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A Despairing and Dying World On the dismal Sunday afternoon of June , the first trainload of  Union enlisted men (including about  from the Ninth Minnesota) from Sturgis ’s failed expedition entered “Camp Sumter,” the prison at Andersonville.1 Formed in the “drenching rain” into a ragged column of fours, the weary, hungry captives, already soaked to the skin from riding in open flatcars, tramped east across sandy ground that rose toward the large stockade in the distance. “When we got within a short distance of that place,” recalled Pvt. William N. Tyler of the Ninety-Fifth Illinois, “we smelt something rather strong.” To his question as to the source of the odor, a guard answered, “You will soon find out what it is,” and, Tyler added, “You bet we did.”2 The guards halted the new arrivals near camp headquarters, an “old log cabin” set atop a hill. Across an adjacent valley the huge compound stretched southward toward them, extending down one steep, bare hillside, hurdling a little creek, and climbing the nearer, shorter slope. “God help us, what a sight!” recoiled Bjørn Aslakson of Company H. “On both sides of the stream we could see thousands of prisoners, ragged and crippled, sitting on the turf and walking around. It looked for all the world like an ant hill.” In place of barracks or any substantial accommodations bloomed a sickly garden of thousands of small “crude tents,” with a very few log huts in their midst. The “stench, noise and disorder” of the stockade, “a despairing and dying world,” represented “a death call to us.” To Corporal Medkirk of the Seventy-Second Ohio, “the mass of seething, hot, starving, diseased and dying humanity” visible inside the camp “seemed to daze us; we did not comprehend what it was and what was before us. I aver now, after the lapse of years, that if the  chapter twelve ‫ﱸﱷﱶ‬ Andersonville (I) prisoners could have realized what they would have to endure when they were once turned in there, they would have fell upon their guards and settled the question then and there whether it should be liberty or death.”3 The shout “Prisoners, Attention!” in a guttural German accent introduced the newcomers to the “Dutch Captain,” as the inmates dubbed Capt. Henry Wirz, in charge of the inner prison. “While the counting was going on,” remembered Pvt. Andrew C. McCoy of Company F, a twenty-one-yearold farmer from Rochester and Hamline University student, “Capt. Wirz and other officers and men mounted on horses, stood in our front and rear with long pistols in hand apparently ready for any emergency.” A forty-oneyear -old Swiss immigrant and onetime homeopathic doctor from Louisiana, Wirz had long served in Confederate prisons. His right arm was permanently crippled from wounds received, he claimed, in the  Battle of Seven Pines. Perched on an old, white mare and wearing his customary warm-weather garb of gray army cap, white shirt, and trousers of white cotton duck, he personally oversaw registering the new intake.4 “We were worn out and hungry,” recalled Aslakson, “but forced to stand in line for many hours.” When John Bartleson of the Eighty-First Illinois plopped down in the mud, Wirz snapped, “Stand up you damned Yankee or I will shoot you.” Actually, that was a mild reaction, for Wirz often cursed creatively and vehemently, dismounted, flourished his, in fact, broken revolver , and shoved men back into line. One Rebel guard called him “very profane, one of the profanest men I ever saw. He had a very severe temper.” A Connecticut soldier testified how Wirz was often “violent in these moments, cursing and swearing, as he always was with us,” but he added with insight that Wirz “seemed harder than he was.” To the prisoners the “Dutch Captain ” came to personify all the terrible sins of the Rebel prisons, despite the fact he truly had little power to improve their living conditions. According to Aslakson, Wirz (the “evil spirit”) was “slim in stature,” with a “rat-like face,” a “stiff bristly beard,” and a “terrible temper that bordered on insanity.” Frank Lyon described him as “stoop shouldered; complexion dark; hair black; mustache , black; eyes, black,” with a “heart as black as the fires of hades could burn it.” In stark contrast, Orderly Sgt. James Madison Page of the Sixth Michigan Cavalry, who came to like and respect Wirz, offered a much more sympathetic portrait: “Good height, perhaps ´ ,´´ slim in build...

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