Our Mortality
So, I have been thinking a lot about death recently. This past week, I lost two dear, elderly friends. Yesterday I attended a memorial birthday party for a neighbor who passed a month ago. Over the past couple years our church has seen nearly twenty members go to their reward. Each time I turn on the news, I am reminded of the over one million Covid deaths our country has sustained and daily I am faced with an insane string of random mass shootings (one last week in Smithsburg, MD, not eight miles away) and of course the daily death toll from the unnecessary Ukranian conflict. All this shadowed my research and writing on the Civil War’s infamous Andersonville Prison.
Allow me to drown you in Civil War statistics. It is widely accepted that the Reaper gathered 620,000 souls during our nineteenth century fratricidal fight. This figure is based on research by veterans after the war. More recent historians, however, believe that number falls short. They guesstimate that the number is more likely as high as three quarters of a million or 2% of the population at the time. Roughly three fifths of those were Billy Yanks, two fifths, were Johnny Rebs. Twice as many died of disease as minie bullets, bayonets or shell fragments. Military prisons accounted for approximately 56,000 Civil War deaths or 10% of all Civil War deaths … that is a staggering figure. In 1861 the prison death rate hovered at 2% of inmates but it soared to 28% in 1865 when prison walls bulged with prisoners.
Andersonville (More properly - Camp Sumter) located in Georgia 125 miles south of Atlanta, is often cited as being the most horrific and most deadly of the Civil War camps - and it was. Of the 45,000 prisoners of war held at Andersonville, 12,920 were buried in trenches there. Its death rate stood at a steep 29%. What is less well known is that 10% of the Confederate guards who served at Andersonville also met their maker. Prisoners and guards alike largely died of scurvy, dysentery and typhoid fever, compounded by overcrowding. At its height in the summer of 1864 Andersonville was filled to more than three times it’s intended capacity. Try to imagine it … no more than 36 square feet per person, your clothing rotting off your body, assaulted day and night by flies, mosquitoes, chiggers, and rats, your meager rations minimal, irregular and entirely lacking in fruit and vegetables. All this and little if any shelter from the sun in the summer and the cold in the winter.
Southern prisons were doubly bad, not entirely because of callous supervisors, but because of a desperate lack of supplies, food, medicine, and clothing. In the North where those things might be had in abundance things should have been better. They were, but only somewhat. New York’s Elmira Prison was located midway between New York City and Buffalo, near the Pennsylvania border. Elmira Prison also known as “Hellmira,” has come to be known as the Andersonville of the North where 3,000 men died of a total 12,000 inmates, This was a mortality rate of 25% - in the land of plenty. In comparison another infamous northern prison, Camp Douglas, outside Chicago, accounted for between 5-6000 deaths from a total of 30,000 held there.
So much suffering. So many deaths not on the “glorious” field of battle but in fetid, disease riddled compounds where many patriotic volunteers, found themselves mysteriously separated from their families and their futures, sequestered to die a miserable death while so many others went about their lives, survived multiple battles and went on to live full lives and wonder why they were spared the indignities of those unfortunate prisoners of war.
It’s the same today for us, isn’t it? So much death all around us, reminding us, warning us of our mortality. We hear about it, we see it and we wonder … why them? Why not me? Why that city, that state, that country and why not mine? In my long life, I have been in numerous situations where I might have been killed. I survived a broken neck and I’ve been on the wong end of pistols, one rifle and in one case a shotgun. I survived a harrowing airplane flight during a hurricane. As a Marine, I remember being informed the the last American casualties in Vietnam died from mortar fire on the perimeter I was flying into on the very night I was gearing up for the evacuations in Phnom Penh and Saigon. Why them, I wondered. Why now, when the conflict is all but over? It truly concerned me - would I be next?
Life is the same crap shoot today, that it was during the Civil War and the Vietnam War, and every other war. It was the same during the Age of Napoleon and Caesar before him. Does that mean we should despair? Should we see no reaason for the life we lead? I suppose that’s one way to look at it. I think a better, more positive point of view is service. While we are here, we have an opportunity to make a difference, no matter where we are or what our situation is. Crazy as it sounds, I think by helping each other we help ourselves. Whether our actions are big or small, each act of service enriches us and the people we encounter.
When our time comes, wouldn’t it be better to leave this earth knowing that we made it just a little bit better for someone else, rather than depart stressed and filled with dread and despair. I have to believe that if we live to see another day, there has to be a reason for it.
Personally, I want to make it a good reason.