Thomas A. Botts: An American Civil War Confederate Prisoner

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A thick, gray sky hung over south-central New York State this dead winter’s day in early 1864. Against the darkness and the season’s barren landscape, Elmira Prison looked particularly gloomy. Indeed, Confederate prisoners there were freezing, starving, and sick, clinging desperately to their lives.

On the surface, the widespread suffering seemed to have little effect on one of the prisoners. An icy wind blowing through his long, dark beard, he strolled nonchalantly about the compound alone. Snowflakes frosted the shoulders of his coat, a strange garment that said more about him than any words ever could.

‘He was a large fine specimen of a man and wore a long-tailed coat of brown jeans,’ wrote fellow prisoner John Williamson Alexander of the 5th Virginia Cavalry. ‘He had a mania for buttons — sewn on every available spot of his coat — hundreds of buttons from every state in the union. You could not put down the point of your finger without touching a button.’

Prisoners and guards alike wondered aloud about the unusual coat. ‘The Yanks plied him with questions,’ Alexander wrote. ‘He hesitated and did not want to hurt any feelings. After being hard-pressed, he told them that every time he killed a Yank, he sewed on a button — and this was his second coat!’

Identified simply as ‘Buttons,’ the mysterious eccentric turned up over the years in diary after diary and memoir after memoir. Alexander remembered him as ‘playful as a kitten.’ One writer recalled a’strange character’ who ‘fairly glistened’ in the sunshine.

A true testament to Buttons’s legendary status was the number of apocryphal stories that featured him as protagonist. One of these fabricated accounts, published in Confederate Veteran magazine in 1926, described how he had escaped Elmira by feigning death. According to that article, Buttons lay in a coffin that was en route to the cemetery beyond the prison grounds for interment. Suddenly, he popped open the casket lid, frightening the burial party off into the adjacent woods. He then climbed out and ran away to reunite with the Confederate army.

Despite all the references to Buttons, his true identity remained a mystery. Fellow Elmira prisoners had given him the nickname almost immediately upon his arrival, and for obvious reasons, they remembered it long after they had forgotten his given name. The phenomenon was common among former prisoners trying to record their prison experiences for posterity, according to Berry Benson, a South Carolinian who escaped from Elmira with 10 other inmates in October 1864. ‘It was generally true that whenever soldiers could hit upon a nickname which was in any way characteristic, that name would take preference over the legitimate one,’ he wrote. After a while, the real name was gone, if anyone had ever known it. Such was Benson’s experience with Buttons: ‘I never heard him called by any other name than Buttons.’

The truth behind the legend of Buttons might have been lost forever if not for a woman named Annie Alexander Johnson. A member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, she urged her brother to record his memories of his days as a Confederate soldier and prisoner of war. To please his sister, Alexander sketched out the story of his Civil War experience. Once completed, the document lay forgotten in old family files until a descendant in Matthews, North Carolina, discovered it.

In his manuscript, Alexander states that he left his father’s farm in Pond Field, just outside Gaffney, South Carolina, and enlisted in the Confederate army at Orangeburg on June 4, 1861. After serving as a private in Company G of the 5th South Carolina Infantry for 10 months, which included the war’s opening campaign at Manassas, Virginia, he transferred to Company G of the 5th Virginia Cavalry. During the Battle of Yellow Tavern on May 11, 1864, Alexander was captured. Sent to prison at Point Lookout, Maryland, he remained there for three months before being moved north to Elmira.

Tags: 19th Century, Civil War Times, Historical Conflicts

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