😾 by The Grouchy Old Cat Who’s Seen Too Much
Well, butter my paws and call me bitter. I cracked open Michael Dougherty’s diary expecting gloom—what I got was full-on despair, soaked in sweat, blood, and bureaucratic cruelty. If you’re looking for the milk of human kindness, don’t go pawing around Andersonville. It curdled long before it got there.
This is no soldier’s journal. This is a slow-motion horror flick where the monsters wear uniforms and call themselves civilized. Starvation wasn’t a tactic; it was a sentence. Dougherty’s words describe men wasting into bone racks, dying by the dozens—no, the hundreds—every single day. Over 13,000 deaths in that one pen of pestilence. That’s not neglect. That’s policy.
Let’s talk filth. These weren’t camps. They were open graves. No shelter. No clothing. Diseases rippling through like a wildfire through dry hay. I’ve buried hairballs with more dignity. Dougherty watched comrades drink from the same stream they defecated in. He counted limbs littering the ground from amputations done with rusty blades, more butchery than surgery. Medical “practice”? Please. These weren’t doctors. They were death apprentices.
And that warden—Wirz. Refusing Northern food deliveries just so more men would perish in agony. That creature had the empathy of a scorched boot. They hanged him, yes, but no rope could balance that ledger.
If one more whisker-twirling apologist purrs about “Southern heritage” in my presence, I will cough up this diary—ink, bile, and all—and shove it under their nose. Dougherty lived it. We should read it. And weep. And remember. Our U.S. Armed Forces.
🐾 Final verdict: five stars for a shredded Confederate flag, but none for “Lost Cause” nostalgia.
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