“We [will] never be separated nor surrender our remaining rights while alive.”
Andersonville, Georgia, 1864
Fourteen-year-old Billy Bates enlisted in the Ninth Ohio Cavalry in 1862. Dick King joined a Pennsylvania regiment at seventeen. Both boys were captured in battle and thrown together as Confederate prisoners of war. They bounced from prison to prison and wound up at Andersonville, in southwest Georgia. Andersonville was widely known as the worst prison of the Civil War, a place where nearly one in three who passed through its gates died of starvation, disease, or torture.
Billy Bates was half-asleep during his watch at dawn in Cumberland, Maryland, when his horse snorted restlessly. He looked up, too late. Six Confederate soldiers suddenly sprang from behind rocks, leveled rifles at him, and yelled, “Throw down your guns you
infernal Yankee!” Billy got off one shot to alert the others before he was roughly seized and hustled away at gunpoint.
Billy was taken to a prison camp near Wilmington, Delaware. There he joined a group of new prisoners who were told to line up, strip to their underclothes, and throw all their belongings in a pile so Confederate soldiers could have them. Dick King, standing next to Billy, refused. Instead, Dick let his clothes drop at his feet, planted his boot on the pile, and told the commander that no rebel would ever wear his clothes. The commander calmly inspected the pile of garments. He noticed a picture of Dick’s mother sewn to a shirt pocket. Looking into the boy’s eyes, the commander ripped it from the shirt and ground it into the dust with his boot. Dick lunged for the commander’s throat, and a brawl followed. Dick was knocked unconscious, but when he came to, he found himself in the watery hold of a ship, chained back-to-back with Billy Bates. A lifelong bond formed in that moment. Billy later wrote that “in the presence of Almighty God we pledged that we would be absolutely true to each other; and that we would never be separated nor surrender our remaining rights while alive.”
Prisoners were forbidden from building shelters at the Andersonville camp. Most lived in holes they scraped in the ground, protecting themselves from the sun and bad weather by making tents of their blankets.
They had no idea how much they would need each other. In the next three months they were transferred to seven different prisons, each bleaker than the one before. A prison chaplain came to visit them the night before their final move. His words were disturbing. “You are going to the worst place in the Confederacy,” he said softly, “but you must keep up your courage. Be careful in speech, discreet in action, and constantly plan how to keep up your strength and your hope for deliverance.”
The prison at Andersonville, Georgia, sixty miles away, was nothing less than a death camp. When Billy and Dick arrived, it was still being built and contained only twelve hundred men. A year later, thirty-three thousand prisoners were jammed inside its pointed brown stockade fence—three times more than the prison was built to hold. Each inmate struggled to survive on daily rations of a teaspoon of salt, three tablespoons of beans, and a half pint of cornmeal. They drank water from a filthy creek that trickled through the camp and slept in depressions they scraped from the earth with their own hands. Any prisoner who crossed a rail fence twenty-five feet from the prison wall was shot by a guard in a wooden tower called the “pigeon roost.” With no clean water or shelter from the weather, disease ravaged the camp. Before the war was over, thirteen thousand soldiers died at Andersonville.
When they arrived, Billy and Dick were searched thoroughly, and everything of value was taken from them—but Billy managed to conceal a pocketknife in the hem of his pants. Though they were among the youngest prisoners, they were leaders from the start. They made a point of greeting each new prisoner in their unit with words of encouragement and friendship. They picked arguments with those who seemed to have given up hope, to try to keep them interested in surviving. They joined a nighttime effort to dig a tunnel under the stockade fence. It failed when one prisoner told a guard. When Billy and Dick refused to name the others, their rations were cut.
Billy and Dick’s role in the escape attempt brought them to the attention of the camp’s commander, Captain Henry Wirz. Wirz was a hard-drinking Austrian-born doctor who had been given the terrible assignment of overseeing a prison that was too crowded even before it was finished. He had a violent temper. To teach the boys a lesson Wirz put them in a chain gang. They remained maddeningly cheerful. There was something about Billy, especially, that irritated Wirz. One day Wirz removed Billy from the chain gang and ordered him hung by his thumbs over a gateway in front of the other prisoners. “[My] flesh was cut to the bone by my weight,” Billy wrote, “ … my tongue swelled, my head throbbed almost to bursting.”
