Lower Georgia is very thinly settled.  Much of the land is still in the hands of the Government.  The three or four railroads which pass through it have little reference to local traffic.  There are no towns along them as a rule; stations are made every ten miles, and not named, but numbered, as “Station No. 4”—­“No. 10”, etc.  The roads were built as through lines, to bring to the seaboard the rich products of the interior.

Andersonville is one of the few stations dignified with a same, probably because it contained some half dozen of shabby houses, whereas at the others there was usually nothing more than a mere open shed, to shelter goods and travelers.  It is on a rudely constructed, rickety railroad, that runs from Macon to Albany, the head of navigation on the Flint River, which is, one hundred and six miles from Macon, and two hundred and fifty from the Gulf of Mexico.  Andersonville is about sixty miles from Macon, and, consequently, about three hundred miles from the Gulf.  The camp was merely a hole cut in the wilderness.  It was as remote a point from, our armies, as they then lay, as the Southern Confederacy could give.  The nearest was Sherman, at Chattanooga, four hundred miles away, and on the other side of a range of mountains hundreds of miles wide.

To us it seemed beyond the last forlorn limits of civilization.  We felt that we were more completely at the mercy of our foes than ever.  While in Richmond we were in the heart of the Confederacy; we were in the midst of the Rebel military and, civil force, and were surrounded on every hand by visible evidences of the great magnitude of that power, but this, while it enforced our ready submission, did not overawe us depressingly, We knew that though the Rebels were all about us in great force, our own men were also near, and in still greater force—­that while they were very strong our army was still stronger, and there was no telling what day this superiority of strength, might be demonstrated in such a way as to decisively benefit us.

But here we felt as did the Ancient Mariner: 

               Alone on a wide, wide sea,
               So lonely ’twas that God himself
               Scarce seemed there to be.

CHAPTER XVI.

Waking up in Andersonville—­some description of the place—­our first mail—­building shelter—­gen.  Winder—­himself and lineage.

We roused up promptly with the dawn to take a survey of our new abiding place.  We found ourselves in an immense pen, about one thousand feet long by eight hundred wide, as a young surveyor—­a member of the Thirty-fourth Ohio—­informed us after he had paced it off.  He estimated that it contained about sixteen acres.  The walls were formed by pine logs twenty-five feet long, from two