The 5th New Hampshire at Andersonville

Andersonville (1864): Andrew Jackson Riddle took this image as part of a series on August 16, 1864. This daguerreotype captures the ration wagon (center) as corn bread and beans are being distributed to the prisoners. By this date, the population of prisoners had reached its greatest extent. Some 31,000 Union POWs were then confined at Andersonville, making it the third-largest city in what remained of the Confederacy, behind Charleston and Richmond.

I recently completed William Marvel’s Andersonville: The Last Depot. I have not surveyed the entire historiographic debate concerning Civil War prison camps, and my reading of Marvel was not an attempt to start that project. I read his work because I picked it up at a library book sale in the fall and thought it looked interesting. I must admit that I found his argument compelling: logistical difficulties, incompetence, corruption, and numerous other difficulties rather than malevolence accounted for the massive loss of Union prisoners’ lives at Andersonville. But I will keep an open mind until the time comes for me to attack the topic of Civil War prisons in earnest.

In any event, Marvel writes in passing about the experiences of the 5^th New Hampshire’s Hiram Jepperson at the camp. I was thus inspired to find out what happened to men from the regiment who were captured around the time of the Union assault at Cold Harbor on June 3, 1864, many of whom ended up at Andersonville. Only when I looked into their experiences did I realize how diverse they were. The other thing I realized, too, was that the members of the 5^th New Hampshire who became captives in the spring and summer of 1864 were much more likely to see the inside of a Confederate prison for a long span of time than those who were captured before or after. The main reason for the difference was that the Dix-Hill Cartel that governed prisoner exchanges fell into abeyance in July 1863. Large-scale exchanges did not resume with any regularity until early 1865.[i]

I’ve briefly described the Battle of Cold Harbor from the 5^th New Hampshire’s perspective while examining Cornelius Stone’s harrowing experience. The long and short of it is that the 5^th New Hampshire and the 7^th New York Heavy Artillery were the only two Union regiments to break through the Confederate position. After experiencing some local success and capturing a number of rebel prisoners, the two units were driven back and almost surrounded. Both the Granite Staters and the New Yorkers were eventually driven off with heavy casualties. The viciousness that characterized the close-quarter fighting in which the 5^th New Hampshire was engaged on that day explains why 46 of the 200 casualties the regiment suffered were killed in action, a high proportion of dead to wounded.[ii] 

Ayling’s Revised Register indicates that two members of the 5^th New Hampshire were captured shortly before the battle. The regiment lost another 39 prisoners during the assault at Cold Harbor on June 3.[iii] Among the 39 men captured that day were two 1^st lieutenants, four sergeants, and ten corporals. In other words, almost two-fifths of those captured were commissioned or noncommissioned officers. That’s an extraordinarily high proportion. My instinct was to speculate that these officers may have been original volunteers who had taken it upon themselves to lead their untrustworthy substitutes, draftees, and bounty men by example (although, strictly speaking, non-commissioned officers pushed from behind as file closers). That view possesses some merit, but it doesn’t capture the whole case. Ten of the officers (including both of the 1^st lieutenants) were indeed original volunteers, but the captured sergeants and corporals also included four substitutes and one draftee. That suggests the regiment found some decent noncom material from among men who were often scorned for their lack of patriotism. Or it suggests that the number of qualified original volunteers was no longer sufficient to serve as the exclusive source of NCOs.

For a variety of reasons, many of the 41 men captured around the time of the battle never went to a Confederate camp, let alone Andersonville. Thirteen of the prisoners were wounded, and seven of them died in Richmond. Another two men are described as having died in Richmond shortly after the battle—one from disease and the other from unspecified causes.[iv] We should also keep in mind that the two 1^st lieutenants who were captured at Cold Harbor, Robert S. Dame and John A. Duren, did not end up inside the Andersonville stockade either: the prison exclusively held enlisted men. What exactly happened to both of these officers remains unclear; Ayling’s Revised Register mentions they were “released,” but gives no date.[v]

