[SAMWolf]

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

[SAMWolf]

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.