Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 2.djvu/544

 not been equaled by that of any civilized nation of modern times, in its treatment of American prisoners. Crowded in the holds of prison ships reeking with foul air and filth, suffering horrors indescribable, they perished by hundreds. The cruelties practiced by the prison keepers upon their helpless victims were perpetrated for the avowed purpose of punishing rebels and terrifying the patriots who were joining the armies of the Revolution.

The Confederate government in the treatment of prisoners captured from the Union armies surpassed the British in barbarity, in many of the prison pens. The horrors endured by inmates of Libby, Salisbury, Florence, Macon, Belle Isle, Tyler and Columbia have been told by survivors in every Northern State and the record of thousands who perished from inhuman treatment, disease and starvation and were buried in the prison cemeteries, bear witness to an infamous system of cruelty that must ever shock humanity.

Iowa soldiers endured the horrors of these prisons and hundreds sleep in nameless graves, who were slowly murdered within the stockades.

A brief description of the Andersonville stockade, where more Iowa soldiers perished than in any other prison, will give the people of present and future generations a truthful picture of the horrors of all of them.

Early in 1864 the site was selected in southern Georgia remote from any large city or town, in the heart of a swampy, desolate region covered with pine forests. A railroad station and seven small buildings made the town of Andersonville. Half a mile east, twenty-seven acres of the forest were cleared and inclosed with palisades firmly planted in the ground to a depth of five feet. This made a solid wooden wall twelve feet in height. Inside of this wall at a distance of seventy feet was another wall of palisades and, at a distance of one hundred feet inside of this, was a third wall eighteen feet high. Within this wall, at a distance of seventeen feet, was the “Dead Line,”