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Perhaps the most tragic chapter in American history was written in military prisons, of the North as well as the South, during the American Civil War. They were the immediate and inevitable aftermath of battle, battle which was followed by the mighty emotional impact of victory or defeat. Prison life was, at its best, dull, dirty, pestilential monotony; and at its worst, unmitigated misery relieved only by physical calamity, and often death.

The beginning of conflict on April 12, 1861 found neither North nor South prepared for war. They were even less prepared to care for prisoners of war, of which, from beginning to end, not counting the surrender of Confederate armies in the field in April and May of 1865, there were well over 400,000.

As the war progressed numerous prisons, large and small, came into being. Most notorious in the South were Libby and Andersonville, whose names became synonyms for human misery, brutality, and bestiality. They had their less well-known but equally wretched counterparts in the North. Indeed, the highest mortality rate recorded for any military prison was at Camp Douglas in Chicago, where, in February, 1863, 387 deaths occurred in a group of 3,884, or almost ten percent. Neither Libby nor Andersonville ever reached this incidence rate.

The total prisoner-of-war picture, based on official records of the Federal government, was 211,411 Federal soldiers captured; 16,668 pardoned on the field; 30,218 died in prison, which is about 15.5 percent. These sources show 462,634 Confederates captured; 247,769 pardoned on the field; 26,000 died in prison, which is an incidence of about 12.1 percent. This difference in death rates could have come about because of lack of so many essentials in the South - food, medicine, clothing, fuel, doctors, and nursing care for the sick, all of which were comparatively abundant in the North. However, though food and care were abundant in one prison in the North, disease and inhumane conditions were responsible for the deaths of many Confederate soldiers, some of whom came from the Ozarks region of Southwestern Missouri.

The Alton prison, built in 1831, was the first Illinois Penitentiary and the first building funded by public money in the State. The initial building, which was a neat stone structure, contained 24 cells and was ready for occupancy in 1833. It was a long, low fortress that stood near the Mississippi River, measuring nearly 100 yards on a side and its 30 foot high walls were broken only by occasional narrow, paneless windows. The prison in its day was considered a humanitarian one, following a system known as "congregated", as opposed to the brutal solitary system which was then generally in vogue. It was at this same time that the Legislature amended the criminal code by abolishing whipping, the stocks, and the pillory as punishment for crimes, and substituted confinement at hard labor. Prisoners at Alton wore striped uniforms and had one side of their head shaved for identification. They labored in silence by day and were confined separately by night.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Dorothea Dix led a prison reform movement across the country, and Alton prison was one of her targets. Badly located in a low area too near the river, the site undrained and ungraded, it became the center of a violent controversy that eventually ended in a legislative investigation and the construction of a new prison upstate at Joliet. In 1847, Dix proposed the abandonment of Alton Prison because of its unsanitary conditions. As a result, by June 1860, all of its inmates had been transferred to the new penitentiary near Chicago. Although abandoned by the State, the grim old walls of Alton were destined to again be populated before long. Soon after the outbreak of the Civil War, it became a military prison and many thousands were confined there, many of them young soldiers in their teens.

The Federal prison at Alton, Illinois became one of the largest military prisons in the St. Louis area. It received its first military prisoners February 9, 1862. They were transferred there from Gratiot Street Prison in St. Louis, which was located on the northwest corner of Eighth and Gratiot. In 36 months during which official reports were made, 11,764 Confederate prisoners passed through Alton's gates with an average of 1,261 housed there in any given month. Hunger, scurvy, and anemia were the lot of all the prisoners. However, Alton had no food shortage. The rich farmlands of surrounding regions had already made the city as important a produce and livestock center as St. Louis.

Col. Jesse Hildebrand of the 77th Ohio, the prison commander, was respected by his superiors as a ruthless "secesh" hater. In one incident, a heavy rain turned the dusty prison yard into a swamp. Shortly after the rain had subsided, a strong wind blew the Union flag off its pole and into the mud. Two dozen ragged inmates rushed out of the cellblock and began to trample the flag in the mud, singing "Dixie" as they did so. A prison sentry heard them and shot one of the demonstrators through the head. The rest fled. Col. Hildebrand ordered all meals stopped for a week in retaliation.

The ranking Confederate officer in the prison was Col. Ebenezer Magoffin. Magoffin, whose brother, Beriah, was governor of Kentucky, was described as one of the most colorful figures in the prison. He had been captured at a minor battle in Missouri. He had killed three men and escaped twice before he was finally caught hiding in a warehouse in St. Louis and sent to Alton.

On July 25, 1862, shortly after midnight, 35 civilian-clothed Confederate prisoners, led by Col. Ebenezer Magoffin, climbed out of a tunnel under the prison wall and scattered into the neighborhood around Fourth Street. Some immediately headed for Jerseyville, and the homes of some Southern sympathizers. Others made for the river front to catch a train to Cairo. All but two of the escapees made it to safety. Those two were caught that very evening.

