AMERICAN WAR PRISONS
War-prisoners in other countries--The worst in the United
States--British prisoners during the Revolution--Prisoners during
the Civil War--Important Confederate prisons, Libby, Belle
Isle--Sufferings of Union prisoners--Attempts to tunnel
out--Andersonville; situation, crowding, lack of food--Horrible
suffering and high mortality--Conditions at Salisbury, North
Carolina--Federal prisons--Suffering at Fort Delaware--Descriptions
of prisoners held there--Johnson’s Island--Horrible suffering from
cold--Dr. Wyeth’s experiences at Camp Morton--Point Lookout and
Elmira--Mortality statistics--Responsibility for ill-treatment.
England and France are not the only countries in which prisoners of war,
and other non-criminal prisoners have suffered. Indeed the story of
those made captive by the fortune of war is so much worse in other
countries, that the hardships mentioned in the preceding chapters seem
trifling inconveniences in comparison. Strange to say the most horrible
prison pens have not been in Europe, but across the Atlantic, in the
latter half of the nineteenth century.
Imprisonment for debt was common in America during the colonial period,
and persisted after the adoption of the Constitution, but in a thinly
settled country, with no large cities, there was no great prison which
stands out like the Fleet or the King’s Bench.
During the Revolution, British prisoners were taken here and there, but
the numbers except at Saratoga, where General Burgoyne surrendered, in
1777, and at Yorktown, were not large. Generally they were treated as
well as circumstances allowed and besides were soon exchanged. The fact
that they were in a hostile country, where their power to work harm was
slight, made strict guarding unnecessary.
Burgoyne’s men under the convention signed by the British leader and
General Gates were promised transportation to England on parole, and
first were marched to the vicinity of Boston. The agreement was
repudiated, however, and Congress ordered that they be taken to
Charlottesville, Virginia. Madame Riedesel, the wife of the commander of
the Hessians, has given in her sprightly diary an interesting account of
their experiences, first at Charlottesville and then at Lancaster,
Pennsylvania. Evidently there was little suffering. Many simply walked
away and settled in the new country. Others joined the American army and
by the time peace was declared the camp had practically melted away.
Some dark pages tell of the experiences of American prisoners in New
York when the city was held by the British. Even worse were the
experiences in the British prison ships in the harbour. There
over-crowding, improper food and disease, took heavy toll of the
prisoners, but the story is the same, in its essential features, as the
account of the prison ships given in the preceding chapters. A prison
ship was a prison ship whether anchored in British or in American
waters.
With the great Civil War, we enter upon new ground. The contending
parties were not different nations, but sharers of a common heritage
joined both by tradition and by blood. War was waged upon an
extraordinary scale. Never before were so many prisoners taken and held.
While the figures are not entirely reliable, the best estimate places
the number captured by both sides at 674,045, and the number held in
prison for a longer or shorter time at 409,608, truly a stupendous army.
The proper care of such a number of men is task of surpassing
difficulty, even where the authorities are accustomed to handling men in
large masses. When they are not, the machinery must break down. Add to
the inherent difficulty the fact that prejudice was strong, that war
always brings out the petty and cruel as well as the nobler sentiments,
and that one of the contending parties was hard pressed for food for its
own soldiers, and you have the materials for tragedy.
Some prisoners were taken on both sides during 1861, and the number
increased the next year. In 1862 Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War of
the United States, stopped the exchanges because of a quarrel about
terms. The differences were patched up, however, and exchanges went on
until July, 1863, when Major-General Halleck again ordered exchanges to
stop. On the Federal side many negroes had been enlisted, a considerable
proportion of whom were runaway slaves. The Confederate authorities
declared that these were not subject to exchange but should be returned
to their masters. Both sides were firm, and few prisoners were exchanged
until near the close of the struggle.
An investigator has counted sixty-eight points where Confederate
prisoners were kept for a longer or shorter time, counting each town or
city as one even though several prisons were within the limits. The
number of Federal prisons was not so large as seldom was it necessary to
remove prisoners because of the approach of a Confederate army. Only a
few are important, however, on either side.