Robert S. Dame (1840-1916) is the only soldier from the 5th New Hampshire captured at Cold Harbor whose image I possess. Born in Portsmouth, NH, 1860 found him living in Concord, NH, with his parents. His father was a blacksmith, and Dame himself was listed in the census as a blacksmith’s apprentice. In April 1861, he enlisted in the 1st New Hampshire (a three-month regiment), serving in Edward Sturtevant’s company. His enlistment papers describe him as having grey eyes, black hair, and a light complexion. His height is listed as 5’ 6” ½. He enlisted in the 5th New Hampshire at the end of October 1861, but was not mustered in until the very beginning of November, by which point, the regiment had already left New Hampshire. Dame was placed in Sturtevant’s Company A and appointed a corporal, no doubt because of his experience in the 1st New Hampshire. Dame is a good example of the 5th New Hampshire’s tendency to promote almost exclusively from within. He was promoted repeatedly, finally attaining the rank of 1st lieutenant in March 1863. Wounded and captured at Cold Harbor, he somehow returned to the federal army in time to be discharged in October 1864. After the war, Dame may have served in the Marine Corps. He later moved to Erie, PA, where, among other things, he worked as a “mariner.” He married Emma Dame and had two children, Claire (b. 1879) and Robert (b. 1882).

It appears, then, that only 30 of the men captured around the time of Cold Harbor may have ended up in a Confederate POW camp. According to the National Park Service’s Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System’s Search for Prisoners, 19 of these prisoners did time in Andersonville:

• Pvt. Charles Farley, born in Ireland, living in New York, NY, volunteer from 1863 (wounded)
• Pvt. George Bell, born in Ireland, living in New York, NY, volunteer from 1863 (wounded)
• Pvt. Daniel Bradbury, born in Haverhill, MA, living in Haverhill, MA, substitute from 1863
• Cpl. George Brooks, born in Charlestown, NH, living in Charlestown, NH, volunteer from 1861
• Cpl. William Gilson, born in New Hampshire, living in Concord, NH, substitute from 1863
• Pvt. Hiram Jepperson (aka Jefferson), born in Lisbon, NH, living in Lisbon, NH, volunteer from 1862
• Sgt. Albert O. Johnson, born in in Northfield, MA, living in Northfield, MA, volunteer from 1861
• Pvt. Ludwig Lucht, born in Germany, living in New York, NY, substitute from 1863 (wounded)
• Pvt. Peter Melliot, born in Montpellier, France, living in New York, NY, substitute from 1863
• Pvt. Charles Morton, born in Quebec, Canada, living in Quebec, Canada, substitute from 1863
• Pvt. Samuel Parson, born in England, living in England, substitute from 1863
• Pvt. Peter Quinn, born in Ireland, living in Concord, NH, substitute from 1863
• Pvt. Charles Reynolds, born in Durham, NH, living in Newmarket, NH, volunteer from 1861
• Cpl. Nathaniel Smith, born in Cornish, NH, living in Cornish, NH, volunteer from 1861 (wounded)
• Cpl. John Sutton, born in Canada, living in Lancaster, NH, volunteer from 1861
• Pvt. Andrews B. Taylor, born in Great Barrington, MA, living in Great Barrington, MA, substitute from 1863
• Pvt. James Thomas, born in St. John, New Brunswick, living in Canada, substitute from 1863
• Pvt. James Walker, born in Canada, living in Canada, substitute from 1863
• Pvt. Alonzo Wyman, born in Manchester, NH, living in Manchester, NH, substitute form 1863[vi]

This group presumably arrived together on June 15, 1864 (the Consolidated Monthly Report of Federal Prisoners of War Confined at Andersonville, GA tersely notes “1108 men f[rom] Richmond” with another 1069 arriving from the same location the next day).[vii] Jumping out of their boxcars at Andersonville Depot, these men walked the quarter mile to the stockade. Once inside the gate, they encountered 16 acres of muddy, fetid, densely populated, and rapidly growing misery.

“Al. Jer. Klapp,” The Andersonville Stockade (1903): According to Marvel, shooting prisoners for crossing the “deadline” at Andersonville (which is what the guard at left is doing) was a relatively rare event. This image, though, gives a good idea of how crowded the prison was at its height. The 16 acres enclosed by the stockade contained 31,000 prisoners by August 1864, which means each captive had 22 square feet to himself or an area of just over seven feet by three feet.

