Immortal 600: Prisoners Under Fire at Charleston Harbor During the American Civil War

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To be caught between the opposing cannon fire was truly horrifying for the Rebel inmates. The big Federal guns in Battery Wagner would blast shells over their heads, and occasionally one of the rounds would prematurely burst, scattering the camp with fragments. The outgoing shells could be’seen distinctly’ as they roared overhead, recalled a lieutenant in the 20th Virginia Cavalry.

It was even more terrifying when the Southern gunners replied to the Union salvos and sent inbound projectiles directly over the prisoners’ camp. Henry Dickinson, a captain in the 2nd Virginia Cavalry, remembered the huge mortar shells that ‘looked as though they would fall directly on us.’ Dickinson could follow the shells at ‘night by the fuse burning,’ and was very relieved when their ‘parabolic course’ terminated in Battery Wagner.

As for the shells that sometimes burst over the camp, one of the incarcerated Confederates recalled that the inmates could ‘listen at the fragments humming through the air and hear them strike the ground with a dull thud among the tents.’ ‘Just imagine our position,’ one Rebel wrote in his diary. ‘Tied hands and feet as it were without the means of defending ourselves and know not what moment we may be writhing and bleeding under the effects of the bursting of terrible shell….

When shall it end?’

As reports of the arrival of the Confederate officers in the stockade on Morris Island reached Confederate headquarters, Jones suggested that harsh methods of reprisal were necessary. On September 7 he wrote to the Confederate high command in Richmond: ‘If the department thinks it proper to retaliate by placing Yankee officers in Sumter or other batteries, let the order be given, prompt action should be taken. Please instruct me what if any authority I have over prisoners.’

On September 22, the Confederate prisoners were taken out of their stockade and placed once again on Crescent City. They remained in the damp hold of the ship for one storm-tossed evening and, unaware of Grant’s firm dictate to Foster, hoped that they were to be exchanged. They had been transferred, however, so that Federalauthorities could search their camp for unauthorized goods, and the inmates were herded back to their forlorn digs the following day.

Throughout the month of September, the shelling continued, and the Confederate captives remained in their prison pen. Several Union guards outside the stockade were struck by shrapnel, but, almost unbelievably, the prisoners remained unharmed, even though approximately 18 rounds, fortunately all duds, actually landed among their sun-bleached A-tents.

The prisoners’ meager rations often consisted of only two pieces of hardtack a day. On a good day, a prisoner might receive some ‘worm eaten hard tack, a little chunk of bacon one half inch square’ and a bowl of bean soup made, it was rumored, on a formula of ‘three beans to a half quart of water,’ remembered Thomas Pickney, a captain in the 4th South Carolina Cavalry.

General Jones’ threats to put Union prisoners on the ramparts of Fort Sumter never materialized, and on October 8 the Union captives in Charleston were removed to cities farther inland. The Southern captives’ ordeal continued, however, until October 21, when, after 45 days of exposure to shellfire, they were finally taken out of their miserable pen and transferred to Fort Pulaski at Savannah, Ga.

The men spent a miserable cold, dreary winter there, 13 dying of disease. In March, the survivors were shipped back to Fort Delaware, where 25 more succumbed to illness. There they remained until after the war ended. The last man of the group was not released until July 1865.

The harsh and unusual conditions of their imprisonment inspired one of the captives, John O. Murray, to record his experiences in the 1905 book The Immortal Six-Hundred. The name he gave the group stuck, and today they are still referred to as the ‘Immortal 600.’

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Tags: 19th Century, America's Civil War, American Civil War, Historical Conflicts

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