Fort Delaware
Return now to the days before the bunker and the tracks existed. Return to the prison where, according to
one prisoner, Confederate captives bore even "greater indignities, hardships and privation" than those Union
soldiers held at the infamous Andersonville prison. In your mind go back to the Fort Delaware where 32,305
Rebel prisoners were housed during the course of the Civil War. More than 2,400 of them never made it home."The prisoners were afflicted with smallpox, measles, diarrhea, dysentery and scurvy as well
as the ever-present louse. A thousand ill; twelve thousand on an island which should hold four;
astronomical numbers of deaths a day of dysentry and the living having more life on them than
in them. Lack of food and water and thus a Christian nation treats the captives of its sword!"
-Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, July 1863
The marshy location, inclement weather, brutal treatment, and overcrowded conditions at Fort Delaware on Pea Patch Island in the middle of the Delaware River all combined to make the Confederate inmates miserable. It was the starvation diet, however, that imposed the greatest hardship and led to the most deaths. In retaliation for suffering endured by Union prisoners in Southern camps, the U.S. government reduced the rations of the Rebel prisoners. The men stared out across the river to fertile fields of grain and corn, yet they sat starving. "The bacon was rusty and slimy", one inmate remembered about his rations, "the soup was slop... filled with white worms a half inch long... It was a standard joke that the soup was too weak to drown the rice worms and pea bugs, which however came to their end by starvation." A Georgia private wrote, "Our rations consisted of one-fourth of a half-pound loaf of bread, twice a day. Our meat consisted of a very small, thin slice of salt pork of fresh beef, which made about one good mouthful, with one Irish potato occasionally... I was so nearly starved I was reduced from 140 to 80 pounds." Malnutrition and unhealthful conditions resulted in epidemics.
Water was another problem, as one prisoner wrote: "The standing rainwater breeds a dense swarm of
animalculae and when the interior sediment is stirred up...the whole contents become a turgid, jellified mass of waggle tails, worms, dead leaves, dead fishes, and other putrescent abominations...the smell of it is enough to revolt the stomach...to say nothing of making one's throat a channel for such stuff."Prisoner diaries are full of blistering diatributes about Commandant Gen. Albin F. Schoepf. , whom they called "General Terror", and others among the guards who made prison life even more miserable than it naturally was. On orders from Schoepf's adjutant, Capt. George Ahl, a lame prisoner was shot and killed while returning from the privies because he moved too slowly. Ahl's assistant, Lt. George Wolfe, was as sadistic as his superiors and delighted in eating fresh fruit in front of the prisoners, and watching them scramble for the peels he would throw into the mud. For trivial offenses these prison officials would have inmates hung by their thumbs for an entire day. Across the river from the prison on the New Jersey shore lie the mass graves of 2,436 Confederate soldiers who died during their incarceration at Fort Delaware.
Alarmed at prison conditions, a group of Fort Delaware neighbors organized a picnic to raise funds to buy vegetables for the prisoners. A squad of Union soldiers descended on the picnic, arrested all the males, and jailed them at Fort McHenry.
The last inmates were leaving Fort Delaware in July 1865, but our ancestor, Robert Streetman had perished just two months earlier in May of that year. The irony of this is the Confederate prisoners at Fort Delaware continued to languish there for two months after the end of the war.