The best known Confederate prisons were Libby and Belle Isle in
Richmond, Va., Salisbury, N. C., Florence and Charleston, S. C.,
Andersonville and Millen, Ga., though at different times there were
large numbers at Danville, Va., Raleigh, N. C., Columbia, S. C., and
Savannah, Ga., but it is chiefly Libby and Belle Isle, Salisbury and
Andersonville, that have filled the popular imagination.
Libby was an old three-story warehouse 140 by 105 feet, in the centre of
Richmond. The building was divided by transverse brick walls into rooms
each about 105 × 45 feet. This was preëminently a prison for officers.
Few enlisted men were confined here, but it was so crowded at times
that it was difficult to walk among the sleeping bodies. There were no
bunks. Wrapped in the thin vermin-infested blankets the men lay upon the
hard floors. There was an abundant supply of good water for drinking and
cooking, limited bathing arrangements, and fair sanitary conveniences.
The ceiling and walls were whitewashed at intervals and the floor was
scrubbed every day. Lying upon the damp floor was, however, a cause of
much sickness.
The food in the early months of use was fair, though the Northern
stomach unaccustomed to corn meal revolted at times. Boxes from home
were promptly delivered, and the sutlers furnished dainties of a sort.
As the months went on supplies in the Confederacy grew scarcer and
rations were cut down. The portion of bread was smaller and of poorer
quality. Some prisoners declare that both cob and husk were ground with
the corn. The meat was poorer in quality and smaller in quantity. As it
was generally served raw, the prisoners cooked it badly. The supply of
vegetables was scanty and sometimes for days none was issued. Boxes were
no longer delivered promptly. Scurvy, dysentery, and severe stomach
troubles were prevalent, and hundreds died.
Yet hope was not given up. The men had resources within themselves.
Prisoners tell of dances, vaudeville performances, and attempts to give
special dinners. The hope of escape did not die. In the fall of 1863
several unsuccessful attempts to tunnel out were made. Col. Thomas E.
Rose of the 77th Pennsylvania regiment had conceived the plan of
tunnelling from the cellar under the street east of the prison into a
warehouse yard. The tunnel led through a fireplace in the cook room,
where the prisoners were permitted to go, down into the cellar. The
piles supporting the walls were cut through with pocket knives, and the
earth was attacked. The only implement was a chisel. A wooden spittoon,
to which strings were attached, brought the earth back into the cellar
where it was spread on the floor and concealed by straw.
The work went on for several weeks, when owing to a miscalculation the
tunnel came to the surface in the street. The hole was stopped, however,
and was undiscovered by sentinels or pedestrians, while the work went on
under the fence. On Feb. 8, 1864, one hundred and nine officers passed
through and fifty-three succeeded in reaching the Federal lines. Some of
the remainder died of exposure, and some preferred death to further
imprisonment. Those recaptured, among whom was Colonel Rose, were
brought back and all prisoners were more closely guarded thereafter.
Belle Isle, the prison for the enlisted men, was a wooded island in the
James, once a place of resort for pleasure. On it was constructed a
prison pen with few buildings. The supply of tents was insufficient, the
water supply not good, and the food worse than in Libby. During the
summer months the mortality was not excessive, but when the sharp winter
came on, the ill-fed, poorly-clothed, badly-sheltered prisoners suffered
terribly. On January 5th, 1864, five are said to have been frozen to
death. The general testimony seems to show that the officers were
humane, but many acts of cruelty on the part of the guards undoubtedly
occurred. Some of the prisoners were desperate characters, bounty
jumpers and the like, and they did not scruple to rob and even murder
their comrades. Many lost hope and observed no sanitary precautions. The
report of the U. S. Surgeon who received late in the war one hundred and
eighty-nine prisoners from this place, says: “Every case wore upon it
the visage of hunger, the expression of despair.... Their hair was
dishevelled, their beards long and matted with dirt, their skin
blackened and caked with the most loathsome filth, their bodies and
clothing covered with vermin.”
