Ghost Stories: Detention, disease and death

“From war’s alarms, from deadly pestilence, Be Thy strong arm our ever sure defense; Thy true religion in our hearts increase, Thy bounteous goodness nourish us in peace.”

– “God of Our Fathers,” by Daniel C. Roberts

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a sunny and pleasant September day as I walk past venerable monuments at the Hillsboro Cemetery. As I pause, I ponder the lives of John Mills Barrere and his wife, Margaret Morrow Barrere. For them and members of their family, life had to be far from pleasant for a few years in the 1860s.

Last week, we talked about how three of their sons lost their lives as a result of the Civil War, along with a nephew. John and Margaret’s youngest son, Bebee, crossed the great divide first. He was just 19 years old when he died of disease at a hospital in Danville, Ky. on Oct. 23, 1862. Two other sons, Thomas and William, were captured and imprisoned by the Confederates.

In days where we can communicate with our loved ones at a moment’s notice, I can only imagine how John and Margaret Barrere felt as their sons languished in prison camps so far away from Highland County.

Lieutenant William Barrere, who was born in 1836, was imprisoned for months but was eventually freed. He was placed on the wooden steamboat called the Sultana, which exploded on the Mississippi River on April 27, 1865.

According to accounts, an estimated 1,800 of the Sultana’s 2,427 passengers perished when three of the boat’s four boilers exploded. That’s almost 200 higher than the 1,512 deaths attributed to the Titanic disaster on the North Atlantic Ocean nearly 50 years later. The Sultana burned to the waterline and sank near Memphis, Tenn.

Among the dead was Lieutenant William Barrere. Following the greatest maritime disaster in United States history, bodies of victims continued to be found downriver for months, some as far as Vicksburg, Mississippi. Many bodies were never recovered.

Sgt. Thomas Jefferson Barrere, who was born in 1834, was captured during the Battle of Chickamauga, which is considered the most significant Union defeat in the Western Theater of the Civil War and involved the second highest number of casualties in the war following the Battle of Gettysburg.

The battle was fought Sept. 19-20, 1863, and following the Union defeat, Thomas Jefferson Barrere and surviving members of his regiment were taken to the notorious Andersonville Prison in Georgia.

History tells us that approximately 45,000 Union prisoners were held at Andersonville, which was overcrowded to four times its capacity. It had an inadequate water supply, low food rations and unsanitary conditions.

Nearly 13,000 men died at Andersonville, with chief causes of death being scurvy, diarrhea and dysentery. In his 1865 book, “Life and Death in Rebel Prisons,” Robert Kellogg, a sergeant major in the Union Army who was imprisoned in Andersonville, recounted entering the horrible prison camp for the first time on May 2, 1864.

“As we entered the place, a spectacle met our eyes that almost froze our blood with horror, and made our hearts fail within us. Before us were forms that had once been active and erect – stalwart men, now nothing but mere walking skeletons, covered with filth and vermin,” Kellogg wrote.

“Many of our men, in the heat and intensity of their feeling, exclaimed with earnestness, ‘Can this be hell?’ ‘God protect us!’ and all thought that He alone could bring them out alive from so terrible a place. In the center of the whole was a swamp, occupying about three or four acres of the narrowed limits, and a part of this marshy place had been used by the prisoners as a sink, and excrement covered the ground, the scent arising from which was suffocating. The ground allotted to our ninety was near the edge of this plague-spot, and how we were to live through the warm summer weather in the midst of such fearful surroundings, was more than we cared to think of just then.”

Robert Kellogg was one of the ‘lucky’ ones.”

He lived to tell tales of his experiences at Andersonville. Thomas Jefferson Barrere was not so lucky. He died in August of 1864 of scurvy at around the age of 30 and was interred in the cemetery at Andersonville National Park.

His monument in Andersonville indicates he died on Aug. 25, a monument in the Hillsboro Cemetery lists his date of death as Aug. 24. Throngs of Union soldiers would remain at Andersonville Prison until it was captured by the North in May of 1865.

The commandant of the prison camp, Henry Wirz, would be the only Confederate official to be tried and convicted of war crimes resulting from the Civil War. After being found guilty of conspiracy and murder, Wirz was hanged on Nov. 10, 1865 at the Old Capitol Prison by the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Today, the U.S. Supreme Court occupies that site.

According to accounts, Wirz’s neck did not break from the fall after the trap door was sprung at the gallows, and the crowd of 250 spectators watched as he writhed and slowly suffocated. Approximately 150 years later, visitors can walk the 26.5-acre Andersonville National Cemetery, which contains 13,714 graves, many of which are marked “unknown.”

Let’s pause for now and we’ll continue next week.

Steve Roush is a vice president of an international media company and a columnist and contributing writer for The Highland County Press.