Federal Prisoners and Southern Ministers and Chaplains

   Earlier this year, I started a series on prisoner of war camps in the South. One post was an overview of prisons (here), and another post looked at the different types of prisoners held at Salisbury (here). This post will examine the clergy who worked with the prisoners.

   The Confederate government apparently never appointed chaplains to prison camps. Instead, the work of the church, ministering to the spiritual needs of the prisoners, was undertaken by concerned clergy.

   At Salisbury, in 1864, Dr. A.W. Mangum began preaching to the prisoners inside the prison pen. Mangum tells us in his short history of the Salisbury Prison that some preaching had taken place in the post hospital by Dr. Richard O. Kurrie, and then by Dr. Wilson and a Dr. Rumple. Wilson recruited Mangum to preach in the hospital, but was discouraged by Major John Gee, the prison’s commanding officer, from preaching to the general prison population. Gee found the prisoners “generally foreign and Catholic” and did not believe that the Methodist Mangum would find a “kindly reception.” But at some point, Gee obviously softened his stance, for when Mangum entered the prison yard, he found a Baptist minister preaching to a large group of men. Mangum selected his own spot and began to sing. A crowd gathered, which Mangum found “respectful, earnest and solemn.” While Mangum goes on to talk about working on establishing a prison library, he does not go into much further detail of his preaching at Salisbury Prison.[1] 

Bishop John McGill

   It is interesting to note that Major Gee thought most of the prisoners were “foreigners and Catholics”; it was apparently the Catholics who ministered to prisoners at Camp Sumter in Andersonville.  There are a couple of mentions of Protestant ministers at Andersonville, including the Methodists Robert James Hodges and E.B. Duncan. There could be more whom history has forgotten. Andersonville was not Salisbury. It was in the middle of nowhere, served by a railroad not tied to a large city further south. When the Reverend William John Hamilton visited Andersonville in May 1864, he found a large number of Catholic prisoners. Hamilton lived in Macon, and southwestern Georgia was a part of his charge. He contacted the Bishop in Savannah who sent Father Peter Whelan to minister to the prisoners. Finding more men to minister to than he could handle, he asked for help, and Father H. Claveril was sent. The two lived in a shack not far from the prison. According to Peggy Sheppard, the pair “soon won the admiration and respect of most prisoners—Catholic, Protestants, Jews, and atheists alike.” They could often be seen crawling into dugouts to hear confessions or to administer extreme unction to dying men. Claveril was replaced by Father John Kirby, who was replaced by Father Hosannah, a Jesuit priest from Mobile who could speak several different languages.[2]

   Libby Prison, located in the Confederate capital, had the benefit of several religious gatherings each week. Chaplain Henry C. Trumball, 10^th Connecticut Infantry, was captured during the assault on Battery Wagner near Charleston, South Carolina, in July 1863. He was held in several prisoner of war camps before being exchanged in November 1863. Trumball noted that there were prayer meetings held three evenings a week, and when chaplains were present, “sermons, twice each Sunday.” It seems in the case of Libby Prison, there was often some Federal chaplain incarcerated within who was able to provide religious meetings, i.e., Charles C. McCabe, 122^nd Ohio, Louis N. Beaudry, 5^th New York Cavalry, Joseph T. Brown, 6^th Maryland Volunteers. There were some outside chaplains.[3] One prisoner at Libby noted that the Catholic Bishop of Richmond visited the prison. The Right Rev. John McGill was noted as “frequently” attending the Northern soldiers confined in Libby prison,” although McGill, Northern born, was “decidedly southern in his sympathies.” If McGill could not attend in person, he sent others, including Revs. Father Scully and Mahone, and the Jesuit Fathers O’Hagan, McAtee, and Tissot.[4]

   However, not all of these measures were appreciated. Historian George Rable noted that the Federal officers at Libby Prison debated, but did not pass, a series of resolutions against “Rebel ministers” conducting services. One Pennsylvania officer noted that the local pastors “had better teach humanity to their own people before attempting to preach Christianity” to the prisoners.[5] However, if the writings of Northern chaplain Henry S. White are to be believed, this worked both ways. White was appointed chaplain of a Rhode Island regiment in 1863 and was captured in eastern North Carolina on May 4, 1864. For a brief amount of time, White was quartered in a church in Andersonville. His request to preach to the prisoners was met with mixed support and was eventually denied. White was soon moved to the officer’s prison in Macon.[6]

   The work on Southern clergy among Federal prisoner of war camps is a neglected topic of study. Outside of a few brief mentions in Rable’s God’s Almost Chosen Peoples (2010) and Miller’s In God’s Presence: Chaplains, Missionaries, and Religious Space During the American Civil War (2019), the topic does not seem to merit any scholarly coverage. The role of local churches and prisons could be explored, as well as the attitudes of various denominations, like the Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists. (Or, if you know of a source that deals with this subject, please drop me a line.)

