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 diarrhoea, 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.

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