Andersonville

Ahhh, idyllic Vermont.  Clean, fresh air and green mountains.  

The Titus side of my dad's family mainly settled in Vershire, Vermont.  To get there, drive to Timbuktu and hang a left, keep going till you hit East Osh Kosh.  Vershire is just 45 minutes further down the "road."

One of the Titus boys had a brief but significant journey away from Vershire.

Family member name: Morris Park Titus 
Lifetime: 1845-1900
Tree branch: Pearson
Relation: My 3rd great-uncle (My dad's dad's mom's mom's brother)

When Morris turned 18 in 1863, the War of the Rebellion was still going strong.  So he enlisted and began his military service as a Private in the 4th Vermont Infantry.

Just six months later, he was captured during a battle in Virginia and became a P.O.W.  He had just turned 19.  First he was held in Libby Prison, an infamous converted food warehouse that was used to imprison Union soldiers.  Huge rooms were overcrowded with men who did not receive medical attention or much food.  

Then he was sent to Andersonville Prison, GA.

**Warning: the following is not for sensitive hearts**

Andersonville was not a prison.  There are many words for it, but the word prison is usually connected with a building that includes cells and bars.  What a paradise prison would have been for those men!  No, Andersonville was an extermination camp in the United States.

Andersonville had two or three rows of tall stockade fences.  And that's it.  It was a pen. 

[Pause here to think of that.]

Inside the pen was the ground and the sky.  No shelter.  No facilities.  There was a small stream running down a hill.  The men would drink water from the top of the stream, and go to the bathroom at the lower stream.  It became a swamp of diarrhea.

The soldiers were starved.  When they had food, it was corn bread and some beans with maggots in it.  They prayed for sweet potatoes in order to possibly avoid scurvy, which most men contracted anyway.  It is a horrible disease.

Morris Park Titus arrived at the absolute worst time to arrive at Andersonville, end June of 1864.  The prisoner population was 26,000 men.  Some healthy men who arrived at that time died in two weeks or less.  Here is what they saw, taken from the diary of a soldier.

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. 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 (latrine), 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

In August, the Confederates started moving soldiers to other prisons.  The criteria for being moved was that you had to be able to walk out.  Those who could not walk out were left in the pen to die.  Even though he had been there less than six weeks, Morris could not walk out.  In September and October, 1 out of 3 and then 1 out of 2 men died respectively.  

[Pause here to think of that.]

But Morris was not a casualty.  Somehow he survived.  After only four months at Andersonville, he probably spent over a year in the hospital and the rest of his life undoubtedly with PTSD and chronic health problems.

He returned to beautiful Vershire.  Here is Morris on his wedding day just two years later.

When we visited Vershire in 2011, the kind town historian showed us a family history written by a Titus family member in 1930.  Here is the excerpt about Morris.  

From a family history book in Vershire, Vermont

Andersonville did not kill him.  But sadly Morris died on a Monday afternoon at age 55 when he fell on some ice.  Sigh... Vermont.