A Fate Worse Than Hell – W Fitzhugh Brundage (1)

Underground trade between guards and prisoners persisted, but it could not compensate for the closure of the sutlers. In Confederate camps the gradual pauperization of Union prisoners during 1864 had a similar effect of severely curtailing prison markets. By late 1864 at Andersonville, after the cash had been siphoned off by the sutler and guards, there was too little left for sutler Selman to turn a profit. He departed for richer pastures, as did his successor, after only a brief spell.

Confederate authorities simultaneously continued to inveigh against guards trading with prisoners. Those that did so were threatened with court- martials while civilians risked civil prosecution. The aim of Confederate authorities was not to shut down prison markets, but to redirect the flow of Union currency from the sutlers to government coffers.

However, the policies that the Confederate government introduced in its last months, when the prison system was in complete shambles and Union prisoners were insolvent, failed to generate any meaningful revenue. Conspicuous and inescapable, the prison markets evoked conflicting emotions in prisoners. Prison yard trading kept some prisoners busy and enabled some to supplement their meager rations or enjoy an occasional luxury. With money, prisoners could tame the endless cravings for food, delay the advance of scurvy and its debilitating effects, savor water uncontaminated by human or camp waste, shod bare feet, adorn an improvised lean-to with a blanket roof, purchase writing paper, and post letters to loved ones.

With money, the accoutrements of normal life were within grasp, even at Andersonville. But trading also accentuated the extraordinary disparity between the deprivation endured by most prisoners and the comparative affluence enjoyed by a few inmates. In the prison milieu, prisoners learned that money was no less precious than it was beyond the stockade walls. In early August 1864, George Hitchcock recorded the angst that the juxtaposition of plenty and scarcity provoked: “We are continually tormented and tantalized with the sight of peaches, apples, chicken and soda water offered for sale at fabulous prices.”

We may never learn why Andrew Jackson Riddle decided to visit Andersonville in far southwestern Georgia on August 16, 1864. With his bulky camera, fragile photographic plates, and chemical solutions in tow, he trekked sixty miles from his home in Macon to an isolated prison facility that had not existed six months earlier. No other photographer took the trouble to do so during its existence. His hurried tour that day had a significance that he almost certainly did not expect or would ever fully appreciate.

It made only a fleeting impression on some of the prison’s inhabitants. But the pictures he took that day conferred immortality and importance on scenes that otherwise would have been preserved, inadequately, only in words. While creating some of the few photographs of any prison camp in the Confederacy, he produced the sole photographic record of the most remarkable prison pen of the American Civil War.

When he trained his camera lens on the tens of thousands of forlorn Union prisoners of war, Riddle enabled viewers to experience, if only vicariously, imprisonment on a scale and of a kind wholly outside of their experience. Neither the trajectory of Riddle’s life nor his circumstances in 1864 foretold his expedition to Andersonville. He left no record of ardent sectional or political loyalties. Nor had he displayed any evident ambition to distinguish himself, like his famous contemporaries Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, as a war photographer.

Riddle instead aspired to be a savvy artisan and small businessman, cobbling together a lucrative career that would have passed without notice had he not trained his photographer’s eye on Andersonville. Like many of the photographers active in the region before the Civil War, Riddle had migrated to the South.

He was born in 1828 in Delaware, but his family made their home in Baltimore. There, in 1846, he began to master the first widely available and commercially successful photographic process—daguerreotypy. He launched his career by opening a studio in Baltimore before moving to Columbus, Georgia, in 1856. As one of the comparatively few daguerreotypists in the state, his business flourished, and by the start of the war he had three studios.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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