Identifier: andersonvilles00mcel (find matches)
Title: Andersonville : a story of Rebel military prisons, fifteen months a guest of the so-called southern confederacy : a private soldier's experience in Richmond, Andersonville, Savannah, Millen, Blackshear, and Florence
Year: 1879 (1870s)
Authors: McElroy, John, 1846-1929
Subjects: Andersonville Prison United States -- History Civil War, 1861-1865
Publisher: Toledo : D. R. Locke
Contributing Library: New York Public Library
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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l, but they allhappened among paroles outside the Stockade, or among theprisoners inside after we left, so I knew nothing of them. One of the Old Switzers favorite ways of ending theseseances was to inform the boys that he would have them shotin an hour or so, and bid them prepare for death. After keep-ing them in fearful suspense for hours he would order them tobe punished with the stocks, the ball-and-chain, the chain-gang,or—if his fierce mood had burned itself entirely out — as wasquite likely with a man of his shallow brain and vacillatingtemper — to be simply returned to the Stockade. Kothing, I am sure, since the days of the Inquisition—orstill later, since the terrible punishments visited upon the insur- 376 AITDEESONVILLB. gents of 1S48 by the Austrian aristocrats—Las been so diaboli-cal as the stocks and chain-gangs, as used by AVirz. At onotune seven men, sitting in the stocks near the Star Fort — inplain view of the camp — became objects of interest to every-
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THE CHAIN OANO. body inside. They were never rcheved from their painfulposition, but were kept there until all of them died. 1 thinkit was nearly two weeks before the last one succumbed. Whatthey endured in that time even imagination cannot conceive,I do not think that an Indian tribe ever devised keener torturofor its captives. The chain-gang consisted of a number of men — varying fromtwelve to twenty-live, all chained to one sixty-four pound ballThey were also stationed near the Star Fort, standing out inthe hot sun, without a particle of shade over them. When onomoved they all had to move. They were scourged with thodysenter)^ and the necessities of some one of their number keptthem constantly in motion. I can see them distinctly yet, A STORY OF BEBEL MILITART PRISONS. 377 tramping laboriously and painfully back and forward over thatburning hillside, every moment of the long, weary Summerdays. A comrade writes to remind me of the beneficent work ofthe Masonic Order. I mention it

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