Marvel, William. Andersonville; the last depot.

MARVEL, William. Andersonville; the last depot. Univ. of North Carolina Press. 337p. illus. notes. bibliog. index. c1994. 0-8078-5781-5. $19.95. SA

Back in 1955, MacKinlay Kantor made the prisoner-of-war camp at Andersonville, Georgia, a byword for all of the horrors of the Civil War. His novel, Andersonville, so vividly depicted the starvation, squalor and casual brutalities of the Confederate military prison that ever since it has symbolized man's needless inhumanity to man. In actual fact, he was not far off the mark: prisoners were allowed to starve to death in other POW camps, North as well as South, and in any case the medical and sanitary conditions of the day practically guaranteed a huge death toll no matter how humanely they functioned. No one expected anything much better.

It has remained for author William Marvel, however, to acquaint the reading public with some of the "whys" behind Andersonville's horrors. The Confederate government had opened the new prison late in the war, as a temporary holding pen for newly captured Union troops until they could be exchanged. It was really an outdoor camp consisting of a few fenced-in pastures crossed by a brook, and guarded by an antiquated fort. Marvel blames the breakdown in the prisoner exchange system and a callous indifference of the North to the dismal fate of its captive soldiers. As the last winter of the war set in, the fields turned to muddy quagmires, gaunt soldiers scratched out shallow wells and shelters in their enclosure, and their almost-adequate rations dwindled to practically nothing. Nearly 13,000 of them died. In all fairness, at the end the prison guards were starving alongside their captives.

There is no end to the literature about Andersonville, and author Marvel really is just retelling what most students of the Civil War already know. He does it in fine style, though: footnoted enough for the scholar, thoroughly readable for everyone else, and studded with lots of contemporary photos. As for Andersonville, Georgia itself: the surprisingly tiny "star" fort overlooks seemingly ordinary fields still being picked over by antiquarians. The hamlet of Andersonville drowses nearby, and a dusty yellow memorial bravely commemorates Henry Wirz, hanged after the war for what happened there. Raymond Puffer, Ph.D., Historian, Edwards AFB, Lancaster, CA

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