Andersonville: A Story of Rebel Military Prisons

Andersonville was hell on earth. In the summer of 1864, Confederate authorities packed 30,000 Union prisoners into a ramshackle stockade in rural Georgia, with inadequate food, no shelter, and contaminated water. John McElroy spent six months there, watching men die by the thousands, and lived to tell the tale. This is his account, not a historian's distant analysis, but the raw, furious testimony of a man who survived the worst prison camp in American history. McElroy writes with incensed clarity about the overcrowding, the starvation, the diseases that turned the stockade into a fever pit, and the Confederate guards who seemed content to let Union prisoners rot. But he also writes about camaraderie, about the desperate attempts to maintain humanity in a place designed to destroy it, about the strange luck and stubborn will that kept him alive when so many others perished. This book endures because it refuses to let a shameful chapter of American history fade into comfortable forgetting.