charleston, Macon, Columbia, Castle Thunder, Savannah, Cattaw[text missing , Black Shear, Tyler, Pemberton. (Ohio Historical Society Collections)