   

 

  

  

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[1] Poteat, Confederate States Military Prison at Salisbury, NC, 27-32.

[2] Sheppard, Andersonville, Georgia, U.S.A, 33-37. See also Marvel, Andersonville: The Last Depot, 140-144, 163-164.

[3] Trumball, War Memories of an Army Chaplain, 297.

[4] Magri, “Catholicity in Virginia during the Episcopate of Bishop McGill, 1850-1872,” The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 2, No. 4 (January 1917): 422-423.

[5] Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples, 367.

[6] White, Prison Life Among The Rebels, 42.

Federal Prisoner of War Camps in the South

 

   Prisoners of war were an inconvenient reality of the war years. When the first batches arrived in Richmond following the battle of first Manassas, no one really knew what to do with them. Almost 1,300 Federal soldiers were brought to the Confederate capital. Brig. Gen. John H. Winder quickly impressed the John L. Ligon and Sons Tobacco Factory building and converted it into a prison. That was the beginning of the system of military prisons across the South.  

   There were at least 118 military prisons in the South. Many of them were opened for only a short amount of time. For example, the prisons in Alexandria, VA; Boerne, TN; Camp Groce, TX; Camp VanDorn, TX; Charlotte, NC; Dalton, GA; Galveston, TX; Greensboro, NC; Houston, TX; Huntsville, TX; Jackson, MS; Marietta, GA; Millen, GA; St. Augustine, FL; San Antonio Springs, TX; San Pedro Springs, TX; and, Savannah, GA were all open for a year or less, sometimes much less.

      No one is sure how many Union and Confederate soldiers were taken prisoner during the war. Numbers range from 400,000 to 674,000 men. One historian believes that 409,000 of these prisoners were captured Federal soldiers.  

   Major prisons of the South included Camp Sumter in Andersonville, Georgia, with 39,899 prisoners; Camp Lawton in Millen, Georgia, with 10,000 prisoners, many of them transfers from Camp Sumter; Belle Island, Virginia, with 10,000 prisoners; 15,000 in other various Richmond establishments; Danville, Virginia, with 4,000 prisoners; Salisbury, NC, with 10,321 prisoners, Savannah, Georgia, with 6,000 prisoners.

Camp Sumter

   The prison system was a complex operation during the war, and it leads to many different topics for exploration: just how did the system grow during the war years? What types of prisoners were housed at different facilities? What types of soldiers constituted the guard units at prisons? How were prisoners transported between prisoner of war camps? How many escaped? Who were the men responsible for overseeing prisoner of war camps? Was Henry Wirz any more of a war criminal than Albin Francisco Schoepf? How did local churches work with the prisoners in their communities? Were some local citizens sympathetic with the prison population? How brutal were prisoners towards each other? How many Federal prisoners galvanized and joined Confederate regiments? What were the medical situations like not only for the prisoners, but for the guards as well? How did the exchange system break down? What became of the prison sites after the war?

   While there are books on various prisons, I feel the best overview to date is Lonnie R. Speer’s Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War (1997). Over the course of the next few months, my plan is to try and explore many of the topics listed above. I actually have already started with this post a couple of weeks ago. Check out that post here.

The types of prisoners at Salisbury Prison

   Recently, The Scuppernong Press released a small book, edited by Donna Peeler Poteat, on Salisbury Prison. It is actually a post-war reminiscence of Dr. Adolphus W. Mangum. Born in 1834 in Orange (now Durham) County, North Carolina, Mangum was a graduate of Randolph-Macon College, who was also in the ministry, riding circuit in Hillsborough, and then pastoring a church in Chapel Hill. He was a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. In 1860, he moved to a church in Salisbury. When the war came, Magnum became chaplain of the 6^th North Carolina State Troops, but later in 1861, resigned due to poor health. Back in Salisbury, he worked with prisoners at Salisbury.