In mid-June, the camp, as Marvel describes it, was a “slurry” after three straight weeks where it rained almost every day, often very heavily. Stockade Creek, which ran through the camp, providing drinking water while flushing the latrines, became a polluted swamp. The spread of illness accelerated. It did not help that the number of prisoners had passed the 20,000 mark about a week into June. By the end of the month, over 26,000 men were packed together in the 16-acre stockade. Confederate authorities had begun work on expanding the camp in late May, but it seemed almost impossible for them to keep up with the incessant influx of prisoners. Moreover, rebel officers found it increasingly difficult to supply the growing prison population with the standard but bland and nutritionally deficient diet of corn pone and bacon. Scorbutus (scurvy) has made an appearance in the camp, and this disease would become increasingly prevalent. Finally, it was also in June—about two weeks after the men from the 5^th New Hampshire arrived—that the Georgia Reserves who guarded the camp, along with the Regulators (a vigilante group of prisoners) suppressed the Raiders who had preyed upon the prisoners for some time.[viii]

Robert Knox Sneden, Plan of Andersonville Prison (ca. 1864-1865): Sneden, who served as a topographical engineer on Samuel Heintzelman’s III Corps staff, produced a large number of watercolors and maps during the war. He was a prisoner at Andersonville from March to September 1864.

How well equipped were our Granite Staters to deal with challenges presented by the worst prisoner of war camp in the south? In one respect, these men were very lucky: they had missed the bulk of the Overland campaign. For almost seven months (early November 1863 to late May 1864), the 5^th New Hampshire had guarded the prison camp at Point Lookout, MD. Here, the volunteers, substitutes, and draftees that had filled the ranks in the summer of 1863 were drilled under the watchful—and sometimes scornful—eyes of the remaining original volunteers. When they were not drilling or performing guard duty, the men fished and clammed. The officers went for rides, flirted with local women, and attended dances.[ix] All in all, it was light duty, and the regiment was well rested by the time it returned to II Corps in the field at the beginning of June. Not only that, the men were well shod, well clothed, and well fed. They had avoided the rigors of Grant’s hard-fought May campaign, and they had missed the bloodbaths at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania. In all likelihood, they were better prepared to meet the physical challenges of imprisonment at Andersonville than many other Union captives were.

Unfortunately, however, they were a small and miscellaneous group. Nineteen men did not make for a social network of sufficient size to allow prisoners to survive in a place like Andersonville. Moreover, the camp had few soldiers from New Hampshire (of the 41,000 or so prisoners who passed through Andersonville, only 364 belonged to Granite State regiments).[x] That being the case, our small group probably could not have relied on prisoners from their native state for help. In any event, many of our captives from the 5^th New Hampshire had no connection with New Hampshire whatsoever. That point highlights the degree to which certain divisions must have undermined the cohesiveness of this group. All the NCOs were original volunteers from 1861, and all of them had either been born in New Hampshire or had resided there. The great majority of the later volunteers and substitutes were foreign-born and had never lived in the Granite State.

The sheer diversity of experiences among these men as they suffered through their captivity is surprising. Six of the 19 died at Andersonville—a mortality rate of 31% which was roughly the same as that of the camp as a whole:  

• Pvt. Andrews Taylor died July 16, 1864 of anasarca (i.e. generalized edema often associated with protein deficiency or kidney/liver failure)
• Pvt. Peter Melliot died August 29, 1864 of “debilitas” (i.e. weakness).
• Pvt. George Bell died September 11, 1864 of scorbutus (scurvy)
• Sgt. Albert Johnson died September 18, 1864 of scorbutus (scurvy)
• Pvt. Samuel Parson died October 18, 1864 of scorbutus (scurvy)
• Pvt. Ludwig Lucht died October 26, 1864 of scorbutus (scurvy)[xi]

The latter four must have been in a bad way for some time because Confederate authorities began rapidly evacuating prisoners from the camp in early September 1864 after Hood’s Army of Tennessee abandoned Atlanta. A number of badly ill patients were left behind. Since so many of their comrades had departed, nobody remained to look after them, and a high proportion of them continued to die.[xii]

