The Immortal 600: Confederate Prisoners of War at Fort Pulaski

When the Civil War began in 1861, few expected it to last more than a few months, and for its first two years few prisoners stayed captive for long. Many were paroled — released on condition that they stay in a given area and not return to the war — and many officers were exchanged for enemy prisoners of equal rank. By 1864, all that had changed, and at Fort Pulaski, on Cockspur Island near Savannah, several hundred Confederate officers endured one of the war's harshest prison experiences. They called themselves the Immortal 600.

The southeast wall of Fort Pulaski, used as a prison during the Civil War. NPS/J. Cadoff

Why exchanges stopped

On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing enslaved people held in the states in rebellion, and the United States began enlisting African American men. Outraged, the Confederate Congress passed the Retaliatory Act as the new United States Colored Troops reached the front. Black soldiers would not be treated as soldiers when captured but handed to state authorities, and many were to be sold into slavery. Their white officers would be treated as inciting a slave rebellion and "shall, if captured, be put to death."

The United States responded by halting all prisoner exchanges until every soldier was treated equally as a prisoner of war. The Confederacy refused. Captured soldiers were now held for the long term, and both sides built systems of large prison camps.

Human shields at Charleston

Charleston, where the war's first shots were fired on April 12, 1861, was still at its center. From 1863, Union forces held the islands around Charleston Harbor, putting the city under siege, and after warning civilians to leave, they began a bombardment that lasted months.

The Confederate commander, Major General Samuel Jones, desperate to stop the shelling, had fifty high-ranking U.S. officers held as prisoners in the part of the city under direct Union fire. Union Major General John G. Foster answered in kind, confining fifty high-ranking Confederate officers under Confederate guns. Neither side stopped firing, and after several months of stalemate President Lincoln allowed a one-time exchange of those hundred prisoners.

Then news came that General William T. Sherman was marching through Georgia toward Savannah. Fearing he might reach the prison camp at Andersonville, the Confederacy moved hundreds of prisoners, mostly officers, to Charleston — and six hundred of them were held under Union fire, just as the first fifty had been. Believing Jones had brought in more human shields, Foster ordered six hundred Confederate officers imprisoned on Morris Island, in the line of Confederate fire. This time there would be no exchange.

Morris Island

The six hundred came from all eleven seceded states and from Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri. Many had been captured at well-known battles such as Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Courthouse and Cold Harbor, others at places like Lancaster, Kentucky; Cumberland Gap, Tennessee; and Trevillian Station, Virginia. By the time they reached Charleston in the summer of 1864, many had been prisoners for more than a year.

They were held in an open-air stockade, with little food, poor shelter and constant fire from their own side's artillery. The standoff lasted nearly three months, until yellow fever broke out in Charleston and the Confederacy moved its U.S. prisoners to new camps inland. With no reason left to hold the Confederate officers on Morris Island, they were sent south to Fort Pulaski.

Fort Pulaski

On October 23, 1864, about 540 of the prisoners marched into Fort Pulaski. The fort was hardly ready. They were housed in its southeastern section — the corner destroyed in the battle of 1862 — where stoves were placed in the casemates and materials provided for the men to build their own bunks. At first there were no bars, so the doors were kept shut and guarded until iron bars were installed.

Prisoners shared bunks with several others, with no mattresses and nothing to keep out the damp winter cold. NPS Photo

Things seemed better at first. The damp, cold casemates beat the tents and stockade of Morris Island, the rations were slightly larger though still not enough, and the new guards, the 157th New York Infantry, treated the prisoners with more courtesy and respect than they had expected. In November, nearly two hundred were moved to a camp on Hilton Head to ease crowding.

The starvation diet

In December 1864, U.S. commanders learned that the fort's commander, Colonel Philip P. Brown, had not carried out orders to put the prisoners on a starvation diet. Brown said he had never received the orders and had done what he thought right. The orders were sent again, and he enforced them.

For a little more than a month, in retaliation for the mistreatment of U.S. prisoners in Confederate camps, the prisoners got no meat, fruit or vegetables. Scurvy, diarrhea and dysentery spread. They had no blankets or extra clothing and huddled together through the cold winter, with fuel for only one or two fires a day. "Hunger drove our men to catching and eating dogs, cats, and rats," Captain J. Ogden Murray later wrote. Captain George W. Nelson remembered a guard passing him a kitten through the grating: "In a very few minutes the kitten was in frying order."

In January 1865 a surgeon ordered full rations and proper medicine, which probably saved many lives. For thirteen men it came too late; they were buried in a small cemetery just outside the fort.

Escape attempts

Two prisoners escaped from the hospital, stealing a boat and rowing away. Escaping from inside the fort was far harder. On February 26, 1865, Colonel Edward L. Molineux of the 159th New York, who had taken command that month, wrote in his diary of an attempt the night before: eight thin men had worked an old vent into the chambers below, dug through into the commissary's casemate, dropped by rope into the ditch and swum the moat under cover of fog — only to find every boat guarded. All were recaptured, and Molineux had the prisoners' quarters checked every fifteen minutes, day and night.

Holes cut by Confederate prisoners in their escape attempt of February 1865. NPS Photo

After the war

In the first week of March 1865, the remaining prisoners boarded a steamer north to Fort Delaware, where they spent the last months of the war. By June it was all but over, and to go home, Confederate prisoners had to swear an oath of allegiance to the United States. "I have done the unspeakable," former Fort Pulaski prisoner Captain James L. Lemon wrote on June 12, 1865. "But I am now paroled & today set out for home."

In the decades after the war, veterans published memoirs, and the stories of the prison camps spread across the reunited nation. The Fort Pulaski survivors formed a society to keep in touch, several published their diaries and memoirs, and they struck a bronze medal for the survivors. Today a small section of the fort, with reproduction bars in place of the long-rusted originals, shows what prisoners and guards saw during the five months it served as a prison camp.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Prisoner of War Experience" (Fort Pulaski National Monument): https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/immortal-600.htm