Freedom by the Sword - US Army Center Of Military History

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Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862–1867
Even when men and officers of the U.S. Colored Troops reached Confederate
prisons, their captors refused to release them on the same terms that governed
other soldiers. “This is the point on which the whole matter hinges,” Stanton
explained to Butler. “Exchanging man for man and officer for officer, with the
exception the rebels make, is a substantial abandonment of the colored troops
and their officers to their fate, and would be a shameful dishonor to the Government
bound to protect them.” 56
Butler’s Department of Virginia and North Carolina included the Union prisoner
of war camp at Point Lookout, Maryland. In the fall of 1863, it housed
more than 8,700 captive Confederates. A few days’ march up the peninsula from
Fort Monroe, the Confederacy’s capital held more than 11,000 Union prisoners.
About 6,300 of them lived on Belle Isle, an island in the James River a few
hundred yards upstream from the city’s waterfront. Tobacco warehouses held
5,350 others, including 1,044 officers in the notorious Libby Prison. On the day
Butler took command at Fort Monroe, both sides agreed to release all medical
officers they held prisoner. Until that spring, chaplains and medical officers had
been exempt from imprisonment; but when Confederate authorities insisted on
holding a federal surgeon for trial on criminal charges, the system froze, with
hostage-taking on both sides quickly followed by retention of all captive medical
personnel. When the first Union surgeons to be released arrived in Washington
at the end of November, they reported that the number of deaths in all the Richmond
prisons averaged fifty a day, or fifteen hundred a month. Inmates, they
said, ate meat only every fourth day. The more usual daily ration was one pound
of cornbread and a sweet potato. 57
Northerners received this news with horror. “The only prospect now of relief
to our prisoners is by our authorities acceding to the rebel terms for exchange,”
thus excluding black soldiers from the agreement, a New York Times editorialist
wrote, “or by Gen. Meade’s pushing on his victorious columns. If we do not
speedily operate in one of these ways, Death must in a few brief months relieve
the last of the . . . Union prisoners.” Butler heard of the possibility of a raid on the
Richmond prisons just days after he arrived at Fort Monroe. Almost simultaneously
with the surgeons’ release, General Wistar, commanding at Yorktown, sent
Butler a proposal for a raid to free the prisoners, but two months passed before
circumstances favored such a move. 58
When the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia went into winter quarters,
General Robert E. Lee turned his attention to the reduced Union garrisons in
North Carolina. On 20 January 1864, he ordered Maj. Gen. George E. Pickett
to move against New Berne with five infantry brigades drawn from Lee’s army
and the garrison at Petersburg, Virginia. This shift of about nine thousand men
56 OR, ser. 2, 6: 528 (quotation), 711–12; Charles W. Sanders Jr., In the Hands of the Enemy:
Military Prisons of the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), pp. 146–
47, 151–52.
57 OR, ser. 2, 6: 501, 544, 566–75, 742; New York Times, 28 November 1863; New York Tribune,
1 December 1863. See OR, ser. 2, 6: 26–27, 35–36, 88–89, 109–10, 208–09, 381–82, 473–74, for an
outline of the breakdown of the system for exchanging medical officers.
58 OR, ser. 1, vol. 51, pt. 1, pp. 1282–84; New York Times, 28 November 1863 (quotation); Butler
Correspondence, 3: 143–44.