The FReeper Foxhole Remembers The Immortal 600 and Morris Island Prison, 1864

In late June, the war of words began to match the war of guns, as Jones and Foster fired verbal salvos back and forth across Charleston Harbor. Both generals were under pressure to end the siege, but since they were losing troops to the front in Virginia, the stalemate dragged on and the prisoners stayed put.

Genl. Q. A. Gillmore's line of earthworks in front of Fort Wagner, Morris Island, S.C., July 1863.

The captives themselves became involved in the ongoing rhetoric when the five Federal generals among them—Truman Seymour (another Fort Sumter veteran), Henry Wessells, Eliakim P. Scammon, Charles A. Heckman and Alexander Shaler—wrote to Foster requesting an exchange and asking that the Union provide the Confederate prisoners with "kindness and courtesy." Scammon also requested permission from Jones to be released so he might go north to reason with the U.S. War Department to allow the two groups of prisoners to be exchanged. But the Confederate commander politely refused the request: "General, your note of yesterday was handed to me today. I am sorry to hear that your health is so bad, and I would gladly do anything in my power to contribute to your relief, but I have no authority to permit you to leave the Confederate States and go north for the purpose of effecting an exchange. Your government does not grant that privilege to our officers held as prisoners of war, but has, [it] seems to me thrown obstacles in the way of fair exchange."

Jones was dismayed at the fact that as of April 1863 the Federal government refused to continue the practice of exchanging prisoners. Prior to that date, a formal policy had existed that prescribed how prisoner exchanges were to take place. The new hard-line policy was designed to prevent soldiers from returning to the ranks of the Southern armies, as the Federal Army concluded that the Confederates received the greater benefit from the practice. It also, however, caused a rapid swelling of the numbers of men in Northern and Southern prisons.

Two 100-pdr. Parrott guns

President Abraham Lincoln became aware of the situation in Charleston and gave permission to Foster to make an exception to War Department policy and begin making arrangements for an exchange. Thus, on August 3, an agreement was worked out for the 100 officers.

Just when it seemed that the prisoner dispute had been resolved, things took a turn that would place even more captives in harm's way. Union Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman's campaign in Georgia was getting a bit too close to the overcrowded Southern prison camp at Andersonville, and the Confederate government began to send hundreds of Federal prisoners to Charleston for safekeeping. Jones objected to the situation, arguing to no avail that it was "inconvenient and unsafe."

Using church spires as markers Federal forces fired thousands of shells inside the city of Charleston

Upon their arrival in Charleston, most of the Federals were confined to the city jail, a massive octagonal fortress guarded by a 40-foot tower. It was located on Magazine Street, in the southeast part of the city, directly in the line of fire from the mortars across the harbor.

Before long, the inmates included nearly 600 officers, more than 300 enlisted men both black and white, as well as local criminals and deserters from both sides. All were jammed into A-frame tents set up in the courtyard. An officer inmate described the yard as "A dirty filthy place unfit for human beings to live in." Another Federal, Lieutenant Louis Fortescue, wrote of the "intolerable heat" that he endured in the cramped courtyard, which did not have a "single shade tree."

The full heat of high summer made the interior of the jail stifling, and yellow fever began to take a frightening toll. General Jones reacted to the outbreak of disease by issuing orders to his provost marshal to remove all of the sick and wounded prisoners who were able to travel and have them sent back to the prison at Andersonville. Furthermore, he ordered that only extreme cases be allowed to enter Roper Hospital in Charleston. Food for the Federals was poor and scarce; sanitation was nearly nonexistent. Most of the men were exposed to the elements all day and night, and the constant crash of artillery was unnerving. Clearly, the Federal prisoners were in a deadly and harrowing position.

Foster became wrathful when he heard of the new prisoner shipments, thinking that they had also been sent to the city to serve as human shields. He wrote Jones that he would place Confederate officers "under your fire" to retaliate. Construction began on a Union stockade in front of Battery Wagner on Morris Island and directly in the path of Southern artillery, and Foster ordered 600 Confederate officers removed from Fort Delaware, telling Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck, the Union Army's chief of staff, that "as soon as the rebel officers arrive I shall place them on Morris Island."

On August 20, the Federal steamer Crescent City left Fort Delaware with its cargo of 600 Confederate officers packed into the fetid hold and shipped south in the blistering summer sun. Lieutenant George Finley of the 56th Virginia Infantry remembered sitting in "total darkness, without any clothing and drenched with perspiration." He ate but a "few crackers with a bit of salt beef or bacon" during the journey. The prisoners remained on Crescent City near Hilton Head while the stockade on Morris Island was completed.

