[Photo: Georgia Department of Industry, Trade and Tourism] After the agony of Andersonville was ended, Northern states erected monuments to their dead in the military cemetery. This mourning figure, placed by Iowa, watches over the graves.

By ROBERT N. JENKINS, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 31, 2002

In Georgia, the Andersonville prison and Jimmy Carter's hometown offer insight into dark and bright chapters of the South's history.

The bad story first, for it now has an uplifting ending.

The very name "Andersonville" has come to stand for the blind obedience to military orders that leads not just to cruelty, but to needless death.

[Times art]

Andersonville is about 110 miles south of Atlanta, 40 miles east of Alabama. Deep in Dixie, the farming village also had a train depot and a freshwater stream. During the Civil War, these things made it a perfect place to hold thousands of Union Army POWs, out of the reach of any hurried raids by Northern troops.

Starting in January 1864, slaves from farms were used to construct a pine-log stockade fence around 161/2 acres. The 15-foot-high fence enclosed an area 1,010 feet long and 780 feet wide. In February, trains filled with prisoners began to roll south from the capital of the Confederacy, Richmond, Va. The destination was officially called Camp Sumter, but the stockade quickly took the name of the tiny rail depot: Andersonville.

Along a quarter-mile of narrow dirt road, weaving through thick stands of pine, Southern troops were soon constantly marching a line of prisoners, more than 45,000 all told. But when those stockade doors swung open with the end of the war 14 months after Andersonville began operating, nearly 13,000 had been carried out, dead.

The problems with Andersonville were simple, and they were horrible.

First, there was overcrowding. The original enclosure was large enough to hold 10,000 prisoners, but in the prison's first 100 days or so, about 20,000 were crammed inside.

An outer fence was built to enlarge the holding area by 10 acres. But the flow of prisoners increased, and by August, an estimated 33,000 were locked inside.

Then there was a lack of food, water and shelter.

Hard-pressed to supply its fighting men after three years of war, the Confederacy could hardly care for tens of thousands of prisoners.

[Times photo: Robert N. Jenkins]

The small shelter was erected in 1901 over what the POWs named Providence Stream, a source of fresh water that bubbled after lightning hit the ground in 1864. At the rear is a reconstructed corner of the stockade fence..

Yet, historians say, the Northerners were provided the same rations as the ragtag troops who guarded them: equal amounts of corn meal and beef, and occasionally some beans, peas or rice.

The prison's location had been chosen for the small stream flowing through it -- the only source of water for all the prisoners. But the guards' encampment was situated so that the latrine was over the stream.

No permanent shelters were planned for the prisoners. They scavenged what they could, including tearing down the original wood stockade fence, though some of that was used for campfires. With extremes of weather, life in Andersonville became survival of the fittest. Disease and starvation were rampant. Prisoners without enough personal strength or friends to help them slept beneath tent fragments or in holes they dug in the ground. The uniforms the prisoners wore when they had been captured began to disintegrate.

And then there was the infamous deadline.

This was a simple rail fence, 4 feet high, built about 25 feet inside the outer prison wall. It created a true no-man's land. A prisoner crossing the deadline was not given a warning by the sentries atop the stockade wall; he was just shot.

Survivors reported that rather than continue to die a little each day -- with only the how, not the when, certain -- many prisoners decided to cross the deadline to end the agony.

As Union Gen. William T. Sherman advanced through Georgia in the fall of 1864, thousands of prisoners were relocated, to keep them out of Union hands. About 5,000 still were held at Camp Sumter when Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered the bulk of the Confederate Army in April 1865.

Union troops arriving to free those men were astonished at the living skeletons they found. The old photos rival those of prisoners freed from German concentration camps 80 years later.

The official death toll, chronicled by a teenage Union prisoner assigned this task to aid in the burials nearby, was 12,912, about 29 percent of all the prisoners ever held in Andersonville.

The dead are now represented by tiny headstones that rise inches apart in the National Cemetery. It is a few hundred yards from what had been the stockade, through the thick, muffling, piney woods.

