When the steamboat was secured, a gangplank was
extended to the dock. Soon a long line of men – weary, ragged, emaciated – was
shuffling slowly down the gangplank. They were Confederate soldiers who’d
recently been released from a Union prisoner-of-war camp at Point Lookout,
Maryland. They would later board a Confederate steamboat flying a white flag that
would take them up the winding river and through Union lines to Richmond.
That’s how close General Ulysses Grant’s troops were to
Richmond in February 1865 – a steamboat that left the Confederate capital was
behind enemy lines only a few miles downriver. Although Confederate General
Robert E. Lee had managed to keep Grant from taking Richmond, his days of
working military miracles had passed. Soon Grant would break Lee’s defenses at
nearby Petersburg, throwing the door to Richmond wide open.
The war would be over in about six weeks.
A few days earlier, a similar line of bedraggled,
tired and alarmingly skinny young men had tramped wearily up a gangplank at
Aiken’s Landing to board the steamer New
York. They were Union solders who’d just been released from Confederate
prisoner-of-war camps.
Confederate leaders have long been justly criticized
for the appalling conditions where Union prisoners were held. But what seems
less known is that conditions for Confederate prisoners in Union POW camps were
little, if any, better. And the POW camp for Confederates at Point Lookout was
among the worst.
My great-grandfather, William Crooks Dry, was one of
those ragged Confederate soldiers who got off the steamboat at Aiken’s Landing
on that February day 150 years ago. He’d been with the 52nd North Carolina Infantry when he was captured at the Battle of Bristoe Station in October 1863.
He’d spent 16 months at Point Lookout. The camp was intended for 10,000
prisoners, but the population quickly swelled to 20,000.
The Confederate prisoners had had to endure two
bitterly cold winters in tents, sleeping on the ground. Once in a while they
were given a few scraps of wood for a fire, but mostly they shivered from
November until March. There was never enough food, and the men often caught and
cooked rats.
William’s brother Thomas, captured at Gettysburg and
imprisoned at Point Lookout at the same time, died there of smallpox in January
1864.
William and the other former POWs were taken to Camp
Winder Hospital, a sprawling complex of wooden buildings at the western edge of
Richmond. The hospital was organized into divisions, and each division housed
soldiers from one of the states in the Confederacy. William went to the Third
Division, which cared for soldiers from North Carolina.
The conditions at Camp Winder Hospital were primitive
by modern standards, but at least the men slept on cots in buildings heated by
woodstoves. And they were fed. It was unappealing institutional food prepared
in large quantities from whatever foodstuffs could be scrounged by the dying
Confederate government. But it was better – anything was better – than rat soup
at Point Lookout.
William hadn’t been paid since June 30, 1863 – the day
before the first day’s fighting at the Battle of Gettysburg. On March 4, he
received 20 months’ back pay – around $220. That would have been quite a bit of
money in 1865, but the payment was in Confederate dollars, which were virtually
worthless at that point. In 1907, James Roden, a Confederate soldier who was
hospitalized at Camp Winder a few months before William, recalled that he’d
spent two months’ pay for a dozen eggs during his hospitalization.
Robert Krick, historian for the Richmond National
Battlefield Park, said that soldiers sent to Camp Winder after being released
from POW camps typically were very weak from malnourishment. The usual
procedure was to keep the men hospitalized until they’d rested and regained
enough strength to travel, then send them home on a 30- or 60-day furlough to
completely recover.
That’s probably the treatment William received at
Winder, Krick said.
Even though William was only 25 years old in
1865, his stamina would have been greatly reduced by 16 months at Point
Lookout. Simply getting out of bed and walking across a room could have been
exhausting.
There’s no record of how long William was hospitalized.
His service records end with his payday on March 4. So there’s no way of
knowing for certain how long he was in Richmond, or when he left, or when he
arrived at the family farm back home in Cabarrus County, North Carolina. Nor is
there any way of knowing how he traveled the 270 miles between
Richmond and Cabarrus County.
It would have been weeks before William regained
enough strength to travel. By March 24, he would have been recuperating at Camp
Winder for one month. It seems unlikely that he would have left before then.
If he left before the end of March, he probably
traveled on the Richmond & Danville Railroad (later the Southern Railway)
from Richmond to the Cabarrus County seat of Concord. As the train left
Greensboro and chugged through the rolling hills of the North Carolina
piedmont, he undoubtedly was relieved to see the familiar landscape of his
home.
But he was a changed young man after three years of
war, and I wonder if that landscape didn’t bring back other memories. During a private
guided tour of the Gettysburg battlefield a few years ago, I mentioned to tour guide Gary Kross
how much the topography of southern Pennsylvania reminded me of back home. Kross smiled
and said many North Carolinians who visit Gettysburg say exactly the same
thing.
So as William approached Concord, the familiar
landscape may have reminded him less of home than of the horrors of the Battle
of Gettysburg, and of the death and gore of Pickett’s Charge. He was coming
home to a family decimated by the Civil War. Two brothers, two uncles and a
cousin had died. He may have thought that fate could not possibly deal
another blow to his family.
But if that thought did cross William’s mind, he was
wrong.
The engraving at the top of this post, from Harper's Weekly of March 18, 1865, shows Union soldiers who'd been released from Confederate prisoner-of-war camps boarding the steamboat New York at Aiken's Landing on the James River a few miles downriver from Richmond, Virginia. Three days later, Confederate solders released from the Union POW camp at Point Lookout, Maryland would be unloaded from a steamboat at the same spot.
