Circa1865

Deadly hatred toward white Southerners was instilled in black troops by their new Northern friends, and the same would continue in the postwar as victorious Republicans needed the freedmen’s political dominance in the South to remain in power.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Black Guards for Southern Prisoners

“As a general rule, the treatment by the white soldiers was not so bad, and it would have been much better, no doubt, had it not been for the cruel policy of the United States Government, and the stringent orders to have that policy carried out.

The colored troops were very harsh in their treatment of us, and they we no doubt urged to do this by their officers, who were certainly the meanest set of white men that could be found anywhere. The Negroes never let an opportunity pass to show their animosity and hatred towards us, and the man who shot a Rebel was regarded as a good soldier. They carried their authority to the extreme, and would shoot upon the slightest provocation.

If a prisoner happened to violate even one of the simplest regulations, he was sure to be shot at, and should he be so unfortunate as to turn over in his sleep, groan, or make any noise, which some were apt to do while sleeping, the tent in which he lay would be fired into.

For instance, one night in Company G, Fourth division, some one happened to groan in his sleep. The Negro patrol was near, heard it, and fired into the tent, killing two and wounding several others. These were killed while sleeping and were unconscious of having committed any offence whatever.

None of these patrols were punished, but were praised for vigilance. Scores of incidents, similar in character and result, might be given . . . Suffice it to say that a man’s life was in more danger than upon a picket line, for he was completely at the mercy of the cruel and malignant Negro soldiery.

Shooting into the tents of prisoners became so common that the officers of the white regiments protested at last against their [the colored troops] being allowed in camp, and accordingly they were withdrawn at night, and white patrols substituted.”

(Southern Historical Society Papers, Prison Experience (Point Lookout), James T. Wells, Volume VII, pp. 397-398)

Serving with Orangeburg’s Edisto Rifles, Company G, 25^th Regiment, South Carolina Volunteers of Hagood’s Brigade was one Ira Thomas Shoemaker. He was part of the Fort Fisher garrison during the attacks in late 1864 and early 1865, and captured after its fall. Sergeant Shoemaker was imprisoned in his hometown of Elmira, New York.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

An Empire State Confederate at Fort Fisher

“Our picket line one day while the brigade was on the Darbytown lines was attacked and driven in by the Yankees. The pickets in front of the Twenty-fifth Regiment were commanded by a lieutenant. General [Johnson] Hagood had a new detail made at once, with Sergeant Ira T. Shoemaker of the Edisto Rifles in command, who promptly drove the Yankees back, reestablished the line and held it till next morning when regularly relieved.

Sergeant Shoemaker was a New Yorker, from Herkimer County. He came down South several years before the war and was teaching in Orangeburg [South Carolina] when the State seceded, and did not hesitate as to what he should do, but promptly aligned himself with those who fought under the Starry Cross, and unswervingly held on to the bitter end.

Like Jim Bludsoe: “He seen his duty a dead sure thing, And went for it thar and then.”

He fulfilled the requirements of a model Confederate soldier. After the close of the war he represented Orangeburg County in the legislature several years before his death.

Sergeant Shoemaker’s home was in Elmira, where the prison was located, before he came South, and his parents and other members of his family were living there when he was a prisoner. They endeavored in every way to induce him to take the oath of allegiance to the United States, but this he positively refused to do, preferring to stand true to his convictions and “live and die in Dixie.”

(Sketch of the War Record of the Edisto Rifles, 1861-1865, William V. Izlar, The State Company, 1914, Pages 103, 109)

In April 1864 Gen. Grant, apparently with the approval of Lincoln, forbade Gen. Benjamin Butler “to deliver to the Rebels a single able-bodied man.”  Butler then wrote that “[the] facts abundantly show that the responsibility of refusing to exchange prisoners of war rests with the Government of the United States, and the people who have sustained that government; and every sigh of captivity, every groan of suffering, every heart broken by hope deferred among [the North’s] eighty thousand prisoners [in Southern prisons], will accuse them in the judgment of the just.”  Lincoln kept his own men starving in Southern prisons in order to deny the South any returned soldiers.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Prisons Holding Independence-Minded Americans

“For the common soldier in prison, survival was a daily struggle. James Huffman of the Tenth Virginia Infantry was one who lived to write his reminiscences of prison life:

“Elmira Camp was a very sickly place. The death rate was much higher than in the army during active hostilities. About half of us Virginians — and I think three-quarters of all the Southerners — died here in eight to ten months. A large number of North and South Carolinians had been captured at a Fort on the North Carolina coast — hale, hearty looking fellows except that they were yellow from lying in the trenches.

These men crowded us very much at first, but in two or three weeks they were nearly all gone to the hospitals, and most of them died. The well water looked pure and good but was deadly poison to our men, thousands taking chronic diarrhea from which they died. We had smallpox almost all the time. One doctor there said he killed more Rebs than any soldier at the front.”

(True Tales of the South at War, Clarence Poe, editor, UNC Press, 1961, pg. 147)