Thomas A. Botts: An American Civil War Confederate Prisoner

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It was at Point Lookout that Alexander met Buttons. Fortunately for us, Alexander remembered more than his comrade’s nickname, and in the latter pages of his manuscript, he provided the key to the Buttons mystery. Describing the death and disease so prevalent at Elmira, he wrote, ‘among those who died now of the writer’s acquaintance was: that gentle soul, Botts, familiarly called Buttons….’

Further research revealed that ‘Botts’ was Thomas A. Botts, born in 1817 at Abbeville District in South Carolina. He was one of eleven children born to Thomas Cromer Botts and Nancy Moore Botts. No other details have surfaced about his early life.

Information about his adult years is hardly more enlightening. At one point, he was listed as an ‘overseer’ of a farm. On Christmas Eve 1848, he married Matilda Wright at Abbeville. The couple had five children: James (1849), John (1851), Nancy (1857), Asa N. (1859), and E.G., whose exact year of birth is unknown.

As the clouds of war darkened over the North and South, Botts decided to join the Confederate army. On December 28, 1861, he enlisted in South Carolina’s Holcombe Legion Infantry Battalion at Camp Hamilton. The 44-year-old private was assigned to the regiment’s Company F. The following March, he reenlisted for two more years. The last time Botts saw his family and home was during a brief period between March 6 and April 31, 1862, when military records listed him as ‘home on leave of absence.’ Several Botts family descendants speculate that he may have fathered the last of his five children during this furlough.

Later in the war, when Confederate troops were entrenched in defense of Petersburg, Virginia, Botts was captured at Jarrett’s Station on May 8, 1864. His first place of confinement is unknown, but many prisoners captured in Virginia about the same time were briefly held at Fortress Monroe, at the tip of the Virginia Peninsula. Before long, Botts was at Point Lookout and on August 17, 1864, was moved to Elmira. He died there on May 14, 1865, less than two weeks before President Andrew Johnson ordered prisoners released. The official cause of death was listed as ‘rhuematism.’ Alexander’s memoir recalls some of the burial ritual performed for Botts and the nearly three thousand others who died at Elmira:

…I went to the Dead House often, and his [a Reverend Eddy, chaplain of a Texas regiment] was the last kindly act done for our dead. After they were placed in their coffins, it was he who regulated the wooden shavings, which served for pillows for their last long sleep. This done, those rough grizzled carpenters, who were so familiar with death, formed a line with hats off while this good man repeated short burial services — the last and only service I ever heard while there. This done, the carpenters again got busy and the lids of the coffins were speedily nailed down.

The caskets were then interred at Woodlawn Cemetery, adjacent to the prison compound. That 2.5-acre piece of land was the final resting place for most of the 2,917 who did not survive the rigors of Elmira. In plot No. 2801 lies Thomas A. Botts — Buttons, to those who knew him.

This article was written by Hudson Alexander and originally published in the June 2000 issue of Civil War Times Magazine. For more great articles, be sure to subscribe to Civil War Times magazine today!

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