Here’s a piece of Andersonville history most people don’t know. The greatest immediate danger to a prisoner in the summer of 1864 wasn’t the guards. It was other prisoners.

They were called the Raiders—organized gangs who robbed, beat, and killed fellow inmates for food, blankets, and whatever valuables a new prisoner hadn’t yet lost. At their peak they operated with near impunity in a camp where the guards had no interest in policing the interior.

So the prisoners did something remarkable. A group calling themselves the Regulators went to Captain Wirz, the commandant, and asked permission to police their own. They held trials—actual trials, with a jury of newly arrived prisoners who had no stake in old grudges. On July 11, 1864, six Raider leaders were hanged inside the stockade, by prisoners, with lumber the commandant supplied for the scaffold. The six are buried at Andersonville to this day, set apart from the honored dead.

As a soldier, this episode fascinates me more than almost anything else about the place. Thirty thousand starving men, abandoned by every institution that was supposed to protect them, built a functioning system of justice from nothing. Order is not something handed down. It’s something people make, even in hell. Maybe especially in hell.

In Howl, the Regulator uprising is the hinge of the Andersonville section—seen from above, from the pigeon roost, by a guard who knew it was coming three days before the commandant did. And who set a price on what came next.

Howl: WT Sherman’s Monster Hunters is available on Amazon. https://amzn.to/40WYgfJ