Escape by burial: a Union officer’s 1864 flight from the road to Andersonville

A Union lieutenant captured outside Atlanta in 1864 decided he would rather risk escape than Andersonville, and escaped by having his comrades bury him. This National Park Service article, by a park guide at James A. Garfield National Historic Site, describes First Lieutenant George W. Bailey's book about it, A Private Chapter of the War, and is the first of two parts.

First Lieutenant George W. Bailey in 1864, from the copy of his book sent to James A. Garfield in 1880. NPS.

Veterans' silence, then stories

The article begins with the 1863 song "When Johnny Comes Marching Home", which cheered Americans in both North and South. Those at home may have expected the returning soldier to be unchanged, but the men had changed, each by his own experience, and found it hard to share. Quoting a Wisconsin officer, the article says that most thought only of returning to peaceful work. The historian Gerald Linderman called the years after the war a "hibernation", in which veterans kept disturbing memories to themselves for more than a decade. Around 1880 a "revival" began: commemorations, publications and veterans' organizations multiplied, and soldiers told their stories.

Bailey of St. Louis, Missouri, wrote his in 1880. He described it as a limited inside view of part of the Confederacy, seen secretly by a "stray" from the invading army, showing the real political feeling of different classes of its people. He sent a copy to "Gen. Jas. A. Garfield, with compliments of the author", and it is now in the memorial library at the national historic site. The book reads like a diary, written in the present tense.

Andersonville, Georgia, held the Confederacy's most notorious and deadliest prison for Union prisoners of war. Thousands of northerners died there of exposure, malnutrition and neglect. Library of Congress.

Captured near Atlanta

Bailey begins on July 22, 1864, before Atlanta. He was a first lieutenant and aide-de-camp on the staff of Major General Morgan L. Smith, commander of the Second Division, Fifteenth Army Corps. Confederates overran the Union position through an undefended railroad cut and captured him with perhaps eighty other officers and a great number of soldiers. Marched toward Atlanta under guard, he met a mixed crowd: a soldier trailing a captured flag in the dust, women taunting the prisoners, some onlookers curious and some sneering or pale with hatred. The prisoners were soon moved south toward Andersonville.

By July 25 Bailey was wondering what the silence from the direction of Atlanta meant, and how long the prisoners would stay on quarter rations. Exchanges of prisoners had stopped because of a disagreement over the status of Black troops. Weighing his chances, he judged a desperate escape better than surviving Andersonville.

The burial

On July 26 he escaped, in his words "by way of burial". Comrades helped: a tin cup served as a tool, briars were cut and stacked over the hole, and boughs and grass were laid over him. A colonel handed him linen maps and a small pocket compass, and a canteen served as a pillow. Buried with a packet of rations by his head, he waited as the column moved out the next morning; soon a hog helped itself to the rations. At least until midday he listened, and when rain made his "grave" untenable he pushed his way out. Almost at once he found another Union soldier, a seventeen-year-old named Lybyer, six feet tall, who explained that he had slept through the march in a brush pile and then decided to go the other way.

On the evening of July 27, the two approached enslaved people at a mansion's cabins, sure that they were friends. A woman who sheltered and fed them said they were the first Yankees she had ever seen and that every Black person nearby would help. The next day, near a plantation with cabins hidden behind the main house, a field hand told them the same. Bailey records that Confederate guards at every mill and crossroads in the area, partly to prevent enslaved people from fleeing to Union lines, made moving on risky, so they stayed hidden nearby and waited for news. By August 1 he placed himself twenty-four miles a little east of south from Atlanta. The plantation belonged to a committed Confederate, with a wife, daughters and a son at home recovering from a wound.

James A. Garfield's copy of A Private Chapter of the War. NPS.

The article stops there, promising a second part.

Sources

• National Park Service, James A. Garfield National Historic Site, "A Private Chapter of the War, Part I" (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/a-private-chapter-of-the-war-part-i.htm), by Joan Kapsch, park guide, written for the Garfield Observer, May 2016; a photograph credited to the Georgia Encyclopedia is left out; Bailey's 1880 book is quoted only in short phrases; rewritten in hubnx's own words.