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.