   Magnum wrote his reminiscences in 1893, and they appeared as two separate articles in the Charlotte Observer in May and June. He provides some interesting information regarding the prison. The site, an old cotton factory, was conveyed to the Confederate States on November 2, 1861, as a prison “for Confederates under sentence of court martial, and those arrested for alleged disloyalty, for deserters from the Federal army and for prisoners of war.” Those are four different groups of men: court martialed Confederates; disloyal Southerners; Federal deserters; and, Federal prisoners of war.[1]

   Court Martialed Confederates: The number of Confederate soldiers court martialed for some infraction of the Articles of War is unknown. One historian estimated the number at 20,000, based upon ledgers that survived the fires in Richmond on the night of April 2, 1865. Many of those found guilty were sentenced to loss of pay, reduced back to the ranks if a non-commissioned officer, company punishment, or if an officer, cashiered from the service. Or punishment could be confinement or hard labor. There were two places where these periods of confinement were conducted: Castle Thunder in Richmond, and Salisbury. There were Confederate soldiers confined at Salisbury. Pvt. Samuel S. Bryant (57th Virginia Infantry) was one such prisoner. Bryant was absent from his command from June 1863 until March 1864. He was tried for desertion, found guilty, and ordered to be confined on bread and water.[2] It is unclear just how many Confederate soldiers were confined at Salisbury over the course of the war. On December 1, 1864, the Adjutant and Inspector General’s office issued an order releasing all of those court martialed and ordering them to return to their regiments. Bryant was one of them, along with 155 others at the Salisbury Prison Camp.[3]

   Disloyal Southerners: While for generations writers portrayed the South as one big happy family, there were many who objected to secession and to the Confederate government. One conservative account places the number of political prisoners, those arrested for being disloyal, at 4,108 civilians.[4] In February 1863, at the bequest of the Confederate Congress, the commandant prepared a list of political prisoners then confined at Salisbury. The list contains 131 names. They included C.C. Sheets, a Winston County, Alabama, law student, suspected of “treasonable conduct”; R.B. Elliott a overseer from Tarboro, North Carolina, suspected of being a spy and “trading with the enemy”; and, George Billingsly, a Claiborne County, Tennessee, blacksmith, charged with “aiding and supplying stock for the enemy at Cumberland Gap.” [5] It is unclear just how many political prisoners passed through the Salisbury prison camp.

   Federal deserters: There were roughly 2,000 Federal deserters confined at the Salisbury prison. Many of them simply walked off picket post and into the Confederate lines. An interesting case is that of Peter and Jacques Sneyers, members of the 35^th Massachusetts Infantry (substitutes). They were captured on September 30, 1864, near Petersburg. Both of their Compiled Service Records contain “Memorandum from Prisoner of War Records” and both state that they “joined the Rebel army while a Pris of war at Salisbury, N.C. date not given.” Mangum tells us that “A Col Tucker came there for the purpose of getting recruits from their number for the Confederate army. Only foreigners were allowed to enlist. Nearly eighteen hundred took the oath. . . Some may have taken this step in good faith. . . but the greater number chose it as the only means of escape from their terrible den. They were called ‘galvanized Yankees,” and though most of them made scarcely a show of fighting when the test came, a few stood their ground and fought with true courage.”[6]

   Federal prisoners of war: Mangum tell us that the first prisoners of war arrived on December 9, 1861, numbering 120. An additional 176 arrived on December 26, and 80 more on February 7. “These different installments came from various points – some being captured in Virginia, some on the coast of North Carolina and some by the Army of the west in Kentucky. By the middle of March, 1862, their number aggregated nearly 1,500.” [7] Over the course of the war, a little over 10,000 men were incarcerated. An estimated 4,500 died.[8]

   Mangum talked about many other issues, such as prison escapes, the death of a Confederate surgeon, African-American prisoners brought in during the last months of the war, along with the horrors of the prison itself. He considered his story one of “dark history of this great reservoir of misery and death.”[9] If you would like to read more of Dr. Adolphus W. Mangum’s account, check out the book through The Scuppernong Press:

 

 

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[1]  Poteat, Confederate States Military Prison at Salisbury, NC, 3.

[2] Bunch, Military Justice in the Confederate States Army, 8, 70.

[3] Brown, The Salisbury Prison Camp, 259-260.

