Thomas O’Dea’s Lithograph of Andersonville Prison

Thomas O’Dea was born in Ireland in
1848 and came to Boston as a young man.
When the Civil War started he was adamant about serving and ran away,
enrolling as a drummer in the Maine Infantry Volunteers. He continued in the war and was captured in
May 1864 during the Wilderness Campaign in Virginia. After being moved from one prison camp to
another, he was finally taken to the infamous Andersonville Prison, also known
as Camp Sumter. The prisoner of war camp
was located in Georgia and operated during the final 15 months of the Civil
War. It was designed to hold 10,000
prisoners, but when O’Dea arrived there were 35,000 prisoners of war at the
camp.

The severe overcrowding resulted in
starvation, sickness, and death. Forty
percent of all Union POWs who died in captivity during the entire war died at
Andersonville. O’Dea would have
encountered a truly desperate situation at the prison, with insufficient food,
polluted water, and a near-complete absence of medical care. Captain Henry Wirz, the Confederate commander
of Andersonville, had a cruel disposition and a lack of empathy that led to the
high death rates at the prison. He
became the only Confederate commander convicted and executed for war crimes
after the Civil War.

Thomas O’Dea was released in
February 1864 and eventually returned to Boston in July. He was physically and emotionally shaken by
his time at the camp and was heartbroken to discover that his family had
disappeared without a trace. He searched
in vain for 25 years to locate his sister and parents. He left Boston and settled in the town of
Cohoes, Albany County, New York.

In 1879, O’Dea saw a picture of
Andersonville Prison which showed a well-organized and clean camp. He dedicated himself to creating a true
depiction. Although he had never drawn
before, he picked up the skill quickly and with an apparent natural talent
sketched in pencil a detailed and accurate image of the prison from memory. He produced a 4.5’ x 9’ bird’s eye view of
the site as he remembered it.

O’Dea’s main image captured the despair, hunger, disease, and death at
the camp. It is surrounded by 19
separate scenes including the modes of punishment, execution of raiders, the
line of dead at the gate, and a shooting at the dead line.

The “dead line” was a demarcation
inside the main stockade wall. It
created a no-man’s land into which no Union prisoner was allowed to cross. Any prisoner even touching the “dead line”
was shot without warning by Confederate guards who lined the stockade walls on
platforms called “pigeon roosts.” Due to
the extreme manpower shortages in the Confederate Army near the end of the war,
the prison guards were often just young boys.

There were only two positive scenes
in O’Dea’s sketch. One was an image of
Providence Spring, a bubbling spring of fresh water revealed one night during a
mighty thunderstorm when a bolt of lightning struck the ground. Providence Spring was a saving grace for many
thirsty soldiers. The other image of
hope was of Father Peter Whelan, known as “The Angel of Andersonville,” ministering
to the prisoners. At the bottom right
corner is a self-portrait of the artist, Thomas O’Dea.

O’Dea’s panoramic pencil sketch became
an immediate sensation. He set up a
business and ordered 10,000 lithograph copies of his work. He sold the lithographs for $5 a copy, but
provided them to Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) Posts for a reduced
rate. Astonishingly, O’Dea’s brother
George saw one of the prints at a GAR post in Alton, Illinois, and it led him
to an eventual reunion with Thomas.

One of the Andersonville prints was
sent to Colonel William Distin at the GAR post in Quincy. Destin had spent several months at the prison
but was able to bribe a guard and escape in April 1865. Destin had the piece handsomely framed and it
was displayed in the

Whig

newspaper’s office window.

Destin sent Thomas O’Dea a
message. In the letter he said, “I have
examined the picture very closely and can easily locate my ‘shebang’ where I
whiled away most of my time…your picture is certainly the best and most natural
representation of that horrible pen that I have ever seen.” (Shebang was a term used in the mid-to-late
19th century to describe a primitive dwelling or rustic hut. It was used by Walt Whitman in

Specimen Days

in 1862 and later in 1872
by Mark Twain in

Roughing It

.) The
letter was printed in the

Quincy Whig

on Thursday, November 10, 1887.

The Andersonville print framed by Colonel
Destin later ended up at the Illinois Soldier’s and Sailor’s Home in Quincy,
along with a wooden plate and a spoon used by Distin while he was languishing
at the prison in Georgia. The Home
donated the O’Dea lithograph and the wooden plate and spoon used by Distin to
the Historical Society of Quincy and Adams County. The items are currently on display in the
Visitor’s Center across the brick alley from the Governor John Wood Mansion.

In May 1914, the 50th
anniversary of his capture, Thomas O’Dea spent a week at Andersonville, which
at the time was operated by the War Department.
He was surprised to learn that his print had been removed because many
Southerners objected to O’Dea’s sketch being on display.

Thomas O’Dea died in 1926 and is
buried in Saint Agnes Cemetery in Cohoes, New York. Today, the Andersonville site is a National
Historic Site operated by the National Park Service: There are no longer any attempts to hide the
unimaginable cruelty of the Civil War’s most notorious prison camp.

Sources

Distin,
W.L. “Andersonville Prison.”

Quincy Whig

, November
10, 1887, 6.

“How
Andersonville Looks.”

The Quincy Daily Herald,

April 20,
1899.

“Land
Mark of the War.”

The Quincy Daily Herald

, September 22, 1910.

McPherson,
James M.

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, 1848-1865

.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Perreault,
Paul. “O’Dea’s Famous Picture of Andersonville Prison.”

“Wirz.”

The
Quincy Whig

, November 18, 1865.