Daniel Lawlor: A "Fighting 69th" Veteran Who Survived Salisbury Prison

Daniel Lawlor's time as a Union combat soldier lasted only a few weeks, but he survived six months in a worsening Confederate prison camp in North Carolina and lived a long civilian life afterwards, until 1916, when he was buried in the historic cemetery at St. Paul's Church.

Enlisting in 1864

An Irish-born laborer, Lawlor signed up in New York City on July 30, 1864. That was unusual: by the war's fourth year volunteering had stalled, largely because of the horrific losses of the Overland Campaign in Virginia and a sense that Union offensives were stuck. Avoiding the stigma of the draft, the $100 enlistment bonus (about $1,400 today), or an immigrant's wish to show his patriotism may all have played a part.

About five years older than the average recruit, the 31-year-old joined a regiment where he would feel at home: the 69th New York Volunteer Infantry, part of the Irish Brigade, whose regiments were full of men from Ireland. Robert E. Lee himself had called it the "Fighting 69th."

Captured at Petersburg

His uniform barely fitted, the 5-foot-9, grey-eyed, brown-haired immigrant was sent to the front at Petersburg, Virginia, south of the Confederate capital, Richmond. He joined the depleted ranks of Company F, in the 1st Division of the Army of the Potomac's II Corps under General Winfield Hancock. He would not be there long.

The fighting in mid-August was over the Weldon Railroad, a vital Confederate supply line into North Carolina. Soon after Lawlor arrived, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant ordered an attack to cut it — the Battle of Globe Tavern, or Second Weldon Railroad, August 18–21 — which tore up miles of track. Days later, at Reams Station, Confederates under Major General A. P. Hill threw back the II Corps' push to wreck more of the line. In one of these battles Lawlor was captured, one of hundreds of Union soldiers taken in that series of fights.

Salisbury

He was sent about 200 miles by rail to the prison camp at Salisbury, North Carolina, at the most dangerous point in the war to be a prisoner.

Early in the war prisoners had been exchanged under agreements called cartels. Grant suspended them, with President Lincoln's support — a strategic and controversial choice. Exchanges, he argued, prolonged the Confederacy by giving it back soldiers and blunted the North's great advantage in numbers. The South's refusal to treat Black Union soldiers as legitimate combatants, and its brutal treatment of the United States Colored Troops, was another reason. The decision coincided with a steep fall in Southern supplies, partly because of the Union blockade, and the prison camps were starved of food and medicine. Union prisoners began to die in appalling numbers.

The Salisbury prison had opened in 1861 in an abandoned cotton factory in the railroad town about 50 miles southwest of Greensboro: 16 acres, a three-story brick building and several smaller ones. Until 1864 captured soldiers stayed only briefly before being exchanged. By August, with exchanges stopped and Union offensives taking thousands of prisoners, a camp built for perhaps 2,500 held nearly 10,000. Lawlor's wife and three young children probably knew where he was; families of prisoners, aware of the conditions, begged federal officials to resume exchanges.

During his six months there, filthy sanitation, starvation and above all disease — dysentery, smallpox, pneumonia — made Salisbury a nightmare. Shelter, if any, was a cloth stretched over a hole dug in the ground. A conservative estimate puts the dead at 5,000, some of whom, one prisoner's diary says, died "from sheer despondency"; they were buried in mass trenches nearby.

Release

Lawlor was one of the lucky ones. When exchanges resumed he was paroled in mid-February 1865. His last months of service included a 30-day furlough in New York — a reunion with his family and a chance to recover from what was likely severe emaciation. Promoted to corporal, he was mustered out on June 30.

Former prisoners suffered a range of social and personal troubles after the war. A Massachusetts soldier accused Lawlor of siding with the South in prison — by one account as many as 2,000 men did defect to the Confederacy to escape the camp. A post-war investigation, which Lawlor requested in connection with a pension application, found the charge false; seeking it still shows his pride in having outlasted Salisbury without giving in. From the available records he showed no outward emotional or psychological harm, living comfortably for another 51 years with steady work and an ordinary family life.

Westchester

The Lawlors moved to the area around St. Paul's in Westchester County, about 20 miles north of New York City, then growing in people, housing and jobs. Daughters Henrietta and Susan worked as seamstresses; in 1880 son Norman, 17, was studying law; and his wife, Jane, was "keeping house," according to the census. Lawlor worked first as a laborer and then as a jailer — more evidence that the camp had left little mark — and finally as the local pound master, holding stray animals until their owners claimed them, an old job fast disappearing by the early 20th century.

The household of seven, including a daughter's husband and an adopted girl, lived about a mile from St. Paul's. As Catholics they did not worship at the Episcopal church, but in the late 19th century many local families bought burial rights in its churchyard, one of the area's few cemeteries.

Daniel Lawlor's tree-trunk gravestone at St. Paul's, topped with an acorn and supplied by the Woodmen of the World insurance company; his veteran's stone is to the right. National Park Service.

A marble tree trunk capped with an acorn — a symbol of life renewed — marks the family plot, supplied by the life insurance company Woodmen of the World. The former corporal of the Fighting 69th was buried there on October 26, 1916, after his wife, a daughter and a granddaughter.

Corrected: the article also spells his name "Lawor."

Sources

• National Park Service, Saint Paul's Church National Historic Site, Civil War Veteran of "Fighting 69th" Buried at St. Paul's Survived Six Months as Prisoner in North Carolina.