[4] Neely, Southern Rights, 1.

[5] Brown, The Salisbury Prison Camp, 233.

[6] Poteat, Confederate States Military Prison at Salisbury, NC, 32.

[7] Poteat, Confederate States Military Prison at Salisbury, NC, 5.

[8] Speer, Portals to Hell, 339

[9] Poteat, Confederate States Military Prison, 36.

The Strange Cases of William Marsh, Carter County, Tennessee

Louis Brown, in his book on the Salisbury Prison, has a long list of civilian prisoners incarcerated at the North Carolina stockade. One of those men listed is William Marsh. In 1860, Marsh was living in Elizabethton, Carter County, Tennessee, working as a hatter. Marsh was twenty-four years old, married to Ellen, with two children. They were all born in Virginia. His personal estate was only worth $50, so being a hatter was obviously not a lucrative job in mid-nineteenth-century Elizabethton.

In 1864, Marsh wrote Andrew Johnson, then serving as a representative of Tennessee in the United States Senate, explaining that he was once again “under the Stars & Stripes,” albeit by “peculiar circumstances.” Marsh explained that he was a friend of Dan Stover, took an active part of the 1860 presidential election, and was a member of the East Tennessee Convention. In September 1861, he visited his parents in Virginia, where he was arrested for disloyalty. He was first confined in Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia, and then sent to the prison in Salisbury. Over the next nine months, Confederate officials repeatedly offered Marsh the opportunity to take the Oath, which he declined, until he felt he was “compelled to take it to save life as my constitution was fast giving way under the treatment received.” In July [1864?], Marsh stated he was “arrested” and sent to a regiment in John C. Breckinridge’s division. When he arrived with his regiment, Marsh was sick, and left at a house, “confined to my room with a fever.” He was afraid that once the troops returned, he would be arrested again, and wanted Johnson to do something to keep him out of the Confederate army. The letter is dated September 24, 1864, Valley of Virginia.

At some point, it appears that Marsh was captured by Federal forces. In October 1864, he was discharged from the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, D.C. He apparently got a job working at the wharf on G Street in Washington, D.C. It seems, maybe in his excitement over being released from confinement, he indulged a little too much one evening, and his employer found that he had dropped his copy of his Oath of Allegiance to the Confederacy. Marsh’s boss had hired Marsh, “a Confederate refugee… through sympathy.” The official wrote that Marsh swore he had not taken such an Oath (prior to losing his Oath). What happened after that point in time is unknown. [1]

There is a little more to story. William Marsh’s name appears on a list of “Union Men Confined at Salisbury, N.C.” in the New York Tribune, July 29, 1862. While there is no information with this article, there is a letter, in the Official Records, from Brig. Gen. James S. Wadsworth (US), written on August 10, 1862, stating that an article from the New York Tribune was being enclosed, and that Wadsworth was holding thirty Confederate citizens from the area between Fredericksburg and Washington, D.C., “as hostages.” [2]

What became of William Marsh? It seems that he hired himself as a substitute for John C. Wellbanks, and was mustered into Company C, 1^st Delaware Infantry. He was mustered in as a private on December 24, 1864, then promoted to sergeant on January 24, 1865. In June, he was promoted to second lieutenant and transferred to Company F. Marsh was mustered out of service on July 12, 1865.  Marsh apparently did not return to East Tennessee. He is listed on the 1870 US Census as a resident of Fort Chiswell, Wythe County, Virginia. It appears that his first wife, Ellen, passed in the previous decade. He was, in 1870, married to Susan V. Marsh and had four children at home. In 1880, he was in Surry County, North Carolina. According to a family history chart on Ancestry, William Marsh died on April 2, 1893, in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, and he was buried in the Bob Marsh Cemetery, Grayson County, Virginia.

Civilians arrested by the Confederate government for disloyalty is a seldom discussed topic. Mark Neely Jr., writes that there were at least 4,108 political prisoners arrested during the war.[3] It would be interesting to find additional information on Marsh, namely, what led to his arrest. Maybe those records will turn up one day.

 

 

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[1] Case Files of Investigations by Levi C. Turner and Lafayette C. Baker, 1861-1866.M797, Record Group 94, NARA. Some of Marsh’s records were microfilmed with those of Adam Mohr.

[2] Official Records, Series 2, volume 4, 368.

[3] Neely, Southern Rights, 1.