Andersonville Diary: Escape, and List of the Dead, with Name, Co., Regiment, Date of Death and No. of Grave in Cemetery

In 1863, twenty-year-old Union soldier John Ransom was captured in Tennessee and began a nineteen-month nightmare through the Confederacy's most brutal prison camps. He endured the flooding mud of Belle Isle before arriving at Andersonville, the infamous stockade where over thirteen thousand Union soldiers would die. This is his diary: raw, urgent, written in pencil stub on scraps of paper, documenting the daily reality of starvation, disease, and human degradation with the desperate clarity of a man who may not survive to tell his story. But Ransom gave future generations something beyond personal testimony. He compiled a register of the dead - 450 names with regiment, company, date of death, and grave number. It transforms anonymous suffering back into individual lives. The diary reads with unflinching honesty about the smell of death that became constant, the comrades who kept each other alive through sheer will, and the small dignities prisoners preserved when everything else was stripped away. This is history from inside the stockade, a document that makes the statistics bleed.