Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor

First published: 1955

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Historical realism and war fiction

Time of plot: October, 1863, to April, 1865

Locale: Camp Sumter, Georgia

Principal characters

• Ira Claffey, a Georgia plantation owner
• Lucy Claffey, his daughter
• Veronica Claffey, his wife
• Harry Elkins, a Confederate army doctor
• Henry Wirz, the Swiss-born commandant of the prison camp
• Nathan Dreyfoos, a Union army prisoner of war
• Coral Tebbs, a Confederate army veteran

The Story:

In mid-autumn, 1863, Confederate army surveyors arrive near the southern Georgia plantation of Ira Claffey to begin construction of a military prison camp. Claffey is told that the facility, planned to encompass about twenty-seven acres, will house ten thousand prisoners of war. There will be no barracks, only an open enclosure bound by a series of fences.

Amid the chaos of the closing months of the American Civil War, the camp swells to close to fifty thousand prisoners. Quickly, as cattle cars of captured Union army soldiers keep arriving, conditions in the camp degenerate: Disease, starvation, insect infestations, impure water from a stream that flowed through the camp, and a lack of adequate medical care contribute to an appalling death rate. The camp is run by Confederate captain Henry Wirz, a cold-blooded bureaucrat plagued by his own demons (most notably a painful wounded hand) who feels hopelessly alone (he is Swiss-born, and his heavy accent underscores his isolation). Overwhelmed by the responsibilities of running the sprawling camp, Wirz fears most the possibility of a camp uprising, as its population steadily grows. Indeed, his fears are justified as a contingent of desperate prisoners valiantly attempts to tunnel out of the camp.

New prisoners arrive every week, including Eben Dolliver, an Iowa farmboy and bird lover who is driven to killing a swallow by twisting its neck and then eating it raw, and Father Peter Whalen, who ministers to the scores of dying and tries to maintain a sense of God’s presence. Other prisoners include Tom Gusset, an Ohio harness maker who, at the age of fifty-eight, is among the oldest prisoners and who manages to stay physically sound until he gradually loses his mind, overwhelmed by the misery in the camp. He hallucinates that he is back home with his family, holding animated conversations with his children and his neighbors; he is carted off to die in the camp hospital. Another prisoner is Nazareth Stricker, a Pennsylvania soldier who lost a hand at the Battle of Gettysburg. He escapes from the camp one day only to confront Coral Tebbs, a Confederate veteran who had lost a leg at the same battle.

Plantation owner Claffey observes from a distance the camp’s steadily deteriorating conditions. He is a noble, generous, long-suffering, and learned person given to philosophical contemplations on humanity and history. He has already lost two sons in the war, but his love of the Confederacy does not blind him to its failings. He recognizes the horrors of the camp built on his land—underscored by the nauseating stench that comes to hang about the plantation. He lovingly cares for his wife, Veronica, who is slowly losing her mind over the death of their sons. Their beautiful daughter, Lucy, who herself had lost her fiancé in the war, is falling in love with Dr. Harry Elkins, a distant cousin who had accepted the thankless position as physician for the camp. Elkins keeps Claffey informed of conditions at the camp, leading Claffey to petition the Confederate command to help ameliorate the conditions. However, his efforts prove futile.

As the months grind away and conditions grow worse, a sharp conflict arises among the prisoners. A group of hardcore thugs, who had for the most part enlisted in the Union army to avoid prison, start to terrorize the other prisoners. Calling themselves the Raiders, they steal what little the captured soldiers had brought to the camp and use intimidation and violence to create a formidable power structure within the prison. The Raiders are challenged by a group of idealistic prisoners, led by the intellectual and worldly Nathan Dreyfoos. The idealists refuse to allow the hellish conditions in the camp to destroy their humanity and their sense of right and wrong. They round up the Raiders and hang them, but not before they hold a trial that (ironically) works to preserve the highest ideals of civilization and justice. Conditions continue to deteriorate. As food stocks run out, prisoners are driven to eating their own feces to survive. Water runs out. Diseases, including cholera, dropsy, scurvy, dysentery, and malaria, are rampant. Union soldiers finally arrive to liberate the camp just weeks before the Confederate surrender at Appomattox; the Union soldiers find the grimmest of conditions at the camp.

In the days following the end of the war, and after news of U.S. president Abraham Lincoln’s assassination reaches the South, Claffey walks amid the grounds of the abandoned stockade. He contemplates the implications of the South’s lost crusade. His daughter, now married to Elkins, is certain she is pregnant—Claffey senses her joy and hopes that she is indeed pregnant. Still, he struggles to find philosophical meaning in the abomination of the camp. He acknowledges the moral evil of slavery, although he describes the appalling conditions in Northern factories as de facto economic slavery.

Finally, Claffey gets beyond the war and its issues—it is the thousands of dead from Andersonville who now weigh on his conscience. He hopes that the story of their lives and their deaths will not be lost to history. He decides, as he heads back to his own ruined plantation, that the only hope rests in the country rising from the ashes of the war and, by avoiding incendiary extremism, rededicating itself to the work of rebuilding the union. As he turns from the ruins of the camp, birds soar toward the rising Sun.

Bibliography

Cullen, Tim. The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1995. A landmark examination of the literature of the American Civil War. Includes a discussion of Andersonville, specifically of the relationship between fiction and history and how Kantor uses stereotypes of Civil War fiction.

Kantor, Tim. My Father’s Voice: MacKinlay Kantor Long Remembered. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988. A highly readable Kantor biography that includes an account of his background as a war correspondent, his career-long love of the history of the Civil War, and the effect of his experience at Buchenwald on the evolution of Andersonville.

Marvel, William. Andersonville: The Last Depot. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. An important study of the legacy of the prison camp that separates facts from the considerable accumulation of distortions, many of them part of Kantor’s fictional account, which have altered the perception of the camp in history.

Ransom, John L. John L. Ransom’s Andersonville Diary. New York: Berkley Books, 1994. A classic firsthand account of the prison camp by a survivor. This work was used by Kantor as a key resource in writing his novel of Camp Sumter in Georgia.

Sachsman, David B., S. Kittrell Rushing, and Roy Morris, Jr. Memory and Myth: The Civil War in Fiction and Film from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to “Cold Mountain.” West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2007. Places Kantor’s Andersonville within a broad context of novels and films that have shaped the contemporary perception of the Civil War era. Deals specifically with issues of romanticizing the war and ignoring its brutality. Uses Kantor’s novel as a critical corrective to idealized readings of the war.