This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for 1956.
Although this is a work of fiction, the Civil War prisoner stockade it is based on, Camp Sumter, also known as Andersonville, was a real place. It was a overcrowded outdoor prison for Federal soldiers captured during the U.S. Civil War. Conditions were so bad that more than 12,000 prisoners died during their captivity, mostly from dysentery, scurvy, and malnutrition. Conditions were so overcrowded and filthy that a small scratch or mosquito bite could become infected to the point of gangrene and death. The prisoners were not policed and conditions were so desperate that, as a consequence, the strong preyed on the weak. A photo of the prison camp is online at the Library of Congress: Andersonville.
In Andersonville, Kantor tries to give the reader a taste of life inside one of the most notorious prisoner-of-war camps ever. He profiles various inmates and details their struggles to survive, and in many cases, their failure to do so. He also shares the lives of some of the local people and of the prison superintendent, Henry Wirtz. Wirtz was the actual superintendent of the prison, and although he was merely doing as he was instructed by his superiors, as is pointed out in the novel, he was executed by hanging in 1865.
The novel starts out with local plantation owner, Ira Claffey going for a walk on his neighbor's land. He loves walking in this area because it is a beautiful, piny forest full of wildlife and birds. He is enjoying his walk, basking in nature when he comes across two men. He talks to the men and discovers that the beautiful forest has been selected to be the site of a new stockade. The many trees will provide the lumber needed to build this stockade and the stockade will be used to imprison captured Yankee soldiers.
The novel ends with Ira once again walking across the desolate and ruined land where the forest used to stand. Now the stockade is deserted and Ira remarks upon the relicts left behind by the now freed prisoners: a crude, handmade sandal; torn clothes and rags; a cooking pan fashioned from a sheet of tin. He reflects upon the defeat the South has suffered and he hopes that some day he and his fellows can learn to love and accept the government they tried so hard to resist.
This was a really long book, trying to tell a really big story. A story so big, that only small sips and samples could be attempted. The Claffey family provides the frame of the story, but even their story is rather shallowly dipped into. I found these small dips and sips a bit dissatisfying and I would have preferred a story that focused on a handful of characters and told their story with more depth.
But still, it is an amazing look at a horrible time in American history and well-worth reading for that alone.
This novel was written in the 1950s and I felt that it has a rather anti-black slant to it. Blacks are mentioned and usually a described in somewhat derogatory terms: "Pet could not count past the sum of her fingers, though sometimes she tried to add the sum of her toes; but this bothered her because she had lost one toe ... and she could not quite understand why she never seemed to have as many toes as she had fingers." "Coffee might understand but dimly what his master had been about, and why..." "The dumb affection and faith they gave to Ira stemmed (much of it) from an awareness that he could do many of the same tasks they performed, and often do them better." "When he was young he had walked through an area in New York ... where besotted people white and black sprawled actually in the swill of the roadway, and wild eyes rolled in kinky heads thrust, slathering, cursing inarticulately, from windows." I sort of got the feeling that Kantor believed that maybe black people would have been better off if kept in slavery! He certainly paints them as inferior to whites in their understanding and intelligence and more suited to life as servants or field hands than to anything else. But that's just how he came across to me.
Review by Kirkus Reviews.
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