The POW's ordeal

The National Park Service has erected a full-scale model of one corner of the stockade fence. Slim white posts mark the locations of the outer fence and the deadline. But the field that was Andersonville requires more than imagination to conjure the horrors.

For that something extra, a visitor need only enter the adjacent National Prisoner of War Museum. Be prepared to be engulfed by emotion.

Opened in 1998, this imaginative museum honors this nation's POWs from the Revolutionary War through the Persian Gulf War.

The galleries are not wide, perhaps to enforce the feeling of containment that is pertinent here. Themes include capture, survival skills, torture, untreated injury and illness.

Presentation is thoughtful: As visitors enter one of the first galleys and turn to read about the ordeal of being a prisoner, lights suddenly flash on behind them. Turning, the visitors face a wall of rifles pointed at them. The sensation of being captured is immediate.

Nearby is a wall-sized mural of a photo taken inside Andersonville. Gaunt figures study the camera. Perhaps for many of them, it is the first time they have seen a camera. For others, it will be the last.

In front of this photo mural are metal outlines of human shapes: Being a POW means not even being a whole person.

Touch screens let visitors choose a war, and even the specific prisoner they want to hear from or read about. Filmed or narrated segments last from one minute to a few. Each prisoner tells about a different aspect of captivity.

One man held during the Vietnam War says he and his colleagues memorized the names of each other, so that when freed, they could recount the Americans they had seen alive in prison. "I had 367 names," this POW says bluntly.

A Korean War POW recalls that to keep from freezing at night, "we made a pyramid of bodies, with seven bodies on the bottom. Then after a while we would switch," and the men who had been warm on the inside of the pyramid moved to the outside.

Especially poignant is a wall of TV screens that shows a succession of prisoners speaking, alternated with clips of their wives and children recalling their experiences.

One wife repeats the question, "Was I overjoyed at (her husband's) homecoming? No, because we didn't know how he had changed; we didn't know who was coming home."

A young woman tells us, as the appropriate family-album photos flash onscreen: "I could never forgive him for not being home for my high school graduation, for not being there to give me away when I got married."

A woman who had been a child when her father was taken prisoner in Vietnam does not reveal until her final comments that he died as a prisoner.

As for the POWs, one man's filmed comments sum up the ordeal:

"It's part of my identity -- that I have lived like an animal.

"We can talk about the misery, but let's not forget the other side -- the goodness we were able to pass along to each other."

Not accepting limitations

[Times photo: Robert N. Jenkins]

This giant peanut with the caricatured Carter smile stands by the highway at the edge of Plains.

Down highways 49 and 280 is a more widely known story of another military man. This is the story with the happy ending.

James Earl Carter Jr. was born Oct. 1, 1924, into the fourth generation of Carters to farm in Sumter County. Young Jimmy, too, worked the peanut, corn and cotton crops on 360 acres.

His family lived in a relatively spacious, three-bedroom home about 3 miles outside the railroad depot town that was Plains. The boy helped with a garden at the side of the house, growing sweet potatoes, collard greens, black-eyed peas.

He also worked in the fields, starting at 4 a.m. to help harness the mules. As the peanut crop was brought in, Jimmy walked along the railroad tracks into town to sell boiled peanuts. With maybe a dollar in his pocket, he then walked home.

It was the Depression, and there did not seem to be anything to Jimmy's future beyond becoming the fifth generation of farmers. But, Carter says in a film that encapsules his life in Plains, "during our school years, we were taught at home and in the classroom to strive and to compete, and that any limitations on our lives were self-imposed."

The film is played several times a day in a most relevant venue: the auditorium of Plains High School. Now the school is part of the Jimmy Carter National Historic Site, but if you are at least a half-century old, or if you grew up in a rural area, you know this place.

It is everyone's high school from a certain time, with ceilings that seem to reach halfway to the sky and orderly rows of smallish desk chairs facing the blackboards at the front of each classroom.

If you can't quite smell the chalk dust, it is only because the school closed in 1979.

Jimmy Carter was valedictorian of his graduating class in 1944, spent a year at a college in nearby Americus and another year at Georgia Tech, in Atlanta. Then he entered the Naval Academy, graduating in 1946. One month later he married one of his sister's friends, Rosalynn Smith.

