John L. Ransom

John L. Ransom (1843–1919) was a Union soldier from Michigan whose diary of imprisonment became one of the best-known accounts of Civil War prison camps. A sergeant in the Ninth Michigan Cavalry, he was captured in Tennessee in November 1863 and held at Belle Isle, Andersonville and other Confederate prisons, where he kept a daily record of hunger, disease and death. He survived and finally escaped, and in 1881 he published the diary himself with a list of the Union dead buried at Andersonville.