by Alan Huffman
At the height of the flood, Melville Cox Robertson wrote in his diary that a thousand or more prisoners stood day and night in knee-deep water amid drowned rats, while the men who had taken refuge in the roosts tried to bolster their supports. One of the roosts had collapsed, sending a large crowd into the water, though Robertson’s own bunk remained dry. “To-day will be remembered in the history of the nation as the day of the Second inauguration of ‘Old Abe,’” he wrote in one entry, “and in my history as one of the days of the great flood in Castle Morgan.”
Henderson, the prison’s official commandant, was then in Vicksburg trying to negotiate a prisoner exchange, and when word reached him of the flood he asked his Union counterparts to send a steamboat with provisions to Cahaba, as had been done once before. Instead, the decision was made to parole the prisoners and send them home. Before the flood fully receded, steamboats began arriving at the Cahaba landing to take them away.
“Late in the evening a few hundred were taken out and more have gone this morning,” Robertson wrote. “The rebs tell us it is for exchange.” The next day the water began to fall, and more men were taken away. Release came too late for some; about thirty more died before Cahaba closed, but it seemed to the rest that their troubles were finally coming to an end. By March 6, only about five hundred prisoners remained, and a week later the water had drained from the stockade. Robertson wrote that in preparation for their release the prisoners were required to turn over their skillets and blankets. The next day he boarded a steamboat for Selma, which, he noted upon his arrival, “is a nice place.”
As at Andersonville, those whose homes were in the Northeast were to be transported to the Atlantic coast, while the rest, mostly from the border states and the Midwest, would head toward Camp Fisk and the network of inland rivers that would carry them from Vicksburg, on the Mississippi, to the valleys of the Missouri, Tennessee, and Ohio rivers.
The releases were staged over the course of a month, and even as they were taking place, prisoners continued to die—twenty-one in March and eight in April. As they were departing, C.W. Hayes, a prisoner who had served as a steward in the Bell Tavern hospital, took the time to write a letter to Amanda Gardner, thanking her for her generosity. On March 5, 1865, he wrote, “We are all about to bid farewell to Castle Morgan. Some are already on their homeward journey…Yet I cannot leave without first expressing my heartfelt thanks to you for the noble & humane kindness you have so generously bestowed upon the prisoners while confined here—aiding them, by the kind dispensation of your books amongst them to while away the tedious hours of captivity, both pleasantly and instructively.” He lamented that “there were some among them who were so worthless as to abuse your books in a shameful manner but the majority, appreciating the noble impulses of thy generous heart were careful in the use of your works, knowing full well that you were making a noble sacrifice of your library for their benefit.” Addressing her as “our kind benefactress,” he added, “Many a one will speak in glowing terms of thy noble generosity and you will ever be remembered as a friend of the unfortunate. The day is not far distant when peace, the great tranquilizer, will again unite our destructed country in perfect harmony and unity. The end is fast approaching.”
From Selma and Demopolis, the journey took the Vicksburg-bound prisoners to Meridian, then Jackson, where they embarked upon the final arduous thirty-five-mile march to Camp Fisk. Hawes wrote that after spending the night in Meridian, his group traveled to Jackson on a train that moved so slowly that at times men walked alongside. The hospitals at Jackson were not equipped to care for the sick and injured, and reports of men collapsing and dying along the roadside prompted the Union Army to dispatch ambulances from Vicksburg under Confederate guard. As at Andersonville, the denouement of the prisoners’ incarceration saga was not exactly celebratory, but excitement grew once they reached Jackson and realized that the Union lines were close.
As they plodded westward from Jackson they passed through a ruined countryside. Reaching the Big Black River took two days, and most of the men were soaked by spring rains, but on the evening of March 16, after more than a week of travel, the first group reached the Confederate-held bank of the river, within sight of the Union lines. Other groups soon followed, including prisoners from Andersonville, Meridian, and Macon, Georgia.
Tolbert and Maddox arrived on April 10 at the height of spring. Everything was verdant. The dogwoods, irises, jonquils, and wild roses were in bloom. The creeks were full. They were finally headed home.
