Life in Southern Prisons

This is not history from the outside looking in. This is a man writing in his diary, by candlelight, inside the stockade at Andersonville, Georgia, where 13,000 Union prisoners would die in fourteen months. Charles Smedley, a corporal in the 90th Pennsylvania Volunteers, recorded what he saw: the raw noon heat, the putrid creek that was their only water, the bodies stacked like firewood at dawn. He writes of the men around him losing their minds, their flesh, their dignity. He writes of his own hunger so acute it becomes a kind of madness. This memoir, based on Smedley's wartime diary, stands as one of the most visceral first-person accounts of Confederate imprisonment to survive the Civil War. It covers his capture at the Wilderness, the brutal march afterward, and the months of survival that followed. Smedley was not a writer by trade; he was a man trying to live through something unbearable and document it before he forgot or died. What emerges is not polished literature but something more valuable: the unvarnished truth of a soldier who saw the inside of the war's worst prison and lived to tell about it.