Today’s Dislocated Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Between February, 1864 and April, 1865 it is estimated that 45,000 Union prisoners were confined in the Confederate stockade, Camp Sumter, near Anderson Station, Georgia, forever to be remembered as Andersonville. Of that number, approximately 25,000 men survived their prison experience and returned home to tell their tale of suffering. It is unknown how many survivors, with their health and lives shattered, died as a direct result of their captivity after returning to civilian life. Close to 13,000 Union soldiers did “give up the ghost” at Andersonville, and it was the ghost of Andersonville that haunted the survivors for the rest of their lives.
The following is the account of Private Eli J. Wamsely, Company E., 65th Indiana Infantry, Twenty-third Corps, age 36.
Captured in East Tennessee, Dec. 16, 1863.
Entered Andersonville on March 14, 1864.
On the 11th of July, when the six raiders were hanged, Captain Wirz had a gallows erected inside the stockade for the purpose, and the time was set for the execution, and the prisoners marched in. When they saw the awful reality before them, one of them made a desperate effort to get away, which caused a general stampede among the prisoners, and in the rush I was shoved head foremost into one of those wells about thirty feet deep, my left shoulder being dislocated in the fall. I remained in the well until the men were hanged, and then the ropes were used in getting me out of the well. I owe my deliverance from that living grave chiefly to a member of the Fourteenth Illinois cavalry. I believe his name was Noah. His surname I cannot recollect, but he has the gratitude of my heart all the same.
Execution of the Raiders
Eli Wamsley was paroled on December 10, 1864 in Wilmington, N.C.
Culled from: Andersonville Giving Up the Ghost: Diaries & Recollections of the Prisoners
In case you’re wondering, the Andersonville Raiders were a band of rogue soldiers incarcerated at the Confederate Andersonville Prison during the American Civil War. Led by their chieftains – Charles Curtis, John Sarsfield, Patrick Delaney, Teri Sullivan (aka “WR Rickson”, according to other sources), William Collins, and Alvin T. Munn – these soldiers terrorized their fellow prisoners, stealing their possessions and sometimes even committing murder. Good riddance!
Sideshow “Freaks” Du Jour!
Australian Aborigines (c 1885)
When the British established their first settlement on the southeastern Australian coast in 1788 they soon discovered that their new land was already inhabited. Three hundred thousand aborigines lived there at a technological level so primitive that it precluded even the bow and arrow, cooking pots and clothing. Spenser and Gillen, the first anthropologists to make a serious study of an Australian aboriginal band (1896), compared them to other Australian biological anachronism like the platypus and kangaroo. Although it was soon discovered that other aspects of their culture, language and kinship systems, were extremely complex, the Australian aborigines became for Western man, the most primitive of all possible beings, the ultimate human exotics.
The abdominal scarification on the men in photographer Chas. Eisenmann’s portrait records the individual’s progress up the ritual hierarchy. Eisenmann’s aborigines declare their Australian primitiveness by holding boomerangs. The men have been equipped with cotton shorts and the women with bras to make them decent for Western viewers.
Culled from: Monsters: Human Freaks in America’s Gilded Age