Chapter Eleven
SOLD UP THE RIVER
THEY CAUGHT THEIR BREATH AT CAMP FISK. IT WAS where they would officially put the war and prison behind them. But for the military command, Camp Fisk was also a vast, potentially dangerous holding pen, with unique, pressing demands made not only by the prisoners, who needed everything, but by the representatives of the steamboat companies hired to transport them home, for whom the camp was a warehouse of lucrative, perishable commodities.
Camp Fisk was named for Colonel Archie Fisk, a Union Army assistant adjutant general at Vicksburg. Fisk had proposed the site, which had also been used to hold Confederate prisoners on their way to being paroled, for paroling the Union prisoners. Operated jointly by the Union and Confederate armies, it was little more than a broad sloping field, with no real infrastructure other than the nearby Union Army post and the railroad into Vicksburg. Considering what the men had left behind, it was an improvement, though. There was food. The American flag flew overhead.
Fisk had come up with the parole plan in response to pleas from the Confederate military for supplies for its Union prisoners. He felt that because the war was ending it made more sense to simply send the prisoners home. He chose the site and designated members of the U.S. Colored Troops as guards (until they were paroled the men were technically prisoners, though in Union hands). During the war the timber had been cleared for several miles along the Big Black for army camps, and the river, spanned by a pontoon bridge, represented the dividing line between the Union and Confederate domains. Everything east of the Big Black was officially controlled by the Confederacy, while everything to the west was in Union hands. The Union Army post, with its orderly lines of white tents, overlooked the site.
After crossing the river, the prisoners were loaded onto flatcars for a laboriously slow, hour-long train ride to the camp, which was eight miles from the river and four miles from Vicksburg. The prisoners, most of whom would remain at Camp Fisk for several weeks, immediately set about building crude shelters of branches and cane, organizing themselves into communities, singing by the campfire, and fighting—everything they had done in the army and in prison, though now in a comparatively more convivial atmosphere. On April 14, Union Major General Napoleon J.T. Dana, commander of the Department of Mississippi, reported the population of Camp Fisk at forty-seven hundred. Of those, more than a thousand—mostly men from Andersonville—were sick. “The rest of the prisoners are in excellent health,” Dana wrote, “the Cahaba prisoners particularly.” Their health, of course, was relative.
The day Dana submitted his report, the steamboat Sultana was docked in Cairo, Illinois, where an announcement in the local newspaper read, “The regular and unsurpassed passenger packet ‘Sultana,’ in command of Capt. J. Cass Mason, departs tomorrow morning at 10 o’clock for New Orleans, Memphis and all way landings. The ‘Sultana’ is a good boat, as well as a fleet one. Mr. Wm. Gamble has control of the office affairs, while our friends Thomas McGinty and James O’Hara will be found in the saloon, where everything of the ‘spirit’ order can be had in due time.”
River traffic had been picking up since the fall of Vicksburg in July 1863, and much of it involved the transportation of Union troops. Military contracts were a profitable economic niche, coveted by steamboat companies, whose owners knew that the focus would soon shift to transporting former prisoners of war. None of the companies were fully prepared for the task, nor was anyone aware of how profoundly the national dyna
mic was about to change. On the night of April 14, after Dana sent his report to Washington, John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. When the Sultana embarked from Cairo, it carried the news downriver.
Union Army officials were consumed by deliberations over how to get the prisoners home, which was not to be a simple matter, and repeated delays proved costly for the sick prisoners. Among the casualties was Melville Cox Robertson, the soldier from Jefferson County, Indiana, who had left this plaintive message in his father’s Bible when he went off to war: “To-day at 2 o’clock P.M. I leave home perhaps forever. If I should return at the end of three years alive I hope to have the proud satisfaction of saying ‘my country is saved and I have done my duty as one of its citizens.’ If I fall, let my friends forget my faults and remember me only as a dead soldier of the republic. I want no brighter immortality.” Robertson had reiterated his desire to make it home, dead or alive, in his last diary entry at Cahaba on June 24, 1864. “While writing the preceding the death gasp of a fellow soldier called me away…God preserve me from such a burial,” he wrote. “Let me die and be buried at home by friends no matter how humble they may be.”
