Ghosts at the Civil War island prison at Fort Delaware State Park.

Moving narrative of the harrowing ordeal of Civil War prisoners. Based on newly discovered primary sources.

James Byrd Foote enlisted as a private in Company A of the First Regiment, Georgia Regulars, just thirteen days after the surrender of Fort Sumter; transferred to Company C of the Seventh Georgia Infantry Regiment some four months later; and participated in engagements against the Yankees at Yorktown, Seven Pines, Oak Grove, Mechanicsville, Gainess Mill, Garnetts and Goldings Farms, Savages Station, Malvern Hill, Kellys Ford, Rappahannock Station, Thoroughfare Gap, Second Manassas, Ox Hill, Boonsborough, Sharpsburg, Suffolk, Gettysburg, Funkstown, Charleston, Chattanooga, Campbells Station, and Knoxville, where he was captured on November 28, 1863. After spending more than three months as a prisoner of war in several jails and military prison camps, he was forwarded from the Union Military Prison at Louisville, Kentucky, to Fort Delaware and was imprisoned there for 366 days before being delivered for exchange to the Confederate authorities at Boulwares and Coxs Wharves in Virginia during the three-day period of March 1012, 1865. He returned home to Dallas, Georgia, as a paroled prisoner of war to find that the land throughout Paulding County had been laid to waste by the Union and Confederate armies and that his family had been impoverished by the war. He endured the hardships of Reconstruction in Northern Georgia but was determined to prosper, and he did, becoming a successful merchant farmer and a leading citizen of Dallas who was favorably known throughout Paulding and surrounding counties.

During the Civil War, each side accused the other of mistreating prisoners of war. Today, most historians believe that there was systemic and deliberate abuse of POWs by both sides yet many base their conclusions on anecdotal evidence, much of it from postwar writings. Drawing on both contemporaneous prisoner diaries and Union Army documents (some newly discovered), the author presents a fresh and detailed study of supposed mistreatment of prisoners at Fort Delaware--one of the largest Union prison camps--and draws surprising conclusions, some of which have implications for the entire Union prison system.

Located on Pea Patch Island, Fort Delaware was erected to defend local ports from enemy attack but never received or fired a shot in anger. The first earthen-work version, constructed during the War of 1812, was followed by a second 1820s plan incorporating a masonry star design with a network of drainage ditches. Engineering issues and a low-lying site doomed the structure; in 1831, it was irreparably damaged by fire. A new plan created a more substantial fortification still standing to this day. Fort Delaware evolved into a well-established community that transformed from protector to notorious Civil War prison camp. Most widely known as a prison, it subsequently served in lesser roles through three more conflicts. Images of America: Fort Delaware unifies an amazing pictorial record of Fort Delaware's historical timeline. The story is not only of active duty but its rescue from abandonment and subsequent successful preservation work.

In 1864, six hundred Confederate prisoners of war, all officers, were taken out of a prison camp in Delaware and transported to South Carolina, where most were confined in a Union stockade prison on Morris Island. They were placed in front of two Union forts as "human shields" during the siege of Charleston and exposed to a fearful barrage of artillery fire from Confederate forts. Many of these men would suffer an even worse ordeal at Union-held Fort Pulaski near Savannah, Georgia, where they were subjected to severe food rationing as retaliatory policy. Author and historian Karen Stokes uses the prisoners' writings to relive the courage, fraternity and struggle of the "Immortal 600."

This collection of articles addresses the lives and experiences of Delawareans during the mid-nineteenth century in general and the Civil War in particular. It examines the subject matter from three perspectives, political, military and social, that combined provide an understanding of the issues and circumstances that influenced the people of Delaware and their leaders during this traumatic period. The objective of this publication is to provide an understanding of Delaware's role during those stressful years in our country's history. The citizens of Delaware were not found wanting when Northern and, to a certain extent, Southern leadership called upon them for political support and military service. From a societal point of view, specifically regarding racial equality, however, it is important to recognize the slow progress that Delawareans made over the next century following the Civil War.