Dancing along the deadline

by Ezra Hoyt Ripple

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 bi