The Title Says It All



The Horrors of Andersonville: Life and Death Inside a Civil War Prison

by Catherine Gourley

Gourley, C. (2010). The horrors of Andersonville: life and death inside a Civil War prison . Minneapolis: Twenty-First Century Books.

I chose to read Catherine Gourley’s The Horrors of Andersonville: Life and Death Inside a Civil War Prison partially because I’m an American history buff and partially because I was very moved after seeing a play on the same subject – Saul Levitt’s The Andersonville Trial.  With an award-winning Broadway hit as my point of reference, I found Gourley’s book less impressive than the play, but still very moving because of the simple but horrible facts it shared about the worst Confederate prison camp of the Civil War.

As I read The Horrors of Andersonville, some dismal thoughts came to mind.  First, as genuinely terrible as Andersonville was, that seems to be the only Civil War POW camp we hear about; when, there were also Yankee camps for Confederate prisoners that were as bad or worse than Andersonville.  But there are not many Broadway plays or popular books written about them because the North won the war.  And I say that as a born-and-raised Yankee.  It also seems sadly ironic that people always seem to look for a lone scapegoat to blame for the wrongs of a multitude.  So, Andersonville’s commander, Captain Henry Wirz, is the only Confederate hanged after the war for running a camp that was only able feed the Northern POWs the food that was sent to them by a Confederate government that did not have enough food to feed its own troops.

Still, I think Gourley’s book would be a good one for students to read.  It gives a startling honest depiction of atrocities that were just one part of the bloodiest war in U.S. history – because it was the only one where Americans were fighting Americans – so the death toll was therefore doubled.

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