The Gates of Hell

On the way back to Pennsylvania from Florida on February 6, 2007, Mary and I spent a day in Southwestern Georgia. We took in the sights at the town of Plains, Jimmy Carter's home town. We also visited the National Historic Site at Andersonville, a few miles away.

I first became interested in the Andersonville story in 1964 when I read the novel "Andersonville," written by MacKinlay Kantor. It is not a pleasant book to read, because it describes in great detail the living conditions in the hell-hole, officially named Camp Sumter, but commonly known as Andersonville. However, I found the story extremely fascinating.

While I was still reading the novel, I was doing research for a paper I was writing for an education course at Penn State University. I was going through some New York Times, published during the Civil War when I came across the original news article, exposing the Andersonville Prison. The scenes described in that article were just as horrible as those described in the novel by Kantor.

At the prison site, the park service has marked out the exact location of the prison stockade. They have reconstructed several small portions of the wall and one of the gates. It gives one chills to stand there and look down over the compound where so much suffering took place under the command of Capt. Henry A. Wirz. He was tried and hanged for war crimes after the war ended. In the aftermath of wars, the losers are tried as war criminals, the winners are hailed as heroes, even though their deeds are the same.

Approximately 45,000 Union soldiers were imprisoned in the stockade, and 13,000 died while held in this facility. Lest we place the sole blame for this inhumanity on the Confederacy, we should remember that there were prison camps on both sides of the war, in which prisoners were treated inhumanely. This was simply the biggest and the worst.

The historic site was built to honor all Americans who have suffered in POW camps in all the wars of our history. The inhuman treatment of Prisoners of War has a long history in this world, and it continues to this day in places with names like the Hanoi Hilton, Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib. War and militarism breed this kind of violence. How many more must suffer such physical and mental abuse before we learn to live with each other in peace rather than war? Let us pray for a generation of peace.