October 15, 2024
“Andersonville Raiders”
– Ms. Gary Morgan
October 15, 2024
On a sultry evening in July, 1864, six men were marched into the stockade at Andersonville Prison. There, in front of 24,000 witnesses, they were forced to mount a hastily erected gallows and were hanged. They had been tried, convicted and sentenced by their fellow prisoners for robbing and assaulting – and rumor had it, murdering – their fellow prisoners. They were part of a group of rogue prisoners known throughout the prison as “Raiders.”
Who were these six men? Were they actually guilty of the crimes they were accused of? Were they really murderers? Why are the names on some of their graves not found in any military records? What led them to the gallows? Drawing from diaries, military records, the recently discovered transcript of the raiders’ trial and prisoners’ memoirs that were published within five years of the prison’s closing, a detailed, clearer and more accurate picture of the raiders and the events leading up to their hanging finally answers these questions.
An unexpected offer to read a friend’s collection of letters from a Civil War sailor who died at Andersonville changed the course of Gary Morgan’s life. The letters led to the discovery of the sailor’s diary, kept while he was a prisoner of war at Libby, Salisbury, and Andersonville prisons. The sailor, Frederic Augustus James, wrote in his diary daily, and in the nine months that he kept it, he left only one blank – the name of the six men who were hanged at Andersonville as raiders. Because by now she was slightly obsessed by the sailor and his story, Gary went to look up the missing names and was surprised to find that there were seven names recorded, but only six men who were hanged. Sorting that out took two years and multiple trips up and down the east coast, looking at diaries, military records, and prisoner’s letters home, but by the time she was finished, she had it all sorted out an had enough material to write a book about the raiders incident, which she did, publishing The Andersonville Raiders: Yankee vs Yankee in the Civil War’s Most Notorious Prison with Stackpole Books in March, 2020.
Gary Morgan is a History teacher in Western Massachusetts. She has spoken about the raiders all over the country, including three times at the National Prisoner of War Museum at Andersonville, Georgia. Her hobbies include crocheting, volunteering at a cat shelter, and genealogy (or, as her brother calls it, “Collecting dead people”). She is currently working on a second Andersonville related book, called Unknown Andersonville, which explores some of the lesser known aspects of the prison.

