I Fear I Shall Never Leave This Island: Life in a Civil War Prison

2. Johnson’s Island Prison

r 7 T wo Johnson’s Island Prison The list is called, and one by one The anxious crowd now melts away, I linger still and wonder why No letter comes for me today. Are all my friends in Dixie dead? Or would they all forgotten be? What have I done, what have I said: That no one writes to me? Asa Hartz (pen name of George McKnight, prisoner at Johnson’s Island) After his capture Captain Wesley Makely was temporarily housed at Camp Chase, Columbus, Ohio, for a few days before the train brought him to Johnson’s Island. His mid-July arrival at this isolated Lake Erie island was the beginning of a nineteen-month stay. However new this prison was to Wesley, the Johnson’s Island Military Depot had already been holding Confederate officers for fifteen months. The treatment he was going to face had already been forged through government actions, guards’ restrictions, and fellow prisoners’ responses. A few thousand had already passed through the gate, and many thousands more were to follow. The imposing physical facility set on this desolate island was the prisoner ’s first encounter with Johnson’s Island prison. In the spring, summer , and fall months prisoners would be herded onto one of the steam ships operating within Lake Erie for the trip from Sandusky to Johnson ’s Island. Those unfortunate enough to arrive in the winter most likely walked over the frozen lake to the island. Incoming prisoners may not have realized the prison was built on a small three-hundred-acre island, since the docks and the prison compound were on its southeastern shore. The higher elevation of the center of the island and the 8 s I Fear I Shall Never Leave This Island fifteen-foot fence would have obscured any view the prisoners would have had of the north side of the island. The growing numbers of captured Confederate soldiers and the realization that the war was going to be a long commitment forced the Union to consider options for incarceration of prisoners. Reasons for the selection of Johnson’s Island in the fall of 1861 as the Union’s first self-contained prisoner-of-war facility were readily apparent to arriving prisoners. Three miles off the coast of Sandusky, Ohio, in Sandusky Bay on Lake Erie, the island was barren of any other human activity. Necessary provisions were easily obtained from Sandusky. Being located so far north, there was little hope the Confederate army would attempt to free these prisoners. The military prison was completed in early 1862. The first prisoners arrived on April 10, 1862, from Camp Chase. Three days later, on April 13, 1862, orders from Washington, D.C., determined use of Johnson’s Island solely for Confederate officers (ORA, ser. 2, 3:448). Although originally designed to house both enlisted men and officers, its facilities were dedicated for officers only. At the time Captain Wesley Makely arrived, there were fewer than one thousand Confederate officers as unwilling guests of the Union (ORA, ser. 2, 8:987–1004). The original 14.5-acre prison compound contained thirteen prisoner housing barracks known as blocks, twelve as barracks and one as a hospital ; latrines known as sinks behind each block; a sutler’s stand; three wells; and two condemned prisoner huts and a pest house.1 Two large mess halls were added in August 1864 after the prison was expanded an average of ninety-five feet to the west on July 12, 1864. The blocks were two stories high and ranged in dimensions. The four blocks built for officers were 117 feet long by 29 feet wide. These blocks, numbered 1, 2, 3, and 4, contained twenty-two rooms each, with two mess facilities. Wesley was placed into Block 1. The other eight blocks, originally built for the enlisted, were slightly longer (130 by 24 feet), with each floor divided into three large rooms. Six of the other blocks had their mess facilities built on the ends as single-story additions. Blocks 12 and 13 did not have these additions. Block 6, measuring 126 by 30 feet, was used as the prison hospital (Frohman 1965:4–5). Johnson’s Island Prison r 9 Fig. 1.“Depot Prisoners of War on Johnson’s Island,”by Edward Gould. (By permission of the Friends and Descendants of Johnson’s Island Civil War Prison.) There were more than forty buildings...