August 2003
Rock Island Prison, Illinois
submitted by James L. Walker
This is a gathering of historical information
about the Rock Island prison in Illinois.
Main source of information was gleaned
from Lonnie R Speer's most excellent book "Portals to Hell".
As prison populations steadily increased after the Battle of Gettysburg, in July
of 1863, it became apparent to Federal officials that the combination of
original and reactivated prison facilities was unable to hold the number of
captives coming into Union hands. Since no major facilities had been established
since the February 1862, capture of Forts Henry and Donelson, Quartermaster
General Meigs directed Brigadier General Daniel H. Rucker, chief quartermaster,
to establish a holding facility at Point Lockout, Maryland, which could confine
up to ten thousand captives. At the same time, Meigs ordered Captain Charles A.
Reynolds, assistant quartermaster, to establish a prison for POWs on Rock Island
in the Mississippi River to help relieve overcrowding in the western facilities.
In the meantime, a number of eastern state penitentiaries were pressed into use.
These places seemed ideal for a number of reasons: they were close to a recent
battlefield, they had the additional space available, and in some cases, they
had the additional security that was necessary.
Some of the major locations used were the Allegheny Penitentiary at Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania and Moyamensing Penitentiary at Columbus, Ohio. Of these locations,
the Ohio facility became the most well-known to the general public because of
the notoriety of one of the POW's confined there.
On July 30, Governor Tod notified Nathaniel Merion, the warden of the Ohio
Penitentiary, of the impending arrival of Confederate Brigadier General John
Hunt Morgon and thirty of his men, who were recently captured near New Lisbon,
Ohio.
In November 1863, Colonel Hoffman inspected the newly completed, but still
empty, prison at Rock Island, Illinois. He then notified Secretary Stanton that
construction of the prison was finished and that he intended to transfer one
thousand POW's from Camp Douglas, which had suffered a recent barracks fire.
At the same time, a large group of POW's who had been recently captured at
Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, Tennessee, were being held in a
Louisville, Kentucky prison. Eventually they would be transferred to Rock
Island, about two weeks before those from Chicago, making them the first
prisoners incarcerated at the new facility.
Rock Island was a government-owned island in the Mississippi River between
Davenport, Iowa, and Rock Island and Moline, Illinois. It was about three miles
long and a half mile wide, with a solid foundation of limestone rock, from which
it got its name. The island had been appropriated by the U.S. government back in
1804 but had remained unoccupied until 1812, when war broke out with Great
Britain. By 1816, a fort named Fort Armstrong, in honor of the then-current
Secretary of War, was established on the west end of the island. It remained
garrisoned by troops until May 1836. In 1840 the government-owned bridge and to
the Illinois side by two bridges, one to the town of Rock Island and the other
to the town of Moline.
Colonel Hoffman had furnished the plans for the prison, which called for
eighty-four barracks surrounded by a rough board fence. Each barrack was to be
one hundred feet long, twenty-two feet wide, and twelve feet high with twelve
windows, two doors, and two roof ventilators. At the west end of each building
was a kitchen or cookhouse eighteen feet long. The remaining eighty-two feet
would be living and sleeping quarters for the prisoners. Sixty double bunks had
been moved into each building so that each barrack could house 120 POWs, setting
the planned capacity at 10,080.
A site at the center of the north side of the island, facing the Iowa side of
the river, had been chosen, and construction began at the end of August. At that
time, Meigs informed the builder that the barracks “should be put up in the
roughest and cheapest manner, mere shanties, with no fine work about them.”
The barracks, six rows of fourteen buildings each, were erected thirty feet
apart facing 100-foot- wide streets, except the fourth row, which fronted a
130-foot-wide avenue, one of two that bisected the prison. The stockade fence
enclosing the site was twelve feet high with a board walkway along the outside,
four feet from the top, with sentry boxes every one hundred feet. Double-gate
sally ports were constructed on the east and west ends of the prison and were
the only openings into the facility. Guardhouses were built outside the fence at
each gate.