And what of the others? In November 1864 Lt. Col. John G. O’Neill of the 10^th Tennessee swung by Andersonville to see if he could recruit desperate Yankees for Confederate military service.[xiii] At this point, having fought at Chickamauga and the Atlanta campaign, the 10^th Tennessee numbered just over 120 men. Since almost all the healthy prisoners had already left, O’Neill only found eight volunteers. (He would later return in January 1865 and scoop up almost 200 more prisoners as recruits.)[xiv] These included three former members of the 5^th New Hampshire who probably felt there was no other way to escape Andersonville besides dying: Charles Farley, Hiram Jepperson/Jefferson, and Edward Kelley (who had been captured several weeks after Cold Harbor during the fighting around the Jerusalem Plank Road near Petersburg). Union forces captured all three in late December at a skirmish near Egypt Station, MS. Surely, they must not have fought terribly hard for the Confederacy. Understandable as their behavior might have been, the federal government took a dim view of their having technically committed treason. All three were flung into the 5^th US Volunteer infantry, a regiment that consisted mainly of “galvanized rebels” who had been recruited from Northern POW camps to fight Native Americans out west. (Ironically, many of the men in this unit consisted of Confederate prisoners who had been held at Point Lookout, where the 5^th New Hampshire had been stationed before fighting at Cold Harbor.) Both Farley and Kelley deserted in Illinois in April 1865 en route to their new unit. Jepperson/Jefferson, however, stuck it out until he was mustered out in October 1866 at Fort Kearney, NE.

Robert Knox Sneden, “Camp Lawton” at Millen Georgia (ca. 1864-1865): Sneden, like many other Union prisoners, was held here briefly in 1864.

What happened to the others is a bit more difficult to decipher. When General Winder started emptying the Andersonville stockade in September 1864, he sent prisoners to what remained of the eastern Confederacy’s prison system: Millen, GA, Savannah, GA, Florence, SC, and Charleston, SC. Although most men left that month, the rebels continued to ship prisoners out for the next couple of months. By the end of November, Andersonville was pretty much cleaned out, and only 1400 prisoners remained.[xv] Most of the men from the 5^th New Hampshire were probably scattered to different camps and shuffled about as Confederate authorities tried to keep them out of the reach of Union forces. In November, as Sherman started marching from Atlanta eastward, Winder emptied the prison camp at Millen, sent the healthy prisoners to Blackshear, GA (which consisted of some rudimentary earthworks in a pine forest) and exchanged the sick ones in Savannah.[xvi] George Brooks, Charles Reynolds, John Sutton, and Alonzo Wyman are all described as having been “released,” “paroled,” or “exchanged” in November 1864, so it seems likely they were among those shipped to Savannah for exchange. Smith and Walker were both “released” or “returned” in February 1865, which is when Charleston was captured, so it appears (and this is speculation) that they were freed when Union troops captured the city and liberated the prison camp there.

Robert Knox Sneden, Plan of the Rebel Prison in Savannah, Georgia (ca. 1864-1865)

In the meantime, the Blackshear prisoners had been moved to Thomasville, GA, and thence back to Andersonville by December (at the end of that month, the number of prisoners at the latter place rose to 4,700 men).[xvii] By March 1865, the cartel was back up and running, and about 1,500 ill prisoners from Andersonville were exchanged in Vicksburg, MS. Among them was probably William Gilson, who was exchanged that month.[xviii] Gilson died of disease in a hospital at Annapolis, MD, shortly thereafter. That left Thomas and Morton as the last members of the 5^th New Hampshire captured at Cold Harbor who still remained in Confederate custody. The former was released in early May and the latter exchanged on May 20, 1865 after almost a year in captivity.[xix] It seems likely that these two men were among the last to remain at Andersonville; every other major Confederate prison camp had been closed or liberated by this point.

It’s hard to say what happened to the other 11 POWs captured at Cold Harbor who never saw the inside of the Andersonville stockade. I have good information that several members of the 5^th New Hampshire who were later captured during the fighting around Petersburg were kept at Millen and the infamous camp at Salisbury, NC.[xx] The only way, of course, to figure out what happened to these men is to look at their pension records.

