It Happened Here--The Saddest of Veterans' Stories

Among the saddest of veterans' stories are those which involve soldiers/veterans who have suffered  the grotesqueries of war--the fatigue, the horror, the shock, the blood,  the pain-- and somehow find themselves being delivered from it , only to have accidental  calamity strike.  The American Civil War had two notable examples of this. One involved the burning of the steamboat Sultana.  With the war ended,  veterans were being shipped home in great numbers.  A  Mississippi riverboat contractor rushed his aging  steamboat, the Sultana, used in the cotton trade  into service,  making emergency  boiler repairs, to take on  2127 veteran soldiers on a ship designed to carry  361 passengers and crew.   Three of the four ships boiler exploded and the ship burned.   Somewhere between 1,164   and 1,547died.

The second involved an horrific train crash barely a couple miles from the New York  Delaware river  border  near Shohola Pennsylvania.  

New York State saw none of the actual  Civil War conflict, except for the New York City draft riots, and a clandestine  plot or two .    But a very large number of New Yorkers served in the Union Army evidenced by Civil War monuments in almost every town of any size across the state.   Its mills, factories and foundries provided much of the materiel, weapons and ammunition  for the Union forces, from the Parrot guns and cannonballs produced at arsenals in Waterveliet  and Cold Spring to the iron plate produced in Troy, for the iron-clad monitors and gunboats that would dominate the rivers of the South.  The small town of Elmira would become a logistical hub for the collection and training of  recruits and draftees from upstate New York.  From 1861 to 1863 Camp Rathbun  received thousands of men, outfitted and trained them before sending them south by rail.   But by the second part of the war a new need arose.  

During the earlier stage of the  war,  a relatively effective  parole and exchange system  kept the numbers of prisoners of war down.  But as  the fighting intensified and pressures on the  the South's war effort and economy increased, the system broke down.  First, the increased intensity of fighting created a lot more POW's.  Secondly, the  agreements that allowed POW's to return to their homes,  as parolees, if they and their governments  agreed not to return them to the fight, until they could be formally exchanged, appeared to be often violated, and thirdly, the economic stranglehold the Union had over the Confederacy frequently resulted in, according to Union officials,  Union POWs  being returned in starved. sickened conditions, unable to return to the Army,  while  their Confederate counterparts  were returned relatively  healthy and could  resume active service much more quickly.   Finally, the  Emancipation Proclamation and the introduction of Black soldiers into the Union Army added another dimension.  It was widely believed in the North, (and to some extent true) that Black POWs were summarily killed or sold into slavery.  Consequently,  by 1864 the exchange system had  broken down.  Both sides began to create facilities for holding more prisoners for a longer period of time, even  for the duration of the war. 

 For soldiers on either side, surviving combat did not insure survival if it led to imprisonment as a POW. 

 In the south ,  Andersonville  Georgia became the major POW prison;  in the North . Camp Rathbun,  aka. Camp Chemung,  Elmira was one of the larger prisons.  The 300 acre Camp Rathbun had barracks for 5000 and tents for 1000, with  kitchens able to feed 5000 daily.  When the camp was reorganized, the new camp commander was ordered to prepare to receive  by train, 8-10 thousand prisoners  in 10 days.  Eventually some 12,100 prisoners would be housed  here in a facility that strained to accommodate half that number. 

 With no doctors and no hospital, a hospital tent and citizen volunteers would serve until a hospital barracks could be built.  Crowding.  restricted rations, rapidly deteriorating sanitation led to rampant outbreaks of diseases and deaths.  A small pond that  Union recruits had sometimes bathed in, in the camp's former life,  became a fetid swamp.  The camp quickly acquired  the name "Hellmira."  Inadequate clothing and shelter combined with a brutally cold and snowy winter of 1864-5 made conditions much worse, with prisoners literally freezing to death and  was followed by a wet spring that caused the  Chemung  river to rise, flooding parts of the camp with as much of two feet of water and washing away part of the surrounding stockade.

Starting on July 5, 1864 the first trainload of prisoners arrived.   On July 15 a trainload  carrying 833 prisoners and 128 Union guards collided with a southbound coal train near Shohola Pennsylvania.  Forty nine POWs and seventeen guards were killed.  Local residents gave the injured first aid and the dead were "temporarily" interred in a mass grave.  The track was cleared the next day, a replacement train found, and the survivors, including the most grievously injured were sent on to Elmira  the next day.  The "temporarily" interred dead were not exhumed until 1911 when, with identification no longer possible , they were buried , Union guards and Confederate POWs , together in Elmira's Woodlawn National Cemetery.

Historians debate the extent to which the privations suffered by POWs were solely the result of inadequate planning and provisioning  in the face of overwhelming numbers of prisoners, or were they exacerbated by retaliatory policies of U.S. officials, responding to stories of mistreatment of Union prisoners in Confederate prisons.  There is evidence that  Commissary General of Prisons, Colonel William Holman   ordered Elmira prisoners be placed on bread and water rations after he heard of the inadequate rations being given Yankee POWs in Andersonville and he ordered that clothing sent by Southern families to their imprisoned relatives not be given out, but burned, if they were not uniform-grey. After the war , the commander of the Andersonville prison , Captain Henry Wirz was charged with the mistreatment of Union POWs and hanged but similar charges were never brought against  Union prison officials.

At wars' end, the mortality rate for POWs  at Andersonville was over 1 in 4,  28.7%,  Elmira's was scarcely better, 24.5%.

One laudatory story that is always repeated in this otherwise tragic episode of NY history is the work of 

John W. Jones.  Jones was the sexton of Elmira's Woodlawn Cemetery, charged with maintenance of the cemetery and overseeing burial parties.  In the year of Elmira Prison's existence he was confronted with a huge number of Confederate soldier burials.  He did his work with respect, care and precision, such that only seven of the nearly 3000  graves are marked "unknown".  The rest, lying in precise ranks, have
 names, and most  have ranks, and units with whom the men served.  Jones had been a slave, escaping North before the Civil War.

 Marker of the Week  Fortnight --  

                                                                            A Milestone for "Markers"

Last summer when "NYSHMS: It Happened Here" was on hiatus while  I was engaged in other projects, I turned  to looking through old posts and happened  on  the  Blogger "stats" page.   I was astonished  to realize that people were continuing to read my old posts, and read them in fairly high numbers with this blog getting over 200,000 page views.   In  the middle of last month it surpassed the 250,000 mark -- a  1/4 million page views !

(It was something of a Sally Fields moment for me.)   But before I break my arm patting myself on the back , however,  I realize an unknown number of these  page views are probably the work of mindless  "bots" scurrying around the internet gathering up factoids for composing term papers for high school students  or college freshmen who could care less about their  paper's subjects.  To my faithful human readers, therefore, I want to express my gratitude.  To the unknown legion of "bots"---ta'hell'witcha!

A Milestone on the Albany Post Road,

Rte. 9  Kinderhook