As the number of prisoners and the difficulty of feeding them in
Virginia increased, arrangements were made to send them southward.
Orders were given in November, 1863, to select a site for a prison in
southern Georgia. The little hamlet of Andersonville, sixty-two miles
south of Macon, was chosen and a log stockade fifteen feet high
enclosing about sixteen and a half acres was constructed. A small stream
about five feet wide and a foot deep divided the pen, and was expected
to furnish water and carry away the sewage. No shelters of any account
were constructed, and the bake house was so constructed that the waste
from it fouled the stream.
Prisoners began to arrive in February, 1864, before the work was
completed, and during August the number was nearly 33,000. Though the
stockade had been enlarged in June, to include twenty-six and a half
acres, three and a half acres of the area were too marshy to be used. In
addition a light railing fifteen feet from the wall indicated the “dead
line” across which a prisoner passed at his peril. A simple calculation
will show that only a few square feet were available for each of the
poor wretches, and the crowding if nothing else was bound to produce
sickness.
The regular Confederate ration was ordered issued at first, consisting
of one-third of a pound of pork and one and one-fourth pounds of corn
meal with beans, rice and molasses as often as practicable, but this was
soon reduced. Gen. J. H. Winder, commandant of prisons, telegraphed to
Richmond, July 25, 1864, that with 29,400 prisoners, 2,650 troops and
500 labourers, there was not a day’s ration on hand, and suggested that
at least ten days’ supplies should be always kept in reserve. He was
answered that Lee’s army could be furnished with only one day’s food at
a time, and that it was impossible to grant his request.
The quality of the food was bad, the bread was only half cooked, there
was insufficient wood for the prisoners to cook the meat, and some of
the scanty supply was appropriated by the hungry guards who fared
little, if any, better than the prisoners, so far as food was concerned.
The prison also contained many desperate characters who robbed their
fellow prisoners. These outrages became so frequent, that with the
consent of Capt. Henry Wirz, the commander of the stockade, the
prisoners themselves organised a court, tried, convicted and hanged six
of these miscreants, after which, the “raiders,” as they were called,
were more careful.
During the summer of 1864, the stockade was a hell on earth. Ten
thousand men might have lived within the enclosure with some degree of
decency. Thirty thousand could not. The stream could not carry away the
filth, and heavy rains spread it over a large part of the enclosure.
The hospital, though moved to the outside of the stockade, could not
care for the sick. Proper food, medicine, and appliances were lacking
even if the medical staff had been larger and more skilful. The United
States had made medicines contraband of war and many simple drugs could
not be had at any price. Truly the hospital was a “gigantic mass of
human misery.”
The rations issued grew smaller, and more uncertain. President Davis
declares that they were the same issued to the soldiers in the field and
that more could not be expected, particularly as the Confederacy was,
in the face of rebuffs, constantly urging an exchange of prisoners. A
visitor to the Executive Mansion in Richmond, who remained to dinner,
relates that the meal consisted of fried bacon and corn bread. In the
spring of 1864, General Lee had meat upon his table twice a week, but
his usual fare was cabbage, sweet potatoes and corn bread, while
sometimes the troops marched for days with no other food than parched
corn, which they pounded into a coarse powder and mixed with water. Yet
during all this time, there was food in some parts of the South, but
poor transportation facilities made it unavailable.
The mortality at Andersonville was fearful. During July, 1864, it was
62.7 per thousand prisoners. In all, from first to last, 49,485
prisoners were confined here, of whom more than 12,800 died, a rate of
twenty-six per cent. How many more died soon after exchange, or else
dragged out a miserable existence with shattered health and broken
spirits, can never be computed. That distinguished and impartial
historian, Mr. James Ford Rhodes, well says: “Thus insufficiently
nourished, exposed by day to the fierce Southern sun, by night to dews,
drenched with torrential rains, languishing amidst filth and stench,
breathing polluted air, homesick, depressed, desperate, these men were
an easy prey to the diseases of diarrhœa, dysentery, scurvy and
gangrene.”
