C.S. Military Prison

C.S. Military Prison. Longing for the Morning. On November 2, 1861, the Confederate government purchased about 16 acres here for a prison. The tract included an abandoned three-story cotton mill, a boiler house, six tenements, a superintendent’s house, and several smaller buildings. A stockade was erected around the buildings and the first 120 prisoners of war arrived on December 9. By July 1862, most of the Union prisoners of war had been exchanged, leaving only a small contingent of Confederate and Union deserters, political prisoners, and convicts. The facility received no additional military prisoners until October 1864., Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, to further strain Southern resources, slowed the exchange of prisoners in 1864, and beginning in August stopped the exchanges entirely until February 1865. In October 1864, the prison began receiving large numbers of Union soldiers captured on the Virginia battlefields. By early November, the prison, designed to hold about 2,500, became inundated with about 10,000 men. The overcrowded inmates occupied tents and partial underground shelters throughout the fall and winter of 1864-65 because most of the buildings had to be used as hospitals. In February 1865, after about 3,500 prisoners had died from exposure, disease, and other causes, those remaining were transferred to Wilmington, N.C., and Richmond for exchange. In mid-April, Union Gen. George Stoneman’s cavalry entered Salisbury and destroyed the prison., The main entrance to the prison compound stood 40 yards across the bridge to your right, enclosed by a wooden stockade and a “dead line” that inmates could be shot for crossing. The log garrison house in front of you is the only surviving structure used by the prison., “There we sat, night after night, in the thick darkness, inhaling the foul vapor and acrid smoke, longing for the morning when we could again catch a glimpse of the blue beaming sky.” , - Four Years in Secessia, Junius Henry Browne