Prisoners and Guards at the Florence Stockade, 1864–1865: What Archeology Revealed

Some 56,000 Americans died in Civil War prisons, North and South, out of close to 700,000 Civil War dead. One of the worst was the Florence Stockade in South Carolina. In 2006, archeologists dug up part of the camp where its Confederate guards lived — and what they found challenged a long-held idea about why the prisoners suffered.

Why prisons filled up

At first both sides exchanged captured soldiers, often on a pledge — frequently broken — not to fight again. As the war dragged on, the Union saw exchanged Southerners returning to the fight, and Confederate atrocities against Black Union soldiers — notably the killing of Black prisoners at Fort Pillow and after the Battle of the Crater — led the Lincoln administration to stop exchanges. The policy also meant more Union prisoners straining the Confederacy's thin resources, and thousands of Union men suffered for it.

Civil War prisons across the North and South. Image from the National Park Service's lesson

Building the stockade

The prison at Andersonville, Georgia, seemed safely far from the front — until Sherman took Atlanta in September 1864. Fearing a raid to free its 33,000 prisoners, the Confederacy moved those who could travel to temporary camps in Savannah and Charleston, and when Charleston overflowed, built a new prison about a mile southeast of Florence, where three railroads met, in a field ringed by pine forest and swamps.

• Construction ran from early September to November 1864, with 1,000 enslaved workers from nearby plantations.
• The first 6,000 prisoners arrived on September 15, held in an open field with just over 100 guards and armed locals. Many escaped at first, but the harsh country let all be recaptured.
• The stockade — a walled enclosure — measured 1,400 by 725 feet, about 23 acres: whole logs set upright in a 4-foot trench, with a 5-foot dry moat outside to stop tunneling, the dug earth banked against the wall as a guards' walkway, and artillery at each corner and the gate.
• A shallow ditch 10–15 feet inside marked the "dead-line": any prisoner who crossed it was shot without warning.

The Florence Stockade, drawn by Robert H. Kellogg, a prisoner there, in Life and Death in Rebel Prisons (1868)

Life inside

The prison held never more than 15,000 at once. Much of what is known comes from prisoners' diaries and memoirs; paper and pencil stubs were treasured.

• Shelter: most prisoners lived in "shebangs." Ezra Ripple of the 52nd Pennsylvania later described four men sharing a hole about three feet deep, roofed with their rubber blankets, too short to stretch their legs, packed so tight that when one turned all turned — waking stiff and frozen until the sun thawed them.
• Food: small amounts of corn meal, flour, rice and beans, sometimes sweet potatoes, never green vegetables; beef rarely reached prisoners. Work such as gathering wood earned more.
• Water: all from Pye Branch, a stream through the stockade, which soon became polluted with human waste.
• Disease: most deaths came from scurvy (lack of vitamin C) and dysentery (dirty water). A hospital stood inside, but doctors lacked equipment.
• Escape: nearly impossible. Ripple played in a prisoners' orchestra allowed outside to entertain the guards; its escape attempt ended when bloodhounds tracked them down. The only other way out was to swear allegiance to the Confederacy — "galvanized Yankees," trusted by no one.
• In November 1864, guards let prisoners hold a mock presidential election with peas — white for McClellan, black for Lincoln. Lincoln won, in the prison as in the North.

Nearly 2,800 Union prisoners died — almost one in five — in the six months the stockade was open. Prisoners buried them in long trenches, each marked by a numbered board; the first 400 or so on a rise just north of the stockade, the rest farther north. The death register vanished after the war, so no complete list survives. Those trenches became the heart of the Florence National Cemetery.

With Sherman nearing Columbia in February 1865, the prisoners were sent home: the sick to Wilmington, the healthy to Greensboro, into Union hands. The first left February 15; by March the stockade was empty. Ripple recalled prisoners crying, laughing and hugging one another in their joy.

The guards

A February 1864 conscription law sent men of 18 to 45 to the front and put older men (45–50) and boys (17–18) in state reserves. Most guards at Florence were South Carolina State Reserves — the 3rd through 7th battalions — from nearby counties. Of no more than about 1,600 guards, up to 300 were on duty each day, standing unsheltered in all weather, on top of camp chores.

Second Lieutenant Thomas J. Eccles of the 3rd Reserves wrote a newspaper column from the camp. In October 1864 his men had no shelter and were cutting up their bedding for tents. By November 11:

…the men have constructed for themselves as comfortable camps as circumstances allow, being without plank or nails. Some, who were able, have brought cloth and made themselves tents, in which they can keep dry.

By late January 1865, he wrote, men who had longed to leave were content to stay the winter, "generally well provided with comfortable cabins, or tents, with chimnies attached." Most guards built dug-in log huts with a fireplace and a chimney of sticks and clay; a few shared large Sibley tents. They ate beef, corn meal, flour, rice, beans and molasses, but lacked coats and even shoes; there were no shovels to dig a well. With shelter, food and well water, the guards stayed fairly healthy — Eccles records small outbreaks of measles, mumps and typhoid, and seven deaths in his battalion.

Digging the guards' camp

After the war the camp became farmland and then a pine plantation. Plowing had churned the top 30 centimeters of soil, so the 2006 excavation — part of the mitigation for expanding Florence National Cemetery, sponsored by the Department of Veterans Affairs' National Cemetery Administration — removed that layer by machine and watched for dark stains marking human activity ("features"), which were flagged, mapped, photographed and dug by hand.

• 521 features were found and 179 excavated: structures (at least eight), possible tent stands, wells, latrine trenches, pits and post holes.
• Artifacts, sifted through quarter-inch mesh, included nails, brick and window glass; bottles, ceramic plates and jugs, cans and utensils; bullets, percussion caps, bayonet pieces, a tin cartridge box and a nearly complete tin canteen; comb teeth, rubber rings, buttons; and two hand-forged shovel blades — likely by a local blacksmith, since by 1864 the Confederacy could barely make or import something as basic as a shovel.
• Most telling: about 88 pounds of animal bone, mostly cattle, plus pig and chicken.

The guards had meat. The prisoners had almost none. Historians long held that Union prisoners starved because their guards were starving too. The bones say otherwise — though Eccles twice claimed that the prisoners were well fed, "drawing the same rations we do."

The Florence Stockade, Florence National Cemetery and the guards' campground from the air. U.S. Geological Survey, National Agriculture Imagery Program

Visiting

The stockade site is off Stockade Drive in Florence, where the Friends of the Florence Stockade keep an information gazebo and a walking trail past the remains of the earthen wall, the anti-tunnel ditch and guard positions. Florence National Cemetery, on National Cemetery Road, holds over 9,000 veterans and family members from every period since the Civil War; the prisoners' burial trenches are in the older section, south of the main flagpole.

Sources

Based on "'Comfortable Camps?' Archeology of the Confederate Guard Camp at the Florence Stockade," a Teaching with Historic Places lesson by Paul G. Avery of MACTEC Engineering and Consulting, with the National Cemetery Administration's history staff, National Park Service, drawing on the Official Records, Thomas J. Eccles's 1864–1865 columns in the Yorkville Enquirer (quoted), Ezra Ripple's memoir (paraphrased) and Avery and Garrow's 2008 excavation report; a work of the United States government in the public domain, rewritten in hubnx's own words. The lesson gives the number of artifacts recovered as both over 5,000 and almost 6,000, so no total is given here. Its questions and activities are left out, and its photographs and site plan by the MACTEC archeologists are not reproduced.