The Confederate War Department, meanwhile, kept sending prisoners to the Charleston area. Jones worried that the number of troops he had on hand was woefully inadequate to guard the captives. The Richmond government casually dismissed his frantic telegrams for relief, however, stating that the military situation required the prisoners be kept in a secure area, and that no reinforcements could be spared for his command.

Prisoners taken out of their casemates for a rollcall to insure none have escaped

Jones was now anxious to make exchanges, and news of a pending deal reached the headquarters of Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at City Point, Va. The overall Federal commander, Grant had been among the leading advocates of ending exchanges. He fired off a letter to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton on August 21 demanding that Foster cease all dialogue with Confederate authorities: "Please inform General Foster that under no circumstances will he be authorized to exchange prisoners of war. Exchange simply reinforces the enemy at once, whilst we do not get the benefit of those received for two or three months and lose the majority entirely. I telegraph from just learning that 500 or 600 more prisoners have been sent to Foster."

Halleck summed up the Federal high command's attitude toward exchanges in an August 27 letter to Grant: "To exchange their healthy men for ours, who are on the brink of the grave from their hellish treatment, of course gives them all the advantages. Nevertheless it seems very cruel to leave our men to be slowly but deliberately tortured to death. But I suppose there is no remedy at the present."

The situation in Charleston intensified when General Sherman's forces captured Atlanta on September 2. The Confederate government was concerned that Sherman would move southward to Andersonville and Macon, freeing tens of thousands of prisoners and allowing them to wreak havoc on virtually undefended central Georgia. Richmond greatly desired to keep as many Federal prisoners as far away from Sherman as possible, and the captured Yankees continued to pour into the Charleston area.

On September 7, the Federal stockade on Morris Island opened and was quickly filled with the Confederate prisoners, numbering a little less than 600 due to deaths from disease. In a purposeful mirroring of the living conditions of their Federal counterparts, the Rebels were housed in A-frame tents and very poorly fed. At night they were subjected to clouds of sand fleas and mosquitoes and drenching thunderstorms, all common to coastal South Carolina. The Federals did not issue blankets, and the men were forced to sleep in the sand. All the while, they were exposed to cannon shells and the scorching summer sun.

Prisoners under escort from the sinks

To be caught between the opposing cannon fire was truly horrifying for the Rebel inmates. The big Federal guns in Battery Wagner would blast shells over their heads, and occasionally one of the rounds would prematurely burst, scattering the camp with fragments. The outgoing shells could be "seen distinctly" as they roared overhead, recalled a lieutenant in the 20th Virginia Cavalry.

Additional Sources:

www.sonofthesouth.net
www.civilwarartillery.com
www.awod.com
rs6.loc.gov
www.swcivilwar.com
www.schistory.org
www.cr.nps.gov
members.aol.com/ rsjoslyn
pone.com
www.56thnyvi.com
www.wildwestweb.net
www.archives.nd.edu

It was even more terrifying when the Southern gunners replied to the Union salvos and sent inbound projectiles directly over the prisoners' camp. Henry Dickinson, a captain in the 2nd Virginia Cavalry, remembered the huge mortar shells that "looked as though they would fall directly on us." Dickinson could follow the shells at "night by the fuse burning," and was very relieved when their "parabolic course" terminated in Battery Wagner.

As for the shells that sometimes burst over the camp, one of the incarcerated Confederates recalled that the inmates could "listen at the fragments humming through the air and hear them strike the ground with a dull thud among the tents." "Just imagine our position," one Rebel wrote in his diary. "Tied hands and feet as it were without the means of defending ourselves and know not what moment we may be writhing and bleeding under the effects of the bursting of terrible shell....

When shall it end?"

As reports of the arrival of the Confederate officers in the stockade on Morris Island reached Confederate headquarters, Jones suggested that harsh methods of reprisal were necessary. On September 7 he wrote to the Confederate high command in Richmond: "If the department thinks it proper to retaliate by placing Yankee officers in Sumter or other batteries, let the order be given, prompt action should be taken. Please instruct me what if any authority I have over prisoners."

On September 22, the Confederate prisoners were taken out of their stockade and placed once again on Crescent City. They remained in the damp hold of the ship for one storm-tossed evening and, unaware of Grant's firm dictate to Foster, hoped that they were to be exchanged. They had been transferred, however, so that Federal authorities could search their camp for unauthorized goods, and the inmates were herded back to their forlorn digs the following day.

Throughout the month of September, the shelling continued, and the Confederate captives remained in their prison pen. Several Union guards outside the stockade were struck by shrapnel, but, almost unbelievably, the prisoners remained unharmed, even though approximately 18 rounds, fortunately all duds, actually landed among their sun-bleached A-tents.

