William Davies’ 1864 diary opens with a list of 19 men from Company A who have given him their photographs.
At Andersonville National Historic Site (see recent posts about Davies‘ stay in the Confederate prison), there is a POW museum with a database listing the nearly 42,000 prisoners who passed through the gates of the camp. Each prisoner’s entry contains such information as name, date of capture, and date of exchange, release, escape, or death.
The first name on the list of men who gave Davies their pictures is G.H. Young. The database shows that George H. Young, of the 95th Ohio Regiment, Company A, not only made it through Andersonville and two other prisons, he also survived the wreck of the riverboat Sultana, sometimes known as the Titanic of the Mississippi.
In late July of 1864, a month after Davies, Young, and other members of Company A were captured, General William T. Sherman was plotting his assault on Atlanta, 140 miles north of Andersonville. The inhuman conditions at the prison had reached the Northern press, and Sherman sent a detachment of cavalry to serve a dual mission of destroying railroads that supplied Atlanta and liberating Andersonville.
The troops failed in their efforts, but the prospect of 32,000 prisoners released into the Georgia countryside sent a thrill of fear through the area’s residents. In mid-September, when Sherman had taken Atlanta, Davies was among the prisoners who were told they were going to be exchanged. Trainloads of men were shipped out. They had been lied to about the promise of exchange many times, in order to discourage attempts at escape. That’s probably why Davies and his friend Wakeman Bell slipped into the woods while enroute to the exchange point.
They made their way to Sherman’s lines and freedom. Records show that the remaining 17 men of Company A, including George Young, spent time in other prisons, suggesting that that they were not on their way to be exchanged but to fill new prisons that were out of Sherman’s reach. Some of those men were later brought back to Andersonville.
At the end of the war, Union soldiers liberated from Andersonville and Cahawba prisons were mustered out of the army at Vicksburg, where the steamboat Sultana stopped to pick them up and take them home. Young was one of those men.
The ship had spent a day in dock to repair the boiler, which apparently should have been replaced, but the captain didn’t want to lose his government contract to transport the waiting passengers, who were desperate to get home. The boat, which had a legal capacity of 376, headed out with 2400 people aboard on April 27, 1865. When the boiler exploded, the Sultana sank, and an estimated 1600 passengers died. It was the day after John Wilkes Booth’s assassination, so the sinking of the Sultana was crowded out of the headlines.
George Young, however, lived and made it home to Columbus, Ohio, to raise a family. So did William Davies, my great-great-grandfather.