Andersonville hospital: the register that dates the first arrivals
The Andersonville hospital was admitting Union prisoners on February 24, 1864. That date appears in the Camp Sumter hospital register reproduced by the National Park Service, which identifies the original as part of National Archives microfilm publication M1303. The first arrivals were already in Confederate custody at the prison site. Their admission to medical care supplies a firmer starting point than a remembered march through the gates. The surviving entries do not establish the hour the train arrived or the movements of every man, and the stockade was still incomplete when the prison began receiving captives.
A second dated record places prisoners there that same day. A visitor's letter, dated February 25 and printed in the Macon Telegraph on February 27, described speaking with prisoners the previous day. The Park Service identifies this letter alongside the Andersonville hospital register. Its publication date belongs to the newspaper's production, while the visit belongs to February 24. February 27 also marked the first prisoner death, another event easily confused with the opening. A proposed sequence of arrival on February 24 followed by entry through the gates on February 25 remains less certain than the dated admissions.
Confederate surgeon Joseph Jones used the same starting date in his medical report, reproduced in John McElroy's 1879 memoir. He dated the prison's organization to February 24, 1864. Jones reported that sick prisoners received treatment inside the stockade until May 22, when the hospital moved outside to five acres shaded by oaks and pines. He described medical staffing as insufficient from the prison's foundation. His report therefore records both an opening date and a subsequent change in the location of care, distinguishing the early hospital arrangements from those he investigated later.
McElroy's own recollections bring the journey into view. He remembered orders in Richmond on February 17 to prepare for departure the following morning. The prisoners expected an exchange, but the train continued south. McElroy placed his passage through Macon late on February 25 and his arrival near midnight, followed by entry through heavy wooden gates. He also remembered a gap in the stockade and timber still being set into trenches. Published 15 years afterward, these recollections describe his transfer and the unfinished enclosure, while the medical records date prisoners' presence earlier.
John L. Ransom described another early transfer in the diary he published in 1881. His entry for March 14 recorded getting off the cars at 2 a.m. in cold rain. Guards carrying burning pine knots escorted the prisoners inside. Ransom felt barely able to walk after confinement in the railway cars, and he described being soaked, exhausted and without food that day. In his March 15 entry, Ransom recalled that around midnight he could no longer stand and lay down in mud and water. The arrival was a physical ordeal before any settled routine of confinement could begin.
The March 15 entry also recorded relief when rations arrived: cornmeal, beef and salt. On March 16, Ransom described an opening in the prison's side with two artillery pieces pointing through it. He and his companions rolled logs together on their chosen patch of ground and tried to settle in. Cold nights alternated with warmer days, and he reported wearing all his clothes at night. These entries describe his own first days, weeks after the initial admissions. Ransom said his published entries came from an earlier newspaper printing of his diary.
The Andersonville hospital also left numerical traces of those opening weeks. Augustus C. Hamlin's 1866 volume, Martyria, printed figures attributed to the hospital register. The February line gives a prison population of 1,600 and 33 men in hospital; the March line gives 4,603 and 909. These are monthly figures, rather than a count of the men on the first train. A separate mortality compilation in the same appendix assigns one death to February. Illness was therefore part of the prison's operations from its first month, alongside the continuing influx of prisoners.
Hospital records acquired another purpose after the war. Hamlin reproduced a report by Colonel Moore describing work at the cemetery. Prisoners assigned to burial duties had placed numbered stakes above graves, matching numbers associated with names in the Andersonville hospital record. Moore found men buried in trenches, without coffins, close beside one another. He reported using that correspondence to identify 12,461 graves and replace stakes with marked tablets; 451 remained unidentified. Names, ranks, units and dates of death could be restored to individual burial places. Moore described burial trenches between 50 and 150 yards long, about 300 yards from the stockade.
- National Park Service, Dates at Andersonville — www.nps.gov
- John McElroy, Andersonville: A Story of Rebel Military Prisons (1879), chapters XIV–XVII and the reproduced medical report of Confederate surgeon Joseph Jones; Yale Avalon Project — avalon.law.yale.edu
- John L. Ransom, Andersonville Diary (1881), entries for March 14–16, 1864; Project Gutenberg — www.gutenberg.org
- Augustus C. Hamlin, Martyria; or, Andersonville Prison (1866), appendix: hospital figures and Colonel Moore’s report; Project Gutenberg — www.gutenberg.org