In September, 1864, the near approach of General Sherman caused the
temporary abandonment of the prison. The inmates were sent to Savannah,
Ga., and Charleston, S. C., and thence to Florence, S. C., and Millen,
Ga. This last named place was soon abandoned and the prisoners sent back
to Andersonville. The place had been somewhat cleansed, by sun, wind and
rain, and as it was not again so crowded, conditions were decidedly
better.
At Florence, conditions were bad, but the officers in charge did all
that could be done with the scanty means at hand, and can not be charged
with neglect or cruelty. The same, perhaps, may be said of Salisbury, N.
C., where some of the Andersonville prisoners were sent, but this prison
deserves fuller mention.
The buildings of an abandoned cotton mill situated in a grove of sixteen
acres were purchased by the Confederate government in the fall of 1861
and at first were used as a prison for deserters and disloyal persons.
Gradually prisoners of war were sent and in March, 1862, there were
about fifteen hundred. There was abundance of room, plenty of good
water, and in spite of the coarse food there was little sickness. These
prisoners were soon exchanged, but others followed them. Still, up to
the latter part of 1864 conditions were endurable. In September of this
year, the commandant, Major Gee, was notified to expect a large increase
which arrived before he was ready for them. Early in October 5,000 came
and 10,000 more before the end of the month. Some tents were furnished,
the buildings already constructed sheltered a number, but the larger
part were left to their own resources. Many burrowed into the hillside,
built chimneys to their dugouts, and whittled shavings for a carpet.
Others built rude shelters from boxes and planks. A train was kept
running to bring fuel, but could not furnish an adequate supply. The
wells were drained by constant use and prisoners under guard brought
water from a neighbouring creek. Many of these escaped, and others broke
through the rickety fence in spite of the “dead line” which existed here
as it did at all enclosed prisons north and south.
The food was poor, the rough corn meal caused stomach trouble, and the
hospital arrangements were entirely inadequate. Preparations to build
more barracks were under way, when the officers were notified that the
prison was to be abandoned. Meanwhile Sherman’s triumphant northward
march threw everything into confusion, and conditions remained about the
same until the prisoners were released. To-day the rows of graves in the
Federal Cemetery, many of them containing unknown dead, show that here
as elsewhere disease and hardship reaped a heavy harvest.
Though much more has been written about prison horrors in the South than
in the North, conditions in the latter section were also deplorable.
Where the Federal soldier suffered from the Southern sun the
Confederate suffered from the Northern winter, and other conditions were
not so different as is generally supposed. James Ford Rhodes, quoted
above on Andersonville, says of Federal war prisons generally:[10]
“Prisons at the North were overcrowded ... bathing facilities hardly
existed, ventilation left much to be desired and the drainage was bad.
The policing was imperfect, vermin abounded.... Some of the commandants
were inefficient and others were intemperate.”
Some prisons were old forts and the prisoners occupied the barracks.
Generally they were enclosures like those at Belle Isle, or
Andersonville, though everywhere except at Point Lookout, there were
rude barracks for shelter, and at Point Lookout tents were supplied.
Conditions differed much at different places, depending somewhat upon
the officers. At Fort Warren in Boston Harbour apparently there was no
cause for complaint, while no former inmate speaks of Fort Delaware
without curses.
This last mentioned prison was built upon a small island in Delaware Bay
about two and a half miles from the mainland. Much of the island was
below low water mark and a dyke kept out the water. Canals of polluted
water crossed the prison enclosure, and poisoned any wound washed in
them. There was little or no drainage, food was scanty and bad, the
officers and guards were cruel, the mortality was high. Alexander Hunter
in “Johnny Reb and Billy Yank” says, describing some prisoners released
from that enclosure: “Scores seemed to be ill; many were suffering from
scurvy, while all bore marks of severe treatment in their thin faces and
wasted forms. They were in the dirtiest, filthiest condition imaginable,
and not a face there looked as if it had been washed for weeks. Their
clothes were torn and ragged; in fact some had not enough tatters to
cover their nakedness. Take it all in all, it was the saddest sight that
our eyes had ever looked upon and made the heart ache to witness it.” Of
one particular friend he says further: “In short, a month’s residence in
Fort Delaware had changed him from the very picture of health and
strength into a lame halting invalid whose body and mind seemed to have
received some great shock.”