On October 15, 1862 Private Henry Farmey of Poindexter's Missouri regiment was brought to the prison, apparently bringing with him the dreaded disease smallpox. He died on December 18, 1862, the first of an untold number of victims of that disease. The poor records which plagued the commanders in that war also prevent historians from drawing accurate conclusions regarding the smallpox epidemic; however, overcrowding and lack of sanitary facilities soon culminated in one of the worst smallpox epidemics ever to occur in southern Illinois. The disease raged for weeks, uncontrolled for want of prison doctors. Prisoners died at the rate of six to ten daily. Between the time of its opening and its closing in May, 1865, it has been estimated that disease claimed between 1534 and 2218 inmates at Alton Military Prison, including some 287 civilians, Federal soldiers, and others.

The correspondence of the Union commanders of the prison quite naturally paint a somewhat different picture than do the letters of Confederate soldiers confined there. In March of 1863, a young officer from Callaway County, Kentucky, pleading for repatriation, wrote to a member of the Confederate Senate this impassioned account of his imprisonment:

"I was captured on the 13th of July, heavily ironed with log chain and ball, transported to this prison, thrown into a cell 6x3 feet with my iron fetters on, kicked, cuffed, taunted, jeered and maltreated in every conceivable form. I remained the inmate of this living tomb until my life despaired of. I was then removed to the hospital where I have remained ever since, denied the privilege of a common culprit, denied a parole, denied to exchange; I have had to run the gauntlet of every disease which human flesh is heir to -- smallpox, measles, mumps, pneumonia; in a word, all the ills of Pandora. Oh! The horrors of this place, the cruelty of my persecutors, tongue cannot tell, neither hath it entered into the hearts of man to conceive. I have seen hundreds of my companions in arms consigned to a premature and untimely grave here by the cruelty and injustice of my enemies, murdered in cold blood in this laser house of disease and death."

In July of 1863, Colonel W. DeHass, then commander of the military prison, wrote this account of the epidemic:

"I desire to direct the attention of the commissary general of prisoners to a matter of much importance connected with the sanitary condition of the prison. Smallpox has become an almost established disease in the prison. It first appeared in December last. Since that time the prison has scarcely been free from it. Three cases were reported on the evening prior to my departure for Washington. I recommended to Colonel Hildebrand the importance of having the cases at once removed to a place outside the city limits. The recommendation was not acted upon (the prison surgeon believing he could confine the disease to the hospital). The consequence was the malady spread with alarming rapidity. It assumed a malignant type and the mortality during the months of January, February and part of March was fearful. The guard necessarily became affected and the whole city was more or less affected by the contagion. Every new accession of prisoners only furnished new victims for the disease. As illustrative of its ravages, I may mention that no less than 220 cases developed themselves in the past detachment of prisoners sent to City Point, Virginia. I adopted the precaution to cause every man to be vaccinated this morning as he entered, but it is fair to estimate that a considerable percentage will escape its influence."

The citizens of Alton became so alarmed that they demanded that the stricken men be isolated from the citizenry. In response to the demand, the stricken men were taken to an island in the center of the Mississippi River. Here a large, deserted dwelling was converted into a "hospital". The island was formerly known as Sunflower Island. It was here in 1842 that Abraham Lincoln retreated to fight a duel with James Shields. It was soon to become known as "Smallpox Island". The names of 240 Confederate prisoners and citizen prisoners are recorded as having been buried there during the war years of 1863-4. An unknown number of Federal soldiers and prisoners were also buried there. Those who were not buried on the island were interred in a special plot located on Rozier Street in North Alton known today as the Confederate Soldiers' Cemetery. A granite monument, with bronze tablets showing the names and commands of 1354 soldiers, was erected in the Confederate Cemetery. Another 182 Federal graves have been counted in Alton City Cemetery.

In early 1856, three Catholic nuns, members of The Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent De Paul, had arrived in Alton from Emmitsburg, Maryland, to set up Alton's first parochial school. The effort did not succeed, and the Sisters withdrew in July 1858. The Sisters of Charity were destined to return to Alton, but to fulfill another need. In the spring of 1864, the commander of the military prison camp applied to the Bishop of Alton for the Sisters to return and provide nursing care to the prisoners. In answer to this request, three Sisters arrived March 16, 1864 and they began to nurse a great number of the soldiers back to health. Their fledgling efforts would result in the opening of a hospital in Alton which was to become St. Joseph's Hospital.

Around August, the epidemic was beginning to subside, and by September of 1864, only seven graves were being dug. By mid-September the island hospital was closed and the prisoners were moved to the newly remodeled prison hospital. The official register of the dead shows that most were natives of Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi.