Ten days after leaving Cahaba, in a letter to his brother from Camp Fisk, Robertson wrote, “Now there is a great deal I could tell you and a great deal I would of perils by land and water, among thieves, false brethren and confederates if I could do it orally instead of by letter.” At that point, he wrote, he was in good health, and weighed perhaps 180 pounds, “but am in rather poor trim for walking having bruised my feet considerably by a march of about twenty five miles day before yesterday, the most of it in a heavy rain.” He reported that the men at Camp Fisk were being aided by the Christian Commission and the citizens of Vicksburg, who provided them with combs, spoons, tobacco, and other items. But during the lengthening wait, Camp Fisk became its own breeding ground for disease, and Robertson contracted typhoid fever. He would later board a steamboat named the Baltic but would not make it home. While on the Baltic he again wrote home to say that he was sick. He died in St. Louis before his father and brother could arrive to escort him home. Robertson apparently knew that his chances of surviving were slim. He had mailed home the earlier pages of his diary after his capture, and at Camp Fisk he entrusted the parts concerning his captivity to a friend who later boarded the Sultana.
During the wait at Camp Fisk, J. Walter Elliott steadfastly maintained his ruse as Captain David E. Elliott. As he later explained, “never until I had shaken the dust of the Confederacy from my feet did I disclose my identity to friend or foe—and the sixty autograph albums gotten up by my companions in Castle Reed will attest to it.”
After as long as a month in limbo, the men were itching to get under way. Dana was under pressure to move them, not only because they were anxious but because tensions were developing between them and the guards. On April 4, a near riot broke out over a confrontation between one of the white officers of the U.S. Colored Troops and an officer representing the prisoners. In response, Dana replaced the guards with white soldiers, and the tensions died down. As Gene Eric Salecker wrote in his book Disaster on the Mississippi, the prisoners tried to make the most of their wait during the first two weeks of April. Some were able to get passes to visit Vicksburg, a battle-scarred town atop a series of undulating bluffs overlooking the river, where they inspected the Confederate works and marveled that the seemingly impregnable city had fallen. Some had money wired to them from home. Private Lewis McCory used his money to buy a new suit of clothes, a valise to put them in, and a sturdy pocketbook in which he stashed $100.
Soon, word came that Richmond had fallen, then that Lee had surrendered at Appomattox Court House. Now the Confederacy was in no position to quibble over the details of a prisoner exchange. A telegram arrived in Vicksburg on April 13 instructing that all prisoners be paroled unconditionally, and the next day there was an official celebration. The prisoners cheered and sang patriotic songs. The guards fired their guns. They organized military parades. John Clark Ely wrote in his diary, “Today Major Anderson again raises the same old flag over Sumter and today the North rejoice over their victories and today came an order from General Dana for us to be paroled and sent North. Bully, we may soon see our sweethearts.” But jubilation quickly gave way to mourning. News of Lincoln’s death reached the camp on April 15, and that prompted the understandably nervous Confederate officers and guards to withdraw across the Big Black River into more friendly territory. With no suitable objects for their anger, some of the prisoners sang a song called “Hang Jeff Davis from a Sour Apple tree” before settling in for the night.
The official exchange of prisoners took place on a sunny spring day, with officers from both sides seated in Windsor chairs at a small outdoor table, signing the papers. It was a milestone event, though little changed at Camp Fisk right away. The prisoners were not aware that the delays were the result of more than typical army bureaucracy. Steamboat owners were paid by the head for each man they carried, and everyone wanted in on the action. Among the central figures in the negotiations over who would carry the paroled prisoners north was Colonel Reuben Hatch, the Union Army’s chief quartermaster at Vicksburg, whose name had already been sullied by allegations of government graft. The Chicago Tribune had reported allegations that Hatch had skimmed profits from government lumber purchases in Cairo in 1861. Though Hatch reportedly dumped his incriminating ledgers in the Ohio River, they had washed up on the bank and been found, and he had been arrested and court-martialed. During the course of the investigation it came to light that Hatch also sold army supplies for personal gain and chartered steamboats to carry Union troops while taking part of the fee. When he was brought to trial, he turned to his influential brother, the Illinois secretary of state, who used his political clout to pressure President Lincoln, a personal friend, to intercede in the “frivolous” charges. Lincoln did.