Johnson’s Island in Lake Erie, near Sandusky, Ohio, was an officers’
prison, corresponding to Libby. The barracks were old wooden buildings
with many cracks and the prisoners suffered intensely from cold. Many of
them were from the far South and had never seen snow. To them, the sharp
winds from the lake represented a torture unknown, and when in January,
1864, the temperature went down to 25° below zero, the suffering was
intense. At first the food was good, but rations were cut down, sutlers
were excluded from the enclosures, and the prisoners declare that they
were always hungry. Some picked decaying food from the swill barrels, or
ate rats when they could be caught.
Camp Morton, at Indianapolis, was an old fair ground, which had been
turned first into a training camp for recruits and then into a prison.
Some of the barracks were the old stalls once used for cattle. It was
generally considered in the North one of the best managed of all the
prisons. Yet Dr. John A. Wyeth, now a distinguished physician of New
York City, who was captured when a boy of eighteen, in an article in the
_Century Magazine_ in 1891, giving his own experience and that of his
fellow-prisoners, says: “I had no disease. It was starvation pure and
simple,” and again, “No bone was too filthy or swill tub too nauseating
for a prisoner to devour. The eating of rats was common.” He further
says that the one thin blanket allowed a prisoner was sometimes covered
with snow which had sifted through the cracks, and some prisoners froze
to death. The guards are described as harsh and a few as tyrannical, and
even murderously inclined.
The prison at Point Lookout on the north shore of the Potomac River just
above the mouth is described by a Virginia officer, A. M. Keiley, in his
interesting book, “A Prisoner of War,” as consisting of two pens on land
only a few inches above water at high tide. The prisoners taken at
Gettysburg were the first to occupy these quarters. Here tents were
supplied in place of barracks, but the supply of wood was scanty, and
during the winter high winds drove water over the land, and converted
the whole pen into a sheet of ice.
The same officer was then transferred to Elmira, New York, where nearly
10,000 prisoners were confined during August, 1864. The ground had been
a receiving station for recruits. Both wooden barracks and tents were in
use. The water was good and the commanding officer was efficient and
humane, though some of his subordinates are charged with cruelty, as was
also a part of the medical staff. Though an abundance of bread was
supplied, little meat was issued, and after the sutlers were excluded,
August 18, 1864, an epidemic of scurvy followed. Speaking of some of his
fellow prisoners who were finally exchanged, he says: “On they came a
ghastly tide with skeleton bodies and lustreless eyes, and brains bereft
of but one thought, and hearts purged of all feelings but one--the
thought of freedom, the love of home ... some with the seal of death
stamped on their wasted cheeks and shrivelled limbs, yet fearing less
death than the added agony of death in the hands of enemies.”
Who was responsible for all this misery? Was this horrible suffering
deliberately inflicted by the authorities with a fixed purpose in view?
Such was undoubtedly the general belief in the North regarding the
Confederate government. Secretary Stanton as early as December, 1863,
declared that Union soldiers held captive “were deprived of shelter,
clothing and food and some have perished from exposure and famine.”
After the war, Captain Wirz, the keeper of Andersonville, was tried and
convicted by a military tribunal which returned a verdict that he had
conspired with Jefferson Davis and others against the lives of Union
soldiers. Wirz was hanged Nov. 10, 1865, and General Winder’s death
probably saved him from a similar fate.
On the other hand President Davis in a message to the Confederate
Congress in December, 1864, says the Union soldiers were given the same
rations “in quantity and quality as those served out to our own gallant
soldiers” while “the most revolting inhumanity has characterised the
conduct of the United States toward the prisoners held by them.”
