Andersonville, Thirteen Thousand Names

Lyrics

[Intro]
Sweetwater Creek, you narrow vein,
cutting through the mud of Andersonville,
July 1864, under that merciless sun.

[Verse 1]
I lean close to you, Sweetwater,
your waters barely a trickle now,
carrying the waste of forty-five thousand men.
Henry Wirz paces the perimeter,
his Swiss accent barking orders from the pigeon roosts,
while the deadline fence stands silent,
nineteen feet from the wall, a line no one crosses.
John McElroy, eighteen years raw,
scribbles in his diary by the shebang's edge,
'July 15, men dying so fast, impossible to track.'

[Chorus]
Oh, Sweetwater, you poisoned artery,
flowing with dysentery and despair,
thirteen thousand names etched in the earth nearby.
The dead wagon creaks at dawn,
hauling bodies to the trenches,
no coffins, no shrouds, just the Georgia clay.

[Verse 2]
I whisper to you, creek of filth,
as the cornmeal rations crumble,
weevils crawling in the coarse grind,
prisoners boiling rats in tin cups over scraps of fire.
The stench rises at midday, 100 degrees,
unwashed flesh and rotting limbs,
echoing coughs through the night,
rifle cracks when a shadow nears the fence.
Henry Wirz, November 25, 1823 born,
will hang by November 10, 1865,
for obeying orders, he claims.

[Bridge]
Andersonville National Cemetery,
still tended, rows tight as the stockade was,
unknown Union soldiers marked in stone.
Sweetwater, you remember the moans,
the prescribed silence of the graves.

[Verse 3]
I trace your banks with my voice,
where enslaved hands built these walls,
their stories buried deeper than the dead.
John L. Ransom writes of the dawn roll calls,
standing hours in the baking mud,
the overpowering smell clinging like a shroud.

[Chorus]
Oh, Sweetwater, you poisoned artery,
flowing with dysentery and despair,
thirteen thousand names etched in the earth nearby.
The dead wagon creaks at dawn,
hauling bodies to the trenches,
no coffins, no shrouds, just the Georgia clay.

[Outro]
Sweetwater Creek, you narrow vein,
carry this ode to the trembling earth,
where history's gaps swallow the unnamed.