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Belle Isle: Island of Misery:
Some Civil War soldiers faced a challenge even greater than battle -- survival in a prison camp.
Captured soldiers initially received adequate foot and shelter, but neither side was prepared for huge numbers of prisoners. Shrinking resources, in the South, and the end of prisoner exchanges in 1863, resulted in dreadful conditions. In Richmond, authorities converted warehouses into prisoners but soon organized open-air camps like Belle Isle to relieve overcrowding.
About six acres of the sandy flat before you were carved out to hold 3,000 Union enlisted men, while captured officers were confined at "Libby Prison" (23rd and Cary Streets. The Belle Isle compound was enclosed by a five-foot-high wall of earth, with three-foot-deep ditches on either side. Guards were ordered to shoot any prisoner who crossed the inner ditch -- the "dead line".
Between 1862 and 1865, nearly 30,000 soldiers were imprisoned here, 10,000 in 1864 alone. Few escaped, but almost 1,000 perished from cold, sickness, and starvation.
"[We are suffering with] very cold weather. Four or five men chilled to death last night. A large portion of the prisoners who have been in confinement any length of time have been reduced to skeletons from continued hunger, exposure, and filth. No wood tonight, and it's very cold. The nights are long and are made hideous by the moans of suffering wretches... Men are too weak to walk nights to keep warm and sink down and chill to death... From 15 to 20 to 25 die every day and are buried just outside the prison with no coffins -- nothing but canvas wrapped around them."
-- Prisoner John Ransom's diary, November 1863. |