The six acres of Fort Delaware held nearly 13,000 Confederate prisoners captured mostly at the Battle of Gettysburg. Many of them were from the 26th Georgia Regiment, CSA. Conditions were horrible. Due to overcrowding, the water became putrefied, and food was scarce from being purposely withheld. The prisoners faced scurvy, smallpox, measles, dysentery, diarrhea, and severe malnutrition often leading to death.

From the booklet, "Prison-Pens of the North," by Michael Dann Hayes

Col. George H. Moffett continues his description of life as a Confederate prisoner in the Union prison camp, Fort Delaware:

"I have said the discipline at Camp Chase was strict, and strictly enforced. At Fort Delaware the discipline was brutal and brutally enforced. For the slightest infraction of discipline and sometimes without any cause, except from the malicious whim of a guard or officer, the most humiliating punishments were inflicted, usually accompanied by the severest torture.

"A common form of punishment was to 'buck and gag' the victim. This was done by placing a gag in his mouth, then pinioning his arms behind him and running a stick between the elbows and back. In this helpless condition the prisoner was thrown to the ground and left to lie there a whole day exposed to the broiling sun or the chill of the winter atmosphere, according to the season. But their most popular penal system was to hang up the victim by the thumbs, or 'thumb hangings,' as it was technically known, in the pass way between the mess hall and the kitchen with a number of swings in it.

"The cruelty in all this was it should have never occurred in a land teeming with abundance. As we looked out through our little pigeonhole windows across the bay to the Delaware side we could see golden fields of wheat waving in the sunlight, the corn in the ear, orchards laden with fruit, and cattle grazing in the green pastures. We knew all the markets in the world were open to these people. Yet in the midst of plenty they denied to these helpless prisoners sufficient food to appease the pangs of hunger, and thus we reasoned that their cruelty was willful and deliberate.

"The mortality was excessive. Two of my bunkmates had been brought to the hospital just the day before, all of us stricken with the same malady, yet before the end of the week both of them had died. In reply to an inquiry as to the death rate in the hospital, the steward told me that for the months of June and July it averaged over seventy deaths per day. I believed him, for I had the ocular demonstration. Each morning at an early hour carts would rattle up to the 'dead house' just underneath our ward and would haul the dead to the wharf, where they were placed on a little steamer and ferried over to the Jersey shore for burial. Lest we forget.

"Before I had fully recovered, but sufficiently convalesced to walk without assistance, I went back into the barracks, in order to make room in the hospital for some poor sufferer who needed medical attention more than I did. Upon my return to the barracks I found, to my inexpressibly joy, that my appetite was gone. God had been good to me. It is a singular fact that the walls of the stomach seemed to have contracted to fit the 'one-fourth' ration. It is true that I continued to be weak and debilitated. I had shriveled and shrunken into a walking skeleton, yet the hunger pains were gone. Nor did they return in the excruciating form I have hitherto described.

"The summer ripened into autumn, the autumn passed into another winter - so cold, cheerless and desolate - the spring time came again, and with it the tidings of the fall of the Confederacy. But it was not until the early summer an order came for the release of all prisoners of war.

"On the morning of the 20th of June, l865, I was called out to the provost's office to subscribe to my 'amnesty,' and when this was performed I was told that I was again a free man. Strange as it may seem to the reader, the announcement of our release excited no enthusiasm among the freed prisoners. Possibly our long and miserable confinement had made us callous to events. All the buoyancy of youth was gone. At sixteen years of age I had quit college to go into the war, and had just recently passed my twentieth birthday when released from Fort Delaware. I felt that the best period of my young manhood had been a wasted experience. Then again, we were men without a country. Our storm-cradled nation once challenging the gaze of the world, had fallen to rise no more. With that feeling of being alien in a strange land, it is no wonder that our heartstrings were tuneless now or that our home-going should have been shadowed by solemn reflections.

"Back again in Dixie Land! But oh how changed, and how different from what we had dreamed or hoped! It was a land of ruins. Yet in its desolation the dear old land seemed dearer to us than in the days of prosperity."

As Col. Moffett and others have been allowed to so explicitly describe in this series, the only difference between Andersonville prison in Georgia and those run by the Union Army in the North was their relative locations, North and South. And that has affected the way popular history has treated the two: with cultural bias clearly directed toward the South.

Bill Ward lives in Salisbury and is a historian, writer, and member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Contact him at wardwriters@bellsouth.net