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

Preface

Preface I cannot imagine examining one of the carved hard rubber rings from the Johnson’s Island Civil War Military Prison site without thinking about Lieutenants Robert Smith or William Peel. I also cannot imagine looking at such a ring without wondering what this piece of jewelry meant to the prisoner who last handled it on this small island just off the shores of Sandusky, Ohio, in Lake Erie. I study the photographs taken by Lieutenant Robert Smith of the 61st Tennessee Infantry and see myself looking up into what used to be the garret of Block 4, admiring how he managed to take so many photographs of fellow prisoners without notice of the guard. As Peel, Smith, and others write about failed escape attempts, I ponder how they found the necessary courage to dig tunnels from the depths of the latrines in the hopes of once again reaching the South. The site of the Johnson’s Island Civil War Military Prison is inextricably tied to the writings of those imprisoned there as well as to the artifacts we have painstakingly recovered. One cannot fully appreciate the writings, the artifacts left behind, or the site without knowledge of all three. Walking on the site brings the memories of the prisoners’ and guards’ writings into my consciousness. As artifacts are uncovered, their association with those who described prison experiences in letters and diaries written long ago seems evident. I am not sure one can truly experience Johnson’s Island, or any other moment in history, without in some fashion transporting oneself to that location via the words and materials surrounding them. I remember my first introduction to the Johnson’s Island Prison site as an unremarkable experience. I had no great revelations, no immediate sense of stepping back in time, no context within which to process the imagery. The perimeter of the island had been developed from a 1950s land deal, which resulted in a smorgasbord of homes constructed along the lake side of the road. As I drove around the outer limits of the island, I was struck by the isolation. Perhaps it was the oversized “No xii s Preface Trespassing” sign at the causeway entrance to the island, or the Confederate Cemetery tucked away behind the twentieth-century architecture, that created the sense of loneliness. Each home seemed disconnected from the next. As summer vacation homes, most were empty of family life. Possibly the sense of isolation was a result of the interior of the island appearing to consist of abandoned woods. No matter what I felt on my first visit, it was certainly not remotely comparable to the experience all prisoners had as they either got off the boat or walked across the ice and had their first view of the prison. How different the island looked back in 1862. I think back to 1988, my first year of study of the history and archaeological record of Johnson’s Island. Although I was not a prisoner, I do at times feel captured by the multiplicity of human experiences the island holds. Johnson’s Island is made up of thousands of stories “told” by multitudes of prisoners and guards who resided there. This is what keeps me trapped at this site: the expectation that each trowel of soil unturned will reveal a new story about the prison experience. With each new historical document that comes to light, a new voice is offered. How is it that the first book this archaeologist chooses to write after excavating the site for more than two decades is not solely about the archaeological record but about the human experience between a man and his wife? What is the bridge connecting the artifact that has been in the ground for almost 150 years to a prisoner forced to spend months or years far from home? As an archaeologist I attempt to get my students to realize that each artifact excavated represents a brief moment of the entire human experience . Over the years, literally hundreds of thousands of artifacts have been excavated, and each one can be tied to one or more human activities that took place there. The human experience can be told through artifacts, letters, pictures, and even unspoken encounters. I encourage people to come to Johnson ’s Island and experience for themselves the connection between the land, the artifacts, and the written word, gaining through their own contact a sense of what this place offers. Through years of excavating and researching the...