This post picks up where this one left off.

Something about this scene struck me. It read like an announcement of some kind. It had a quality of display that seemed at odds with the unassuming character of Kantor's prose elsewhere in the novel. The care with which Swarner spells out his name, regiment, and company to Ed Blamey, and the care with which Ed Blamey then records Swarner's name, regiment, and company for the prison officials was clearly also Kantor's way of underlining this soldier's identity for his reader. So much attention given to such a passing episode; such a seemingly gratuitous act of labelling; so much attention given to the importance of seemingly gratuitous acts of labelling: There was a frame around the scene. It was a set piece. Kantor's breach of his own otherwise understated narrative rhythms felt to me somehow like a sort of a tribute, a gesture of recognition, even of memorial. On a hunch, I looked J. H. Swarner up. He was real. He really did serve in the New York Second Cavalry, and he really did die in Andersonville.

According to the database of Andersonville prisoners maintained by the Macon County, Georgia, Chamber of Commerce, Jacob Swarner--or Sworm, as he was apparently also known--was a musician who served, as Kantor tells us, with the Second New York Cavalry, Company H. Captured at Liberty Mills, Virginia, he died at Andersonville on July 26, 1864. The cause of death was listed as "anasarca," or, in dictionary-ese, "Dropsy of the subcutaneous cellular tissue; an effusion of serum into the cellular substance, occasioning a soft, pale, inelastic swelling of the skin." Officially, Jacob Swarner swelled to death. The discrepancies between the historical record and Kantor's telling are as intriguing as the correlations: If Kantor is absolutely clear that Swarner served in the 2 New York Cavalry, Company H, he is also quite clear that he died of some sort of nonspecific, but non-swelling, ailment in February of 1864. I'll discuss these discrepancies in more detail later. For the moment, my point is simply this: that I began reading Andersonville differently after learning that J. H. Swarner actually lived, and that what Kantor had done with this scene was to use narrative--paradoxically, peculiarly--to try to memorialize the otherwise unknown, irretrievable, probably unremarkable story of his death.

I had expected to find the major figures of the Andersonville episode made over into characters, and I did: Camp Commandant Henry Wirz was there, operating endlessly on his shattered, neuralgic wrist to remove bullet fragments and agonizing, petulantly and ineffectively, about the poor facilities at the camp; Brigadier General John Winder was there, cavalierly refusing to ensure that the Confederate prison camps were adequately supplied; the ascetic Irish priest Peter Whelan was there, tending the Andersonville sick, administering last rites, and tolerating conditions no other clergyman had been able--or willing--to stand. Even Willie Collins, the thug who beat Ed Blamey up, is there--one of the few Andersonville prisoners to acquire some notoriety, and hence personal distinction, in the camp, Collins is remembered as the leader of the Raiders, a prison gang, and as one of the several men whose lawlessness and violence ultimately led their fellow prisoners to try, condemn, and hang them. Working towards literary characterization from archival records, Kantor paints each of these characters vividly, convincingly, true to historical fictional form.

All this was to be expected. What I had not expected was to find ordinary, run-of-the-mill Andersonville prisoners, people about whom virtually nothing is known, given a similar pride of place in Kantor's novel. I had expected Kantor to preserve the sheer faceless anonymity that characterized the waning lives and horrible deaths of the majority of Andersonville men, if only by virtue of necessity. That is not how Kantor chose to pursue his project, however. His decision to make a character of a man about whom we know very little besides the fact that he was at Andersonville and that he died there is tremendously suggestive, at least from the standpoint of the reader who approaches the novel with a vested, if potentially misplaced, historical interest, who is hoping the novel will say something the historical record cannot about what it was like to be a person living in that place at that time.

Once I discovered that J. H. Swarner was not, like Ed Blamey, a figment of Kantor's imagination, but was, rather, a sort of literary memorial planted by Kantor, Andersonville stopped being for me a straightforward historical novel and became instead a work of embedded genealogy. I started watching for my ancestor in Kantor's prose, reading with the not wholly unrealistic hope that David Sells might also make an appearance in the story, if only, as in the case of Swarner, as a largely speechless near-corpse.

To be continued....

For what it's worth, in partial starvation, you swell up. This is true in kwashiorkor (where there are enough calories but no protein) and in lack of calories. You get low protein in the blood, and anemia, then you swell up. You get a fatty liver, and your muscles, including your heart, gradually gets replaced with fibrous tissue.
Many of our Kwashiorkor children died during the recovery phase, i.e. after we started feeding them up. (I worked in Africa 20 years ago, and we had a nutrition village).
Anasarca is generalized edema of the body. Dropsy was edema, usuall chronic of the legs and abdomen, caused by heart or kidney failure.
He didn't "swell to death", he died of the long term effects of severe malnutrition.

Of course he died of malnutrition's longterm effects. My point--and a point Kantor makes repeatedly throughout the novel--is that the official record does what it can to obscure this. Kantor notes that prisoners shot by guards--sometimes for sport--were often listed as dying "by hemorrhage."

I fell upon this site and wanted to pop in and add a few words. As a historian and Volunteer for the National Park Service here at Andersonville I thought I would mention if not in th ebook, that Jacob Swarner,, I assume this is the one mentioned, was the brother of the first prisoner who died here at Andersonville. Adam Swarner died here after arriving sick and dying on February 27 1864 just 2 days after arriving with the first 400 prisoners from Belle Island. If anyone has questions about Andersonville please feel free to write me.
Kevin

Has anyone examined the rates of disease and death in Union POW camps and compared them to Andersonville? I have a friend whose father was taught by Eugene Genovese back when he was a Marxist and apparently Genovese says that a couple of Union camps had death rates at least as high as Andersonville. And that is even worse because the Confederates, due to blockades and Union destructions, could not feed or medicate their own troops close to adequately the last couple of years while the Union had no problems with food, medicine, and transportation of both. If Union camps had even close to the death rates of Andersonville, it would have been deliberate in a way that is worse than any deliberateness in generally hungry and medicine-lacking Confederate territory.

You can see the mortality rates and other observations Andersonville at my website: www.kipchak.com, if you are so inclined.

I seek an honest telling of the Anderson tale, but that can be such a difficult task.

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