The graves of the Confederate prisoners buried in the cemetery in North Alton were wholly neglected and all identity was lost. In 1905 the Sam Davis Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy was organized in Alton. It petitioned the Federal War Department to appropriate the sum that permanent markers would have cost to be applied to the erection of a monument in the center of the grounds, upon which the names of all the soldiers buried there should appear. The petition was granted, the Federal government purchased and improved the site, surrounded it with a substantial iron fence, and the contract for the monument was let. The work was completed in September, 1909. The memorial is a lofty granite column some forty feet high, a tall obelisk telling the chilling story of the smallpox epidemic. A tablet on the granite shaft reads: "Erected by the United States to mark the burial place of 1354 Confederate Soldiers who died here and at the Smallpox Hospital on the adjacent island while prisoners of war and whose graves cannot now be identified." On the four sides of the base are large bronze plates on which are engraved the names, companies, and regiments of all the Confederates buried in the cemetery, including my great-great grandfather James K. Horn, Private, Company E, 3rd Missouri Cavalry, who died in the prison hospital on January 1, 1865 barely two months after his capture. James was a son of Thomas Horn, one of the first sheriffs of Greene County, Missouri. By May of that year, practically all the remaining prisoners had been exchanged or released outright.

After the war, the prison was privately purchased and most of the stone building blocks were moved to where they continue as part of other more modern structures. Subsequently, the prison site was leased from the owners by the city and converted into a public park and playground for children. Little visible evidence remains to tell about this tragic episode in Alton history. A neatly stacked pile of limestone rock near the corner of Broadway and William Streets in downtown Alton is all that remains of the State's first penitentiary. This remnant of a cell block wall was restored in 1973 as a monument commemorating what, by today's standards, would be considered a primitive civil penal system. An historical marker has been erected there by the State of Illinois, telling the grim story. In 1975, the Alton Prison Site became one of the few historic sites in Illinois to be added to the National Register of Historic Places.

In 1974, archaeologists from Northwestern University uncovered five brick-paved cells on the site of the old prison on William Street. Built back-to-back against a central wall, each cell measured only about 4 feet by 7 feet 4 inches, tight quarters for even one man. It is believed that they held as many as three men each. From each cell, there was a 24-inch door opening through an outer wall two feet thick. Unless there was a wooden door, of which there was no evidence, the prisoners were exposed to the weather during confinement.

A tragic finale to the prisoners-of-war story in the Midwest was the sinking on April 27, 1865 of the steamboat SULTANA, in the Mississippi River a few miles above Memphis, Tennessee. This boat, grossly overloaded, was transporting Federal soldiers, recently released from Southern prisons, to their homes in the North. Over 1,500 of them lost their lives when the boilers of the boat burst and set her afire in the greatest peacetime marine disaster in American history.

Notes:

Special "thanks" to Donald J. Huber, Supervisor, Town of Alton, Illinois for his review and contributions to this article. Don has been researching the Alton Prison story, both as an Illinois State Penitentiary and as a Federal Military Prison, for the past five years. Through his efforts, an information kiosk has been erected at the site of the prison, sharing much of his research material.

Don has posted a copy of the entire death database containing the names of those Confederate Soldiers who died at Alton Military Prison. If you think your Confederate ancestor might be among those listed, you can search his database at Alton in the Civil War.

As part of his ongoing research efforts, Don is compiling information about the prisoners of Alton. If you have an ancestor among those who were imprisoned there, please consider sharing information about him with Don.

For more information about the Alton Military Prison, please see the following links and sources:

View of Alton Prison in 1861
Alton in the Civil War
Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, Missouri Commandery
Index of Civil War Information available on the Internet

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Bibliography:

Barban, Jack. "Alton Prison Site on National Register." Alton Telegraph, 15 Feb 1975.

Brinkman, Grover. "Andersonville in Illinois." Illinois Magazine Mar-Apr 1984: p. 14-15.

Cox, Jann. "Alton Military Penitentiary in the Civil War: Smallpox and Burial on the Alton Harbor Islands", U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, St. Louis District, Historic Properties Management Report No. 36, Nov 1988.

Faust, Patricia L., ed. Historical Times Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Civil War. (New York: Harper & Row, 1986) p. 9.

Greater Alton Growth Association. The Infamous Alton Prison. Alton, Illinois: Visitor Information.

Kulp, Jim. "Evidence of Crowded Cells Found Below Old Prison Wall." Alton Telegraph 15 Jun 1974.

McMurray, Dennis. "Jam-Packed in the Joint." Illinois Issues, Jun 1995, p. 26ff.

Morrison, Don. "Alton's Disaster in War Between States." Alton Telegraph 31 Jul 1984.

St. Joseph Hospital. The Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent De Paul. Alton, Illinois: 1974.

United States. Office of the Commissioner for Marking Graves of Confederate Dead, War Department. Register of Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Who Died in Federal Prisons and Military Hospitals in the North. (Washington: GPO, 1912).

The War of the Rebellion: The Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Government Printing Office, 1889. Series II, Vol III, p. 986-1004.

Williamson, Hugh P. "Military Prisons in the Civil War." The Missouri Historical Society of St. Louis Bulletin 16 (1960): p. 329-32.