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Black Confederate Prisoners at Camp Simmons
The military campaign leading up to and including the Battle of Antietam yielded many Confederate prisoners from the Army of Northern Virginia, hundreds of whom were brought by train to Harrisburg. Upon arrival, these captured southerners always generated a lot of excitement in town as citizens gathered near the train tracks to gawk at them as they disembarked and were paraded to the stockaded camp. In the fall of 1862, some of these Confederate prisoners brought for incarceration in Harrisburg piqued the interest of local people and encamped Union soldiers for a different reason.
Among the prisoners brought from Maryland were about sixty uniformed African Americans who had been captured with the southern troops. All of them were confined in Camp Curtin until long-term imprisonment could be worked out by military authorities in Washington. They were described by a soldier of the Sixteenth Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry, whose camp was next to the prisoner area, in a letter home from Camp Curtin dated 18 September 1862. The Union soldier, Private Wallace Mitchell, wrote, “There are about 200 Rebel prisoners quartered a few rods from my tent. They are the nasties[t] looking set I ever saw. About 1/3 negroes. Many of them dressed in our soldiers clothes.”
The African American men were wagoners whose wagon train was captured by Union troops near Williamsport, Maryland on the sixteenth. The Pennsylvania Daily Telegraph reprinted a news item from a Chambersburg newspaper, which gave details about the Confederate African American prisoners: “Some sixty-five four horse wagons, with numbers of loose horses and mules, were brought to town and driven at once to camp Slifer, where they were handed over to the commandant, and the drivers, mostly negroes, were lodged with the other prisoners in the jail yard. The wagons were mostly loaded with ammunition and had been attached to Jackson’s army.” The paper then reported that all the prisoners “were sent to Harrisburg.” The prisoners arrived in Harrisburg from Chambersburg the next morning and were gradually, over the course of the next few weeks, sent to the Union’s prisoner of war camp at Fort Delaware.
Given General Butler's establishment in 1861 of treating captured enslaved people from the south as "contraband of war," or "contrabands" for short, it is unlikely the Black wagoners were imprisoned for long upon their arrival at Fort Delaware. The fort, newly utilized to house Confederate prisoners, would require many additional workers, and it had become routine in the field to employ such "contrabands" as workers in support of the Union troops. The Confederate African American wagoners sent from Harrisburg to Fort Delaware, whether enslaved or free Blacks, likely joined the work force at the fort.
Sources
James S. Miller, “From Erie to Harrisburg in 1862,” The Bugle 2, no. 3 (July 1992): 3.
The actual location of the Confederate prisoner camp and the Pennsylvania cavalry camp was in Camp Simmons, a smaller adjunct camp located just north and to the west of Camp Curtin. The modern day location would be just northeast of the intersection of North Third Street and Polyclinic Avenue (old Reel’s Lane). Miller, Training of an Army, 7, 107.
Pennsylvania Daily Telegraph, 16 September 1862.
This article is excerpted from The Year of Jubilee, chapter nine.