What is there to learn from all of this? To my mind, it’s this: there was no such thing as a typical POW experience. Even men from the same unit captured at the same battle and sent to the same prison underwent very different ordeals. The chaotic nature of the Confederate prison system in the last year of the war only amplified these differences as Union POWs were sent to different camps, shuttled about hither and thither, and released intermittently. Of course, as always, I need to investigate this topic more thoroughly, but this blog is where I do some preliminary research and think “aloud.”

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[i] Only 11 men were captured in 1862 and 1863, and it appears most of them were released or exchanged fairly quickly. It was around Cold Harbor in 1864 that the 5^th New Hampshire first lost a substantial number soldiers as prisoners—just over 40 men. This ill-starred group appears to have been shipped off to several Confederate camps, with a minority going to Andersonville. From that point to the end of the summer, another 16 men were captured in the fighting around Petersburg. The fortunes of these men differed dramatically; some were paroled and exchanged in October while others did substantial time in Confederate camps. There were only two other episodes during where the regiment lost a significant number of prisoners: the fighting around Fort Stedman (March 25, 1865) and Farmville (April 7, 1865). In both cases, these soldiers never saw the inside of a rebel prison. Those captured at Fort Stedman were released five days later (the Confederates were preparing to abandon Richmond and had nowhere to keep them). The men who surrendered at Farmville accompanied the Army of Northern Virginia on the road for a couple of days until Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

[ii] For a good recent account of the battle, see Gordon C. Rhea, Cold Harbor: Grant and Lee May 26-June 3, 1864 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 324-327. For the 5^th New Hampshire’s casualties, see William Child, A History of the Fifth Regiment New Hampshire Volunteers (Bristol, NH: R. W. Musgrove, Printer, 1893), 270. Marvel’s figure appears in William Marvel, Andersonville: The Last Depot (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 83.

[iii] Pvt. Albus R. Fisk, of Lisbon, NH, who had volunteered in the summer of 1862, was captured on May 30, 1864. William Farley, an Irish-born volunteer from New York who had joined the regiment in the summer of 1863, was wounded and captured on June 2, 1864. 

[iv] Levi Newspaun died on June 14, 1864 while William S. Kimball died on June 20, 1864.

[v] Dame, who had been wounded at Cold Habor, was promoted to captain in August 1864 and discharged in October 1864. The implications seems to be that he was released quite quickly, possibly due to his wounds. Duren appears to have remained in captivity somewhat longer. He was discharged in March 1865 and may have died shortly thereafter in Washington, DC. 

[vi] Two more prisoners captured on June 22 during the fighting on Jerusalem Plank Road were also sent to Andersonville: Pvt. Marshall Dion, born in St. Helen, France, credited with Warner, NH, substitute from 1863, and Pvt. Edward Kelley, born in Galway, Ireland, living in New York, NY, substitute from 1863.

[vii] See page 7 on https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QSQ-G979-N4J2?wc=MW44-H23%3A341349601%2C341351701&cc=2019835

[viii] For discussions regarding conditions in the camp at about this time, see Marvel, 77-149.

[ix] For information on how the officers spent their spare time at Point Lookout, see Thomas Livermore, Days and Events 1860-1866 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920), 312-328.

[x] See https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-prisoners.htm

[xi] See https://hdl.handle.net/2027/loc.ark:/13960/t1fj2ws7t?urlappend=%3Bseq=40

[xii] Marvel 198-205.

[xiii] Ibid., 223-205.

[xiv] Ibid., 231.

[xv] https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QSQ-G979-N481?i=16&wc=MW44-H23%3A341349601%2C341351701&cc=2019835

[xvi] Marvel, 222.

[xvii] Ibid., 225-227.

[xviii] Ibid., 234-235.

[xix] Ibid., 239-240.

[xx] For example, Pvt. George Lolley, an 1863 volunteer from Portsmouth, NH, was captured on June 18, 1864 at the battle of Second Petersburg and died at Millen in October 1864. Pvt. Joseph Whitten, an original volunteer from Moultonborough, NH, was captured at Ream’s Station in August 1864 and died at Salisbury in January 1865.