On December 3, 1863, the first prisoners -- 5,592 in all -- arrived at the new
facility. On the day of their arrival, the temperature stood at thirty-two
degrees below zero and two feet of snow lay on the ground. Worse, it was
discovered that ninety-four of those prisoners had smallpox. Hoffman had
neglected to include any construction plans for a hospital at his new prison
camp. Consequently, the sick had to be left in the barracks among the healthy.
By the end of the month, 245 were sick, from smallpox and pneumonia, and 94 had
died. Before long, there would be an average of more than 250 deaths a month in
the prison’s first four months of operation.
By the end of January 1864, little more than seven weeks into its existence, 635
of the 8,000 POWs confined at the Rock Island facility were sick, and 325 had
died. During the same period, seven of the guards had perished. The POWs, as at
nearly all the facilities by this time, no longer cared, or were unable to
properly police the grounds or make any substantial effort at any kind of
sanitary practices. Rock Island was in the midst of coping with an epidemic and
was still without a hospital. When Surgeon and Acting Medical Inspector Augustus
M. Clark arrived on February 10, he immediately directed that certain barracks
in the southwest section of the compound be designated as hospital facilities
and that pesthouses be erected about a half mile outside the prison along the
south shore of the island. By end of February, there were still 708 sick and
another 346 deaths. The 671 burials took place in a graveyard established about
four hundred yards south of the prison. The site was then moved in mid-March, at
Clark’s suggestion, to a new site one thousand yards southeast of the prison.
Union guards, who were succumbing to the smallpox in increased numbers, were
buried one hundred yards northwest of the POW cemetery.
The pesthouses were completed that same month and all prisoners suffering from
smallpox were moved there. The eleven barracks previously used for them were
thoroughly cleaned and whitewashed and, afterward, used as noncontagious disease
wards. Meanwhile as prisoner rations were reduced and the savings placed in a
prison fund, a hospital was built from $30,000 that was eventually accumulated
in the account.
Rock Island’s first commandant was Colonel Richard H. Rush, Invalid Corps, an
Englishman from Pennsylvania who, early in the conflict, had commanded the only
regiment of Union lancers to see active service in the Civil War. He was
relieved in mid-January 1864, by Colonel Andrew J. Johnston of the Invalid
Corps, later designated the 4th Regiment, Veteran Reserve Corps, who would
remain in command until the war ended.
Unique among the Civil War’s prisons, rations at Rock Island were issued in
bulk. “Each company of prisoners receives ten days at a time,” declared
Colonel Johnson, “they having the entire control of the distribution among
themselves.” One forty-gallon cauldron was placed in each cookhouse and the
POWs cooked their own food. Water for the prisoners was supplied by a stream
pump which drew it from the river. Whenever the pump malfunctioned, water became
scarce, although there was a small artesian well in the compound that supplied
some water. Two coal burning stoves in each barracks supplied heat for the
prisoners.
By the time Clark left in mid-March the number of sick in the camp had climbed
to 1,555 including 420 cases of smallpox, out of the total prison population of
7,260. “Almost all the suffering that has actually occurred,” noted Medical
Inspector Norton S. Townshend, “has been in consequence of the transportation
of prisoners during the extreme cold weather and from the breaking out of the
smallpox among them."
As warmer weather arrived, the smallpox declined and cases of pneumonia
subsided. Then sanitation became the big concern. “Already the twelve large
sinks have been filled and the privies removed three times,” advised Captain
Reynolds, the assistant quartermaster. “In the spring, the camp will
unavoidably be muddy and filthy. In the summer, the stench caused by excrements
will be insufferable."
Reynolds suggested the construction of a reservoir on a small bluff overlooking
the prison to help flush out soon-to-be-built open sewers throughout the camp.
He also recommended using prison labor to complete the project, paying forty
cents a day to be credited to the prisoners’ sutler accounts. Hoffman
eventually approved the project but insisted that the pay be lowered to only ten
cents a day for mechanics and five cents for laborers. Reynolds got the project
going, but the system provided little benefit to the POW camp because its
completion wasn’t until just three months before the war ended.
In the meantime, the antiquated steam pump in the northwest corner of the
enclosure, which used a three-inch wooden supply pipe to pump water into four
cisterns, stopped working on several occasions, leaving only the artesian well,
with a nine-inch bore and 125 foot depth, located just inside the prison’s
west gate, as the only source of water for more than 8,000 men.