WORDS FROM ONE WHO SAW ANDERSONVILLE
“My heart aches for those poor wretches, Yankees though they are, and I am afraid God will suffer some terrible retribution to fall upon us for letting such things happen. If the Yankees should ever come to southwest Georgia, and go to Anderson and see the graves there, God have mercy on the land!”
—Eliza Frances Andrews, a Georgia girl who was allowed to look inside the Andersonville prison in 1864
A fellow prisoner raised a cup of water to Billy’s lips but Wirz saw him, pulled out his revolver, and killed the man with five shots. Billy screamed at Wirz from his rope: “You dare not shoot me! I shall see you hang before I die.” Wirz put two shots in Billy’s leg before Wirz’s own men, fearing a prison uprising, dragged him away.
With no guards in sight, a prisoner cut Billy down and carried him to his unit. Billy lay there, near death, until Dick was released from the chain gang and nursed Billy back to health, sharing his own meager food. During a tour of the camp, a few days later Wirz spotted Billy. “I thought I had killed you,” he called. Once again Billy dared to talk back and Wirz shot him in the left side. As Wirz’s men rushed in to calm him down, the captain demanded that Billy declare an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy. “I’ll die in prison first,” Billy answered. “I’ll bring you under my thumb yet,” sneered Wirz, as his men once again led him away.
With nothing to lose, Billy and Dick decided to dig their own tunnel but tell no one. It was a distance of fifty-nine feet from the holes where they slept to the stockade fence. They began late on a moonless night, working with Billy’s pocketknife and two small scraps of iron. They carried dirt back out of the hole in their shirts. For months they scraped at the dirt until finally they hit the bottom of the stockade fence and dug under it. Then they came back inside and thought about what to do next. They decided that the right thing to do was to tell those they trusted most and give them a chance to escape, too.
On a warm spring night in 1864, Billy and Dick started down the tunnel alone, Billy first. The others would follow, but they all agreed Billy and Dick, who had dug the tunnel, should have the best chance to escape. Billy and Dick made it out of the camp; then for three weeks they hid by day and traveled by night, living on wild plants and berries. They shook the bloodhounds that were tracking them by hiding in a hollow log in a swamp. A slave family hid them in a cabin for a few days. A month after their escape they reached Union lines near Bridgeport, Alabama.
A few weeks later, they were sent by train to Washington to tell their story to President Lincoln. Lincoln was shocked by their skeletonlike appearance. Billy, now sixteen, weighed a little less than sixty pounds. Dick, nineteen, weighed sixty-four. As they began to tell the story, they broke down sobbing. President Lincoln put one hand on Billy’s head and the other on Dick’s shoulder. “We are all friends here,” he said, “and I want you as friends of mine to tell me all you can about Andersonville.” When their story ended, Lincoln sprang to his feet and exclaimed, “My God, when will this accursed thing end?”
BASE-BALL
Some Civil War prisoners were allowed a little pleasure. John Delhaney, a teenage Confederate soldier who was captured at the battle of Gettysburg and sent to Fort Henry, wrote, “The prisoners nearly every day are engaged in a game they call ‘baseball’ … I don’t understand the game, as there is a great deal of running and little apparent gain, but those who play it get very excited over it.”
They were sent home by train and reunited with their parents—and then, eleven weeks later, Billy reenlisted. Before Billy and Dick parted, they promised to tell the story for the rest of their lives. After graduating from college, Billy traveled around the country, speaking to schoolchildren until he died in 1909. He kept another promise, too. After the war he went to Washington to testify in the trial of Captain Henry Wirz. Wirz was hanged on November 10, 1865, and remains the only American ever executed for war crimes.