Dancing along the deadline

Ezra Hoyt Ripple was a private in the 52d Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry Regiment and was captured during a bloody engagement with rebel troops near Charleston, South Carolina, in July 1864. Private Ripple spent the next six months as a prisoner of war and had to endure the horrors of Georgia's infamous Andersonville prison, as well as those of the Florence prison in South Carolina. Dancing Along the Deadline is Ripple's remarkable eyewitness account of survival written just after the end of the Civil War. Designed to hold 10,000 men, Andersonville prison was confining over 31,000 Union prisoners by the time Ripple and his comrades arrived. Ripple found the stockade to be a chaotic, filthy sea of starving and decrepit humanity. About twenty paces from the stockade walls was the so-called "deadline," a series of posts driven into the ground, the crossing of which would guarantee instant death from a guard's bullet. Fortunately, Ripple possessed a talent that made his incarceration a bit easier: he was a talented fiddle player. At first reluctant to soothe the enemy, Ripple reasoned that "as I was expected to get some aid and comfort from the enemy in return, I thought one would balance the other." At the urging of his comrades, Ripple formed an orchestra of other prisoners with musical abilities. The band was so good that they were allowed to play at social functions outside the prison grounds. Ripple eventually escaped, but was recaptured. Accompanying Ripple's moving narrative are dramatic drawings by well-known Civil War artist James E. Taylor, whom Ripple commissioned to create lantern slides to illustrate his many speaking engagements during the post-Civil War years.