As late as February 1865, a government examining board had concluded that Hatch was “totally unfit” to serve as quartermaster, but instead of getting rid of him the army brass had sent him to Vicksburg, where he became involved in loading the boats. Officially, Captain Frederick Speed—assistant adjutant general for the region—was in charge, but Captain Mason of the Sultana apparently felt it would be more useful to work through Hatch.
On April 17, Speed hurriedly supervised the boarding of a group of comparatively fortunate Illinois parolees on a steamboat provided by the quartermaster’s department, and sent them on their way. But the process soon bogged down in what would later be characterized as a conspiracy of bribery and greed. When the Sultana docked at Vicksburg on her way to New Orleans, Hatch paid a visit to Captain Mason. According to Salecker, the meeting left Mason with the impression that Hatch was in charge of loading the parolees, and he wanted to get as large a load as possible when he returned from New Orleans. For good measure, Mason asked a friend, Union General Morgan Smith, to pull some strings. According to later testimony in a government inquiry into the matter, Smith told the Sultana’s agent in Vicksburg, “I will give Captain Mason a load as he comes up and if Hatch or Captain Speed don’t turn the men out to him, you let me know it.”
Meanwhile, Speed began organizing the passage of paroled prisoners on whatever boats were available. Dana had instructed him to send them upriver in groups of about one thousand, but keeping the groups together proved difficult. Although each prisoner’s name, company, and regiment had ostensibly been recorded upon his arrival at Camp Fisk, discrepancies and confusion over the continuing arrival of new prisoners complicated the process. Even worse, as Salecker wrote, some boat captains and their agents, in an effort to get their share of the human cargo, “were not above offering a monetary inducement to any officer willing to be a party to their hustling and scheming. It was no coincidence that such an offer was made in the office of Colonel Hatch.”
What followed was a frenzy of lobbying, corner-cutting, and perhaps bribery by steamboat captains, the
ir agents, and the Union military in Vicksburg. Even when all the negotiations were above board, it was clear that whichever boat a paroled prisoner ended up on was going to be seriously overloaded. Few steamboats were equipped to carry more than a few hundred passengers; yet, one of the first to embark from Vicksburg, the Henry James, was crowded with more than thirteen hundred men. For the men, it was all about getting home. The Sultana, the Henry James, the Olive Branch, the Pauline Carroll—the boats were all the same to them.
IN A SENSE, TOLBERT AND MADDOX had been here before. So had every other soldier waiting at the wharf to board the Sultana that balmy April day. They had waited in line at the muster office when they enlisted, had waited in line to be issued their uniforms, had waited in line during drill, had waited in line to enter the godforsaken prisons, and once inside, had waited in line for their daily rations and their turns at the latrines. They had waited in line to get out, had waited in line to board the filthy, rickety trains and the overburdened steamboats that carried them from Georgia and Alabama to Mississippi, had waited in line to cross the pontoon bridge across Big Black River, had waited in line to be issued new clothing and food and medicine at Camp Fisk, and finally had waited in line to board the cars for the short ride into Vicksburg. Now the line stretched from the gangplank of the Sultana, along the wharf, and up the hill out of sight. The delays that had kept the men sequestered at Camp Fisk for as long as a month continued until the moment they boarded.
The delays were the result of multiple factors. There was confusion about names. Steamboat captains and Union officers interrupted the flow, jockeying for position and scrambling for favors. Hasty repairs were being made to the Sultana—in secret. Though some of the recently paroled prisoners were bewildered by the delays, others were taciturn and cared only about getting on the boat. Many were seeing the Mississippi River for the first time, which no doubt made the wait more interesting. Tolbert’s father had traveled the Ohio and Mississippi rivers between Madison, Indiana, and New Orleans, shipping and selling whiskey and other commodities. Tolbert’s own experience with rivers was limited to the Ohio, along which he had grown up, and the Tennessee and smaller waterways that he had crossed and recrossed during the war. The Mississippi was impressive—wide, deep, and forbidding, flowing fast and full with snowmelt from the north. Timbers and rafts of logs bumped against the hulls of the great filigreed boats tied up at the wharf. The waterfront was lined with ravaged storefronts and warehouses, and in the distance, the bluffs were surmounted by mangled trees, damaged mansions, and silent Rebel batteries.
