A teenaged boy-soldier from Normal survived one of the most brutal prison camps in history. Decades after the Civil War, Alpheus Pike wrote a memoir. In it, he detailed horrific sanitary conditions, the murderous behavior of guards and prisoners alike, and amid the privation, the grace notes of human caring that emerged from these trials.
Pike was born in Maine in 1846 and came to Bloomington as a young boy. When the Civil War began, he enlisted at the age of 15 in the 39th, Illinois Volunteer Infantry.
He campaigned in the eastern theater of the war, and after two years and nine months of service, was captured in May 1864 at a battle near Drewry’s Bluff in the Bermuda Hundred campaign and was sent to a notorious Confederate prison camp.
“Andersonville was located about 120 miles south of Atlanta, deep within the heart of the Confederacy, making escape all but impossible,” said Bill Kemp, librarian and archivist at the McLean County Museum of History.
Pike was 17 when he arrived in June of that year.
“The gates were opened, and we marched in and drawn up in line along the edge of the swamp, the guards and rebel sergeant leaving after remarking ‘you will all stay here,’” wrote Pike. “Some of our men stood in line thinking the sergeant would return and mark out a camping ground for us…He did not return, and they might have been standing yet if it hadn’t been for the information received from an old prisoner who said ‘What are you waiting here for? You will stand here a d—n long time if you wait for him to come back."
There were no blankets. There was not much shelter inside the stockade. There was not much food and it was of poor quality. He was exposed to the rain and sun.
“Pike was better off than many. He met his brother Ivory, who was in the 16th, Illinois Calvary, who was captured five months earlier. And that's very fortunate for young Alpheus because his brother, who's a little bit older, a little bit wiser, who's an expert barter and trade man was able to help his brother stay alive in the ensuing months,” said Kemp.
There was a brisk trade in food. He wrote of exchanges of a ration of cornbread for a soup bone, or tobacco, or wood. Corn meal was much cheaper than flour.
"My brother, being of a speculative turn of mind did quite a thrifty business buying and selling whatever he could get hold of that was valuable," wrote Pike. "One day going out to the sick pen, he gave a rebel $10 for a half bushel of onions…and sold them at an average of 50 cents each. (They were a great scurvy destroyer). With the money he received in this way, we would buy a ration of camp food now and then and keep ourselves from being too hungry.”
The confederates called Andersonville Camp Sumter. At its height, there were 32,000 prisoners on about 26.5 acres — or about 1,200 men per acre.
“Andersonville was said to be the Confederacy's fifth largest city, albeit a city with not one single residential structure because the prisoners were basically on their own,” said Kemp.
Nearly 13,000 union troops died at Andersonville and more than 30,000 union POWs died throughout the Confederacy. The prisoners had only ragged tarps to build temporary tents.
“Northerners must not shake their collective finger at the South because no less than 26,000 Confederates died in northern camps. And in the state of Illinois, there were prisoner of war camps in Chicago, Rock Island, and in Alton,” said Kemp.
In 1887, 22 years after the Civil War, Pike wrote a sketch of his Civil War experience. A typed transcription of his handwritten recollection runs almost 60 pages, single spaced. The history museum published part of it in 1899, as a manuscript called "McLean County boy in Andersonville."
“The dead in camp were picked up and carried out in blankets and those who carried a dead man out would sometimes have a chance to pick up a scrap of wood here and there, which was very valuable and therefore it was quite a treat to have that privilege," wrote Pike.
"Each morning, three or four large government wagons each driven by six mules would drive up to the dead house loading on its ghastly load, uncoffined, simply bearing a tag pinned to the breast thrown on to the wagon as carelessly as wood, only not in as good order.”
He wrote that many died of homesickness as well, especially new recruits and married men.
“It was also proverbial in camp if a man was married, he would be carried out a corpse, he probably having greater grief on account of home and friends. I have known great hearty men to come in there and be carried out in ten days, there seeming no disease,” wrote Pike.
The guards also were murderous. Pike wrote of the so-called "dead line" beyond which prisoners could not venture or risk getting shot.