The prisoners' meager rations often consisted of only two pieces of hardtack a day. On a good day, a prisoner might receive some "worm eaten hard tack, a little chunk of bacon one half inch square" and a bowl of bean soup made, it was rumored, on a formula of "three beans to a half quart of water," remembered Thomas Pickney, a captain in the 4th South Carolina Cavalry.

Swamp Angel

General Jones' threats to put Union prisoners on the ramparts of Fort Sumter never materialized, and on October 8 the Union captives in Charleston were removed to cities farther inland. The Southern captives' ordeal continued, however, until October 21, when, after 45 days of exposure to shellfire, they were finally taken out of their miserable pen and transferred to Fort Pulaski at Savannah, Ga.

The men spent a miserable cold, dreary winter there, 13 dying of disease. In March, the survivors were shipped back to Fort Delaware, where 25 more succumbed to illness. There they remained until after the war ended. The last man of the group was not released until July 1865.

The harsh and unusual conditions of their imprisonment inspired one of the captives, John O. Murray, to record his experiences in the 1905 book The Immortal Six-Hundred. The name he gave the group stuck, and today they are still referred to as the "Immortal 600."

Charleston in ruins

Samuel Jones was transferred to Florida after Charleston finally fell to Union forces in February 1865. He remained there until war's end and surrendered at Tallahassee in April 1865. Following the war, Jones returned to Virginia and farmed until 1880, when he took a job in the adjutant general's office in Washington. He died in 1887.

Foster remained in Charleston until the city surrendered. Then, like Jones, he was sent to Florida to command troops. He served in the U.S. Army after the war and is credited with developing underwater demolition techniques. He died in New Hampshire in 1874 and received a hero's funeral from the people of the Granite State.

The issue between Jones and Foster over the use of prisoners as deterrents to shelling dramatized Charleston's symbolic importance during the Civil War. Jones was desperate to save the city, an icon of Southern independence, and its inhabitants from further destruction. Foster, on the other hand, was under pressure to capture the battered but resilient port city that was the cradle of the Confederate States of America, and to recapture Fort Sumter.

RUINS OF THE NORTHWESTERN RAILROAD DEPOT
Charleston SC

Both generals had felt compelled to resort to tactics they knew were against the code of honor they had learned at West Point, yet both felt that under the circumstances they had little choice. Behind their decisions were the emotions of hatred for an enemy they had come to loathe, and the callousness that comes when the sight of destruction and death becomes commonplace.

It is difficult to say who was at fault for the fiasco. Jones was the first to place prisoners under fire. On the other hand, the Federal Army was firing into a city where they were well aware civilians still resided. Grant must also shoulder some blame, for his orders ceased the prisoner exchanges.

No matter who should bear the burden of responsibility, the treatment of the prisoners in Charleston Harbor, particularly that endured by the Immortal 600, remains one of the most controversial incidents of the Civil War. Certainly, the prisoners-as-shields practice constitutes a dark chapter in the greatest of American tragedies.

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The FReeper Foxhole. America's History. America's Soul

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April 20, 2005

A God Of Absolutes

Read:
Malachi 3:6-12

I am the Lord, I do not change. -Malachi 3:6

Bible In One Year: Psalm 28-30

cover I am dubious about the accuracy of our bathroom scale. So I've learned to manipulate it in a self-satisfying manner. The little adjustment knob serves to vary the register, and if that becomes too much bother, I just lean a certain way. The idea is to get a favorable reading-hopefully one that is a few pounds less.

We live in an age when many people believe there are no absolutes. Self-serving behavior is rampant and tramples the moral law given for the protection of society. Our culture prides itself on "freedom" that is actually slavery to sin (Romans 6:16-17).

But there is a God of absolutes whose scales never lose their adjustment. With Him, a pound is a pound, right is right, and wrong is wrong. He says, "I am the Lord, I do not change" (Malachi 3:6).

For us as believers, this puts steel into our spiritual backbone. We gain confidence in the face of difficulty and are assured of the fulfillment of every divine promise.

If God were easily moved by every whim or notion, our eternal destiny would be in constant jeopardy. But because He is the Unchanging One, we "are not consumed" (v.6). "His compassions fail not. They are new every morning" (Lamentations 3:22-23). -Paul Van Gorder

Unchanging God who reigns above,
His truth remains forever;
And from this faithful God of love
No earthly trial can sever. -D. De Haan

Earth changes, but God and His Word stand sure! -Browning

FOR FURTHER STUDY
How Much Does God Control?
Right & Wrong: A Case For Moral Absolutes

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A God Of Absolutes

Read:Malachi 3:6-12

I am the Lord, I do not change. -Malachi 3:6

Bible In One Year: Psalm 28-30

Read:
Malachi 3:6-12