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American Service Men and Women Tell Their Stories of Survival Show 32 with Host Pamela Clark - The Civil War (Episode 11)

April 8, 2026·44 min·3 clips

Emaciated Union prisoners marching toward Jacksonville recognize US cavalry uniforms for the first time — and a shout of joy carries four miles back down the road.

1. New Heights Show on Education host Pamela Clark continues Episode 32 of 'American Service Men and Women Tell Their Stories of Survival,' reading the final chapters of an anonymous 19th-century Civil War prisoner's memoir. 2. Clark is the sole voice; she reads aloud and occasionally pauses to express her emotional response to the material, which she describes as having been neglected in American school curricula. 3. The episode's core theme is what ordinary people endure, refuse, and survive — and whether the nation has remembered it honestly. 4. Chapter 22, 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' opens in late April 1865 with 3,300 prisoners on a small island near Jacksonville, Florida, being told by their Confederate guards that they are being released because the war is effectively over. 5. The Confederate colonel's speech, described by the narrator as 'a lie,' ordered the prisoners to walk the railroad bed to Jacksonville and advised them to tell Northerners that the South could never be beaten — concealing that he was himself under orders to surrender his command to US authorities. 6. Prisoners walked a road they estimate was 42 miles; the sickest fell out within one or two miles; the narrator and his partner Bob pushed to the front, with the narrator carrying Bob's bag because Bob had scurvy in his limbs. 7. When the prisoners encountered Union cavalry and finally identified the blue uniforms close enough to recognise them, a collective shout erupted that the narrator says carried three or four miles back along the road to stragglers still behind. 8. The cavalry captain looked at the prisoners' emaciated bodies, rags, and hollow faces and 'stood up in his stirrups and swore a terrible oath of vengeance'; the troopers turned away to hide their tears. 9. Near Jacksonville, the prisoners learned at the infantry picket line that Richmond had fallen, Lee had surrendered, Johnson had surrendered, and Lincoln was dead — all in one conversation. 10. The narrator describes the prisoners' reaction: scurvy-crippled men who could not straighten their limbs danced and kicked sand twenty feet high; they seized the regimental band's flag, wrapped it around their bodies, and screamed 'This is God's country.' 11. Chapter 23, 'Homeward Bound,' describes the camp at Jacksonville, the distribution of pork, coffee, and whiskey, and Bob and the narrator sitting up all night unable to sleep from excitement, talking about what they would do when they reached home. 12. The narrator reports that of 3,300 prisoners turned loose, only 700 reached Union lines initially; eleven men who had 'struggled so bravely to keep up' and greeted the flag at the head of the column were dead by the next morning. 13. The prisoners stayed in Jacksonville about three weeks, received new clothes, had their hair trimmed, and were shipped by steamboat to Fernandina and then on the ocean steamer Cassandra to Fortress Monroe, then to Annapolis, then to Camp Chase, Ohio, where they were discharged on June 16th. 14. The narrator's homecoming is described simply: 'My folks received me as one from the dead' and 'there were no dry eyes.' 15. The most devastating passage is the narrator's account of what happened to his friends John and Cudge: they made it to Vicksburg and were exchanged, but were loaded onto the Sultana — a steamboat inspectors had already condemned as unsafe, carrying 1,800 men when 500-600 was capacity — which exploded; the narrator calls this 'murder by an agent of the United States government.' 16. Survivor Charlie Higgins told the narrator that Cudge was struck and killed by the explosion, John was never found, and Charlie himself was pulled from the Mississippi five miles downstream. 17. The episode then includes General James Garfield's speech at the Andersonville Survivors Reunion in Toledo, Ohio, October 3, 1879, in which he frames the prisoners' suffering as a daily moral refusal: 188,000 Union prisoners were offered freedom, food, clothing, and family reunion in exchange for joining the Confederate Army; fewer than 3,000 accepted. 18. Garfield asserts that the Confederate policy of deliberately reducing prisoners to 'idiots and skeletons' and then exchanging broken bodies for healthy rebels was 'the most atrocious policy in the civilized world since the dark ages,' and refuses to shake any Confederate hand until their cause is acknowledged as treason. 19. The episode ends with a 19th-century newspaper correspondent's description of the Andersonville cemetery in Georgia: 13,715 men buried in a walled enclosure, 1,000 graves marked 'unknown,' and occasional visitors who had survived the stockade identifiable to the superintendent by 'the effects of fear, dread, and vivid recollection' that come back onto their faces. 20. Best for listeners interested in primary-source Civil War history, military survival accounts, and oral history readings; less useful for those seeking analytical discussion or modern-day veteran interviews.

As heard by us

A spare 1865 survival story that lands with quiet force.

The episode of New Heights Show on Education turns a 1865 survival account into a hard, humane listen. Pamela Clark guides the story through prisoners, rail transfers, exhaustion, and the pressure of staying alive, while the plain detail keeps the suffering close.

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Hear a first-person prison-camp survival story told with plainspoken urgency.

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