"The ever-watchful guard was on the alert, always, night and day, to get a chance to shoot a Yankee. Of course, it would be supposed that they would not dare to shoot a man down without provocation, but in many instances, such was the fact, for it was told to us by the rebels themselves that whosoever shot a Yankee on the dead line received a furlough of 30 days," wrote Pike.
The boundary was all the more problematic because of the poor water quality. Thousands of men had to try to wash and bathe in the stream and those who sought water to drink that was marginally less foul often tried to go as far upstream as possible.
"It would be natural for them to reach and get water as clean as they could," wrote Pike. "And when whey would dip within several feet of the dead line, the fiendish guard without a word of warning whatsoever...would take deadly aim and fire."
There was not enough food, and the meat they were given had clearly been condemned as unfit to feed confederate soldiers," he said, adding he was always hungry. But Pike noted no one died of starvation unless they were already too sick to eat. What killed prisoners was a lack of clean water that caused dysentery and a lack of vitamin C, which led to scurvy. There was a single stream that ran through the camp, and it entered the stockade by the confederate quarters and cook house, contaminating the brackish stream.
“These sources of disease had become such a terror to the prisoners of the camp that they knew and realized the fact they were becoming weaker every day from the drops of this water they were taking in,” wrote Pike.
He estimated 80% of those who died at Andersonville were carried off with diarrhea.
“It was sad to see these poor emaciated fellows going to their death and still calling for a drink and all we had to offer was the miserable water which was like adding fuel to the fire. But there was no help, and of those attacked with this disease not more than one in 50 recovered. The deaths for the month averaged 125 per day,” wrote Pike.
The tightly packed and unsanitary conditions also were boons to lice. Pike wrote that he would take off his ragged clothes twice a day and delouse them, nearly always finding 15-20 lice, though this was a rare attention to detail in the camp. At times, he said you could see the lice crawling on the ground. He described a cooperative gesture by a group of prisoners to help a sick man who was almost being eaten alive by the vermin.
“His hair, which was somewhat long and shaggy, was so filled with lice, it looked a though you had taken a handful of course corn meal and thrown it into his hair from a distance of a few feet. These humanitarians scrubbed him with soap and water, shaved his head, got a few other garments as they could and let him go again,” said Pike.
Pike detailed thuggery in a forthright recollection that did not gloss over the behavior of fellow prisoners.
“There were gangs preying on the weak and the helpless. These gangs took names such as 40-thieves, and most famously ‘Mosby’s Guerillas," said Kemp. "Alpheus Pike recalled in most flocks, 'you will find some black sheep and in this flock there were a great many black ones.’ Soon enough, though, a law-and-order force known as the regulators reestablished order over the roving gangs and became judge, jury, and even executioner.”
Yet Pike kept alive some hope and faith in human nature.
“While I've spoken of the degeneracy of the camp, generally, there seemed to be somewhere the spark of humanity that would not die out. And these were the good Samaritans that healed the wounds of body as well as of soul. While some were looking after the interest of the body, others were looking after the interests of the soul by calling crowds together and preaching to them,” wrote Pike.
Pike spent his 18th birthday at Andersonville on Aug.14, 1864. Union forces threatened the camp and the confederates relocated them to another camp in Savannah, Georgia. Pike blamed Abraham Lincoln for what he believed was needless suffering among union prisoners.
“Alpheus and Ivory Pike probably would have been freed much earlier if not for Lincoln halting prisoner exchanges," said Kemp. "Once Lincoln introduced Black troops into combat, the Confederacy declared that captured Black troops would be placed into slavery and their white officers executed. In response, Lincoln said no more prisoner exchanges The Union Army and the Lincoln administration were clearly waging a war of attrition.”
Eventually, Pike was freed and he mustered out of union army service in 1865. He said he spent three years, five months and 15 days as a union infantry man.
After the war, Alpheus Pike worked as a conductor on the Chicago and Alton Railroad, at a lumber business in Chenoa, and for 15 years as a candy maker in Chicago. He died in 1892 and is buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Bloomington.
McHistory is a co-production of WGLT and the McLean County Museum of History.
