Some of the regiments composing this band of Pilgrims had “veteranized” and were soon going home on a veteran furlough when the attack was made, but they came to Andersonville instead.
Their service had been most entirely in garrisons, where they had always been well supplied with rations and clothing, and exempt from hard marches and exposures, and as a natural sequence, were not as well fitted to endure the hardships of prison life, as soldiers who had seen more active service.
They were turned into the prison without shelter, and they did not seem to think they could, in any way, provide one; without cooking utensils, and they thought they must eat their food raw. They began to die off in a few days after their arrival, they seemed never to have recovered from their first shock.
Comrade McElroy tells in “Andersonville,” a pathetic story of a Pennsylvanian who went crazy from the effects of confinement. He had a picture of his wife and children and he used to sit hour after hour looking at them, and sometimes imagined he was with them serving them at the home table. He would, in his imagination, pass food to wife and children, calling each by name, and urging them to eat more. He died in a month after his entrance.
I observed a similar case near my quarters. One of this same band came to our well for a drink of water which we gave him. He was well dressed, at first, but seemed to be a simple-minded man. Day after day he came for water, sometimes many times a day. Soon he began to talk incoherently, then to mutter something about home and food. One day his hat was gone; the next day his boots were missing, and so on, day after day, until he was perfectly nude, wandering about in the hot sun, by day, and shivering in the cold dews at night, until at last we found him one morning lying in a ditch at the edge of the swamp,—dead.
God only knows how many of those poor fellows were chilled in heart and brain, at their first introduction to Andersonville.
The coming of the Pilgrims into prison was the beginning of a new era in its history. Before they came, there was no money among the prisoners, or so little as to amount to nothing; but at the time of their surrender they had been paid off, and those who had “veteranized” had been paid a veteran bounty, so that they brought a large sum of money into prison.