When his father died in 1953, Carter resigned his naval commission to return to run the family's farm-supply business.

[Times photo: Robert N. Jenkins]

The Carter family home, restored as a National Park Service historic site.

Plains was always home, though Mrs. Carter concedes in the biographical film that having lived around the world during her husband's naval career, she wanted more from life than to be a housewife in her hometown.

In the film, neighbors and friends recount Carter's early years and then his political efforts, which began with work on the school board, then advanced through the Legislature and to a run for governor in 1966. He was defeated, but he ran again in 1970, and that time he was elected. The next year he made the cover of Time magazine as a symbol of the New South.

Politics served husband and wife. The film, lovingly narrated by the late Charles Kuralt, highlights Carter's presidential years. But when he was defeated for re-election, Carter knew that despite four years as the most powerful man in the western world, he was headed home to Plains.

As Mrs. Carter says on the film:

"We go to a lot of places, and we do a lot of things, but we always come home."

To see that home, step into the former classroom that holds a big-screen TV playing a videotape of the Carters leading a tour of their one-story, ranch-style house. It is amusing to see husband and wife tease each other about who does more of the cooking.

[Times photo: Robert N. Jenkins]

The Carter family home had three bedrooms, a living room and kitchen but neither running water nor electricity when the family bought it in 1928.

A serious-sounding Carter launches into a dissertation on proper nutrition. He also chatters about his love of woodworking, and the couple explains how an addition to this, the only house they have owned, was designed to let their grandchildren come in without getting the rugs dirty.

Elsewhere in the school is a presentation of Carter's graduating class, with updated photos and biographies. Other than 39th president of the United States being listed, James Earl Carter Jr.'s brief history fits in pretty well with that of the other middle-class grandparents we see.

Visitors can get another feel for Carter's early years by driving to the restored family farm. His simple bedroom still holds a few favored books on four shelves, but few toys. Also, his bedroom does not have a fireplace, though there is one in his parents' bedroom and in the room shared by his sisters.

Carter was a teenager when electrical service reached his home. Nor was there running water at first; an outhouse is to one side of the 80-year-old main house.

But the Carters were not poor. Father and son played each other on their own tennis court, and both worked in their small general store, selling their neighbors canned foods, work clothes, patent medicine and the occasional mule collar.

Other outbuildings include a wagon shed, a barn and the home -- its walls plastered with newspaper pages to keep out the drafts -- occupied by the farm's foreman, Jack Clark, and his wife, Rachel. Rachel Clark taught Carter about finding his way in the woods, about fishing, about nature. She taught him a great deal about respecting the world and the people in it.

And echoing his wife's comments in the biographical video, the globe-trotting former president is quoted elsewhere as saying that the village is still "a magnet that has always drawn me and Rosalynn back . . . in bright, happy times, also times when we were disappointed and distressed."

If you go

GETTING THERE: Andersonville National Historic Site is 10 miles northeast of Americus, Ga., on Highway 49. The nearest airports are in Columbus (to the west), Macon and Atlanta (north).

Driving from Florida, leave Interstate 75 at exit 101, which is U.S. 280, at Cordele. Follow 280 west to Americus; then turn right onto Route 49, heading north to Andersonville.

The site consists of the National Prisoner of War Museum, Andersonville National Cemetery and the historic prison site.

Park grounds are open 365 days a year. The National Prisoner of War Museum is open daily from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. except Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day.

The film Echoes of Captivity is shown every 30 minutes, beginning at 9 a.m. An audio driving tour is available for a $1 rental fee.

The National Prisoner of War Museum is wheelchair accessible, with a wheelchair available.

The Carter National Historic Site is in Plains, about 10 miles west of Americus, on U.S. 280. It is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. except Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day. The boyhood farm and home are west of town. The high school and farm are wheelchair accessible.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: Call the Andersonville Historic Site at (229) 924-0343, ext. 201, or write to Andersonville National Historic Site, 496 Cemetery Road, Andersonville, GA 31711. The Web site is www.nps.gov/ande.

For information on the Carter site, call (229) 824-4104, or go to the Web site www.nps.gov/jica.

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