Although the barracks at Rock Island were elevated anywhere from one to three
feet off the ground, escape by tunneling was often attempted. On June 14, 1864,
ten POWs tunneled out from beneath their barracks and escaped under the south
wall. The last two POWs to emerge from the hole were captured by the sentry, who
quickly gave the alarm. Guards spread out in all directions and apprehended
three more on the island, while a fourth drowned attempting to swim the
400-foot-wide south channel of the Mississippi River. Four more were captured
later near the Rock River in Illinois.
In all, forty-one POWs successfully escaped during the prison’s existence.
Many more would try but fail. In one case, on October 24, 1864, a POW was shot
and killed while desperately attempting to escape under the north wall at 1:30
in the afternoon.
Additional security at the prison included a barge fitted with a six-pounder
field piece, a twenty-four-pounder howitzer, and a guard crew of thirty-five men
anchored in the river with full view of the compound.
By late 1864, conditions at the camp would become even worse. The poor drainage
of the island resulted in a small marsh forming in the southwest corner of the
enclosure into which the camp sludge would accumulate. Throughout the summer the
prison population remained at around eight thousand captives, and by late in the
year, the total number of deaths reached 1,623.
Northern newspapers, led by the local Rock Island, Illinois, Argus and carried
by the New York Daily News, ran articles comparing the Rock Island Military
Prison to some of the worst Southern prisons, later calling it the Andersonville
of the North. “Many have taken ‘the oath’, any oath, “ reported one
letter published in the newspaper, “to save themselves from actual starvation.
All the released ones say that no man can live on the rations given, and there
are men who would do anything to get enough to eat. Such is the wretched,
ravenous condition of these poor starving creatures that several dogs which have
come to the barracks with teams have fallen victims to their hunger, and they
are trapping rats and mice for food.
In order to escape these conditions, many POWs did take the oath. In fact, by
December, 1864, nearly 1,800 would -- more than at any other prison, North or
South. These men were placed in quarters separated from the others by a
highboard fence and, reportedly, received better rations and care. During this
same period a group of POWs attempted to counter the defections by reenlisting
prisoners into the Confederate service. By February 1865, they had signed up and
formed ten companies of 130 men each. Apparently the other 5,000 or so POWs no
longer cared one way of the other. They were probably too busy just trying to
survive until their release.
Colonel Johnson was finally compelled to write a response to critical newspaper
editors in defense of his prison administration. “The treatment of them here
and all issues to them.” declared Johnson in his letter to the Argus, “are
made strictly in accordance with orders from the War Department.... instead of
placing them in fine, comfortable barracks, with three large stoves in each and
as much coal as they can burn both day and night. I would place them in one with
no shelter but the heavens, as our poor men were at Andersonville. Instead of
giving them the same quality and nearly the same quantity of provisions that the
troops on duty receive, I would give them, as near as possible, the same
quantity and quality of provisions that the fiendish rebels give our men; and
instead of a constant issue of clothing to them, I let them wear their rags, as
our poor men in the hands of the rebel authorities are obliged to do; in other
words, had I the power, strict retaliation would be practiced by me. Again if
discretionary power rested with me, I would arrest and confine the known
sympathizers with the rebellion residing in Rock Island and Davenport, and quite
a large number would be quickly added to our list of prisoners, and those
communities would be relieved from a more dangerous element than open rebels in
arms.
Whether Johnson meant to lie or just got carried away is uncertain, but the fact
was that coal and clothing were never issued so easily, and there were never
more than two stoves in a barracks building. By the time of his letter, prisoner
rations were far from the quantity issued to regular troops. the had been
reduced under orders of the War Department twice by then.
The true conditions at the prison, and, for that matter, at any of the Civil
War’s prisons, can best be gauged by its death rate. By the end of the war,
1,964 Rock Island POWs had succumbed to smallpox and exposure out of a total of
12,400 confined over its twenty month period of existence. Thus, the
facility’s death rate ran nearly 16 percent of the total confined.