Andersonville by William Marvel

Author:William Marvel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

6 Each in His Narrow Cell Forever Laid

John Winder’s own inspector had recommended removing at least fifteen thousand prisoners from the stockade even as Daniel Chandler started through the gate. As the new commander of all prisons in Georgia and Alabama, Winder had already been authorized to distribute his captives anywhere he could, but the interior of those states offered no prefabricated security for such numbers of Yankees. A new stockade would have to go up somewhere, and Winder had been casting about for a site since the beginning of July. His early choices had not pleased the adjutant general, who preferred expanding the prison at Cahaba or building a new one in southern Alabama, so Winder had suggested isolated inland locations between Wilmington and Charlotte, North Carolina, between Charleston and Florence, South Carolina, or between Augusta and Millen, Georgia. At last Winder’s chief aide, his son Sid, found a spot five miles north of Millen on the Augusta & Savannah Railroad. General Winder notified Samuel Cooper, who approved the location and sought authorization for the impressment of labor and materials if it proved necessary. The repulse of Stoneman’s and McCook’s raids seemed to dull the urgency of the situation, at least for Richmond officials, and General Cooper waited four days before passing along the secretary of war’s authorization.1

It was during those four days that the stockade washed down, and nightmares of lean, hungry Yankees kept Georgians awake for miles around as the garrison lay out in the rain for two days and nights. One of those citizens whose dreams were disturbed, a Macon photographer, thought the prison offered a worthy subject for his camera; he may have wished to record it before Winder moved the mass of inmates away, and, once the danger had ebbed, he—and perhaps one assistant—loaded his equipment for the sixty-mile journey to Camp Sumter.2

Like General Winder, Andrew Jackson Riddle hailed from Maryland. An early daguerreotypist, he had come to Georgia a decade before to photograph the gentry. In the first months of the war he opened a gallery in Richmond, but somehow he secured a position as a semiofficial military cameraman. That was perhaps his means of avoiding conscription, for he was not yet forty, but it must have been a foolproof exemption if he dared to enter a post garrisoned mostly by men ten years his senior: old men forced into the Reserves might just call the enrolling officers’ attention to a conspicuously healthy and younger civilian.3

Riddle probably arrived at Anderson Station by Tuesday morning, August 16. Doubtless he had written ahead for permission before transporting all his cumbersome equipment so far. General Winder therefore expected him, and he buttoned on a fresh collar to sit for a private portrait, wearing an old uniform coat in the stifling August heat. Captain Wirz also appears to have crawled out of his sickbed for a picture, but his pained expression betrayed his condition. The ride to the village from his quarters proved too strenuous for the

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