Fatal Frontier – Frank McNally on the sinister origin of deadlines

In today’s world, most people face deadlines of one kind or another at least occasionally. For some of us, such things are a daily affliction, albeit a necessary one.

The diarist has been known to confess that without “the gun to the head” of an imminent deadline, he would never get anything done. Luckily, this is just a metaphor (so far – Ed). But it hints at the d-word’s dark origins, to which guns were indeed central.

In fact, it was as two words that the term first became popularised, during the American Civil War. A “dead line” then was a notional boundary inside or outside the official perimeter of a military internment camp.

Sometimes it comprised nothing more than a low rail, rope, or trench. But a prisoner who crossed it, or even threatened to, risked being shot and typically was.

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According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, the phrase began to appear in print circa 1863, including one example – in a letter to a Tennessee newspaper – that was already borrowing it for figurative civilian use.

But its appearances multiplied in 1864 thanks to one especially notorious prison in Confederate Georgia.

Fort Sumpter, better known by the name of the local village Andersonville, may have an even greater claim to infamy as the prototype for the 20th-century concentration camp (a dubious honour often attributed to British army prisons in the Boer War).

Built to house 10,000 inmates, it had 26,000 by the war’s end, despite appalling death tolls – 100 a day at one point – from disease, malnutrition, and cruelty.

The camp commandant, Swiss-born Henry Wirz, was later hanged for war crimes, one of only two people to meet that fate. Yet in 1908, the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected a monument to his honour in Andersonville. It still stands.

In the meantime, Wirz’s camp was also responsible for making the term “dead line” widely known, via official reports, protest poetry, and the early histories of the war.

A Sanitary Commission Bulletin of September 1864 explained the concept as follows: “Twenty feet inside and parallel to the fence is a light railing, forming the ‘dead line,’ beyond which the projection of a foot or finger is sure to bring the deadly bullet of the sentinel.”

An anti-slavery Boston newspaper, The Liberator, evoked it in verse: “No shelter know the sufferers; bolder ones/Daring to seek it, scorched by the Georgian suns,/Drop on the dead-line ‘neath the warders’ guns.”

Faced with the horrors of the camps, some inmates preferred death. Thus Thomas Prentice Kettell’s History of the Great Rebellion (1866) records an army memo sent to Abraham Lincoln about the Andersonville prisoners’ plight: “They are fast losing hope and becoming utterly reckless of life. Numbers, crazed by their sufferings, wander about in a state of idiocy. Others deliberately cross the ‘Dead Line’ and are remorselessly shot down.”

During the camp’s short existence – 14 months – almost 13,000 men died there, mostly of disease, malnutrition, and the insanitary effects of overcrowding. Hundreds of these were Irish.

In their superb blog Irishamericancivilwar.com, Damian Shiels and his colleagues suggest the local cemetery contains more casualties from this country than any other site of the war. The blog’s Anderson Irish Project is still adding their names and origins, but on an interactive map of Ireland most counties are already represented.

One of the luckier prisoners was Thomas O’Dea from Co Clare. Still a teenager when interned in 1864, he survived incarceration and the war in general.

And it is to him that history owes the most vivid images of life in Andersonville, thanks to an extraordinary series of drawings published 20 years later to sensational effect.

O’Dea’s highly detailed portraits include an overview of the camp in 1864 when, according to the caption, 35,000 prisoners were crammed in.

Other drawings depict the daily laying out of the dead, “like cordwood”; the escape tunnels dug by prisoners; the pursuit by dogs, and the tortures, that awaited many of those who tried to get away; and the contrastingly merciful role played by a Wexford priest, Fr Peter Whelan, aka “the Angel of Andersonville”.

And yes, one picture shows the moment when a prisoner, having crossed the dead line to reach the fresh water supply just beyond it (a typical arrangement in camps), is shot down from the watchtowers.

Although “deadline” was used as a metaphor during and immediately after the Civil War, according to Merriam Webster, it took half a century or more for the word to enter the mainstream.

The medium then was journalism, but not the subject. Instead, the image was being borrowed by death’s jovial companion in inevitability: taxes. A newspaper of December 30th, 1919, predicted a flood of petitions overnight given the imminent “deadline for filings”.