Many similar official or semi-official statements were made on both
sides. Mr. Rhodes has weighed and sifted the evidence, perhaps more
thoroughly than any other historian, and his verdict is as follows:
“There was no intention on either side to maltreat the prisoners. A mass
of men had to be cared for unexpectedly. Arrangements were made in a
hurry, and as neither side expected a long duration of the war, they
were only makeshifts devised with considerable regard for economy and
expenditure. There was bad management at the North and worse at the
South owing to less efficient organisation with meagre resources. And
it plainly appears from the mass of the evidence that the prisoner at
the North was the better off of the two, as he always had food and
shelter.”
Mr. Rhodes then compares the revised statistics which show that of
194,743 Union prisoners held by the Confederacy, 30,218 or fifteen and a
half per cent. died, while of 214,865 Confederate prisoners 25,976 or
twelve per cent. died. He then declares that considering all things the
balance was nearly even and that the North has no cause to reproach the
South.
In making up this judgment he undoubtedly takes into consideration the
attitude of Secretary Stanton and General Grant. When the Confederate
authorities, burdened with the great mass of prisoners whom they could
not feed, finally and persistently besought exchange upon any terms,
General Grant said in August, 1864: “It is hard on our men held in
Southern prisons not to exchange them but it is humanity to those left
in the ranks. Every man we hold when released on parole or otherwise
becomes an active soldier against us, at once directly or indirectly. If
we commence a system of exchange which liberates all prisoners, then we
will have to fight on until the whole South is exterminated. If we hold
those caught they amount to no more than dead men.” Therefore, with iron
nerve he resisted all pressure brought to force an exchange, and was
sustained by Secretary Stanton. Both these men must share with the
Confederate authorities the responsibility for prison horrors.
Handling men in masses is always difficult. In the Crimea, just ten
years before the awful winter of 1864, the English army was reduced by
famine and disease to a mere skeleton. Here there was no animus, but
only incompetence to meet the difficulties of the situation. During the
Franco-Prussian War, in spite of the wonderful preparations on the part
of Prussia, bitter complaints of the treatment of French prisoners were
made. But the misfortunes or the failures of one nation do not excuse or
justify those of another. The treatment of the Civil War prisoners fills
some of the darkest pages of American history.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] A “fleet” in early English meant a “brook,” otherwise a “creek” or
“bay,” a term often met with in British geography in the names
Northfleet, Byfleet, Purfleet, etc.
[2] “State of Prisons,” i. 36.
[3] A free inmate who carried messages abroad.
[4] The doorkeepers and porters whose duty it was to recognise all
prisoners, and prevent them from passing through the gate.
[5] Oldys was for many years an inmate of the Fleet Prison. He was
permitted to go abroad to see his friends outside and even to spend the
whole night at large.
[6] The reader will remember Mr. Pickwick’s kindly relief of Mr. Alfred
Jingle and his faithful henchman Joe Trotter in the Fleet.
[7] The manufacture of straw plaiting was taxed and brought in a revenue
to the Exchequer.
[8] This is not correct. Compare with official report, _ante_, p. 194.
[9] Captain Stopford was an officer who had served with distinction in
the Indian Mutiny as adjutant of the 52d Light Infantry. He subsequently
became a Prison Commissioner and is now a gentleman usher to His Majesty
Edward VII.
[10] History of the United States. Vol. v, p. 487.
* * * * *
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
the involvent debtor=> the insolvent debtor {pg 38}
que deux heros=> que deux héros {pg 79}
According to the acount there given=> According to the account there
given {pg 101}
the hospital and died there of “_langeur_,”=> the hospital and died
there of “_langueur_,” {pg 168}
detenus=> détenus {pg 234, 240, 274}
on supicion of being a spy=> on suspicion of being a spy {pg 253}
‘_Tuez moi ces coquins ci_’=> ‘_Tuez-moi ces coquins-ci_’ {pg 266}
_tres mauvais sujets_=> _trés mauvais sujets_ {pg 275, 276}