A Futile Attempt at Imprisonment

Sherman’s invasion of South Carolina forced the evacuation of 7,672 prisoners from Camp Asylum and Florence Prison to North Carolina in February, 1865. More than 1,600 escaped or had to be abandoned along the route to Wilmington. The Confederacy’s attempt to deliver the remaining prisoners for exchange at Wilmington during the Federal campaign against the city interfered with and disrupted both Confederate and Union operations on the battlefield and had consequences for Sherman’s invasion of North Carolina. The story of prisoner movement cannot be separated from the narrative of the military campaigns that concluded the war in the Carolinas.

They Cover the Land like the Locusts of Egypt

When the Confederate and state government in South Carolina proved unable to respond to the threatening alliance between escaped Union prisoners, slaves, and deserters, citizens of the state took over the functions of security in their neighborhoods and withdrew from state-sponsored efforts to recruit men for the Confederate reserves and the state militia to defend the state against the threatened invasion of Union armies under Sherman. The government of South Carolina ceased to function in significant portions of the state during the last three months of 1864. This is an important reason for the utter lack of resistance to Sherman’s invasion of the state.

Escape

When Confederate officials removed several thousand Union prisoners of war from Georgia to South Carolina after Sherman captured Atlanta, bureaucratic incompetence combined with chaotic conditions to produce mass escapes. Prisoners escaped by the hundreds from trains and from open fields at Florence and at Camp Sorghum in Columbia. Leading four of the escape parties were J. Madison Drake, Charles Porter Mattocks, Willard Worcester Glazier, and John V. Hadley.

Epilogue

The death of the Confederate prison system, like the death of the Confederacy itself, was an uneven process across space and time. After the exchange at the Northeast Cape Fear River, the Confederacy acquired new Federal prisoners of war during the subsequent military campaigns of Schofield and Sherman. Recaptured prisoners from the great escapes of late February still populated county jails. One thousand prisoners returned to Andersonville in early April. A few days before Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant, Colonel Henry Forno, the Confederate prison bureaucrat still in charge of the system in the Carolinas, wrote the new commissary general of prisoners, Brigadier General Daniel Ruggles, about building a new prison on a site eighteen miles from Columbia on the Charlotte & South Carolina Railroad line. “I am receiving small lots of prisoners and have no place to keep them but open fields,” Forno informed his superior. He estimated it would take him ten days to erect a stockade....

The World in Black and White

When escaped Union prisoners travelled through South Carolina, they received food, information, shelter, and guidance from slaves, who interpreted the mass escapes through their religious beliefs as a sign of the jubilee. These encounters accelerated the collapse of slavery because slaves recognized the mass escapes as an opportune moment for escalated resistance against the Confederate state. Interactions with slaves challenged the racial attitudes of escaped Union prisoners. Planter resistance to slave impressment undermined Confederate defense of South Carolina and created conditions that allowed slaves to aid escaped prisoners.

Introduction

The Yankees spread across the South Carolina and North Carolina countryside like a plague of biblical proportions, according to one observer. They dug sweet potatoes out of farmers’ fields, broke into barns, and burrowed into haylofts. Their bodies were infested with millions of lice and they carried these vermin to every place they stopped for the night. Every day one of the pestilential Yankees accosted an unsuspecting white or black southerner going about his or her daily business. In Caldwell County, North Carolina, the Reverend Isaac Oxford discovered a Yankee napping under neath his fodder. The Federal awoke and attacked Oxford, who finally subdued the man after a brutal fistfight. Oxford later captured three others that he encountered while squirrel hunting. In the same county, near Lenoir, the wife of the local doctor used her watchdog to subdue a Yankee trying to slip past the fence on her property. Slaves who lived near the road between Columbia and Spartanburg in South Carolina awoke to find a Yankee who had entered their cabins looming over their beds. He wanted food and a guide....

God’s Country

Thousands of escaped prisoners, refugees, Confederate deserters, recruits for the Union Army, raiders, and guerrillas moved through the Appalachian Mountains in the last winter of the Civil War. The lack of clear jurisdiction among the various Confederate military departments and a dysfunctional command structure hampered an effective response to the movement of internal and external enemies across borders. Thomas’s Legion, a Confederate unit that captured a number of escaped prisoners, exemplified the confused state of the Confederacy’s military bureaucracy. Escaped prisoners joined forces with southern recruits for the Union Army to navigate the dangerous conditions of East Tennessee.

Guardian Angels

When escaped Union prisoners traveled through North Carolina, they encountered regions where the home front had collapsed into a battle front. Families of deserters engaged in violent resistance to Confederate conscription and battled the North Carolina home guard. Unionist families engaged in guerrilla warfare against Confederate supporters. These households resisting the Confederate government mobilized their resources, including children, to aid escaped prisoners. Cultural assumptions about gender, civilization, and romance governed interactions between escaped Union prisoners and Appalachian women.