AMONG THE SOLDIERS’ JOURNALS THAT SURVIVED THE disaster, John Clark Ely’s is one of the few that encompass the entire spectrum of events—the war, camp life, imprisonment, and finally the doomed voyage upriver from Memphis. Most diaries were lost during the disaster. John Clark Ely’s survived, waterlogged. Ely did not.
Before the war, Ely taught writing in school in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, where he lived with his wife, Julia, and their four children. He was handsome, with a full dark beard, and, judging from a surviving photo, liked to wear his kepi cocked jauntily to one side.
After the disaster, all that survived of his life were the moments he had recorded—the prelude. He was an orderly sergeant in the 115th Ohio infantry before being captured near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in December 1864 and sent to Andersonville, after which he was promoted to lieutenant in absentia. What is most remarkable about his journal, aside from the fact of its survival, is the similarity of many of his accounts, whether he was a soldier or a prisoner. They illustrate the maxim: “Wherever you go, there you are.” As he inched toward his doom he wrote most often of performing “usual duties” in army camp—distributing rations, building and repairing shelters, writing and reading letters, cutting firewood, and participating in drills. Now and then Ely’s musings turned lyrical. Of the war he wrote, “Oh, how deep and dark is the human mind, how black are many of its pages, how edge’d with red and splattered, too.” He wrote of “the dark bitter flood” that flowed through his veins, then added, “Band went downtown for a general serenade this evening. Large drove of horses passed today.”
He wrote of picking blackberries and attending church services. After one service he noted that the sermons seemed dull and failed to evoke the realities of his life. He wrote of two women, Lizzie and Angeline, who visited a sick soldier for a “gay smutty time.” As the first menace crept his way, on August 31, 1864, he wrote, “Excitement continues, rebels coming closer, will probably see them today…” He rode into a town in an ambulance to buy a bottle of whiskey. Eight days later he wrote, “One year ago today I was home with those most dear, will another year find me there to enjoy their love and happiness, I hope and trust I may.” On September 23 he wrote of receiving a care package from his wife, Julia, which included a bottle of wine, “a lump of maple,” a can of tomatoes, and a letter. From September 30 to October 16: All were beautiful or very fine mornings.
Ely wrote of heavy and brisk cannonades during the night and on the morning of his birthday, when he turned thirty-nine, “for better or worse.” It would be his last. He was captured the next day and marched with about one hundred other prisoners, including twelve musicians, to a camp near Nashville, where he lay about the next day and wrote a letter to Julia. From there the men marched in sleet and snow along muddy roads, through abandoned towns and forests of oak and chestnut trees. He was soon “very lame.” He spent his last Christmas on a train loaded with prisoners, passing through West Point, Mississippi. “Hungry, dirty, sleepy and lousy,” he wrote. “Will another Christmas find us again among friends and loved ones?”
In late January he had arrived at Andersonville, where adhering to routines kept him going. His description of arriving at the stockade was remarkably brief and opaque: The ground was sandy, the weather was cold, and there were four thousand prisoners inside. “Commenced fixing a place to stay, worked all day,” he wrote.
He wrote frequently, even in the purgatory of prison, of “fine days,” but by February 12, it was evident that a fine day could only count for so much. He wrote, “Again a fine day…Feel much depressed in feeling today, anxiety of home weighs heavy.” On February 22, someone stole from his shanty a shirt, a pair of pants, a haversack, and four days’ worth of rations. Five days later, he was sick again. Just as he seemed to be reaching his lowest ebb, after hearing unfounded rumors of a parole for months, Ely and the other Andersonville prisoners were removed from the stockade. He departed on March 24, traveling by train and boat to Jackson and from there to the Big Black River bridge on foot. In an odd coincidence, the Confederate troops who released his group to the Union Army were the same who had captured him near Murfreesboro. He immediately began building a shelter—something he had gotten pretty good at by now—and fashioned a bower of cane above it for added shade. He then wrote a letter to Julia. He kept his mind on the future.
In early April, Ely was sick again, and he wrote Julia another letter. He was feeling better by April 13, when the prisoners heard a heavy cannonade in nearby Vicksburg, signaling the fall of Richmond and the surrender of Robert E. Lee. He was jubilant. On April 14, he wrote of his joy at the war’s end and the news that they would be exchanged: “Bully, may we soon see our sweethearts.” On April 15, the prisoners from Andersonville drafted a resolution thanking the Sanitary and Christian commissions for their aid. On April 16, he wrote, “Beautiful morning and day, wrote to Julia.” On April 18, they heard of Lincoln’s assassination. April 19 was another fine day.
On April 24 he wrote, “Beautiful day but very warm sun, about 10 a.m. we were ordered to take train to Vicksburg and then up the river, went from cars to boat Sultana, a large but not very fine boat. Vicksburg is truly a city set on not only a hill but hills. Left sometime in night for Cairo, Ill.” The next day: “Fine day, still going up river very high over country every where, no places along the river where white people live but very many monuments of where people had been.” April 26: “Very fine day, still upward we go”
There was no punctuation at the end.