News-Info-Alerts

Re: Slave Preserves POW History

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: July 09, 2002

"Escaped Slave Became Gravedigger Who Preserved History of Confederate POWs

By Eugene Scheel

One of the finest Civil War histories I've ever read just crossed my desk -- Michael Horigan's recently published "Elmira: Death Camp of the North." The subject is Camp Chemung, 32 acres in Elmira in upstate New York, which had the highest death rate among Union prison camps.

In addition to its appeal to hundreds of thousands of descendants of Confederate prisoners, the book is of local interest because it highlights the role of John W. Jones, an escaped Loudoun County slave. Jones dug every grave for the camp and carefully documented names, dates and other known facts about the interred.

I spoke to Horigan, a native of Elmira and a graduate of Fordham University, after his talk about Camp Chemung's atrocities recently at the Leesburg town office. He told me that a previous book, "The Elmira Prison Camp," written 90 years ago by Clay Holmes, also an Elmiran, covered Jones's pre-Civil War years in some detail. Horigan said Holmes's book "was more or less of a whitewash" regarding the camp, often echoing biased articles in the Elmira newspaper, the Daily Advertiser.

A typical Advertiser piece, quoted in Holmes's book, assured readers that "prisoners at present appear quiet and contented, and are well cared for whether in sickness or in health." Another article described Camp Chemung as "a small Eden."

Chemung was built in June 1861 as a recruiting depot for Union soldiers, and 2,000 recruits were quartered in Barracks No. 3. At its most crowded, in August 1864, 9,480 Confederate prisoners of war lived there.

From July 6, 1864, until July 10, 1865, the camp's frame barracks and cloth tents housed 12,123 prisoners. Of them, 2,950 died, a death rate of 24.3 percent, compared with an overall death rate in Union prison camps of 11.7 percent. The 8,800 residents of a prosperous village surrounding this camp, dubbed "Helmira," ignored the enclosure, obscured by a high wooden fence. Union and Confederate prisoners of war were exchanged before fall 1863, and they were not supposed to fight again. But when Union officers began to observe released Confederate prisoners rejoining their armies, the Union halted the exchanges. The Confederacy followed suit. Prison camps became the norm, more than 150 for both sides.

If one were to forgive Holmes for not writing about the true Elmira prison, remember that he wrote in an era when the last of the war veterans were aging and the spirit of reconciliation was at its zenith. In that spirit, Holmes spoke with Jones during the last decades of his long life and obtained the following information.

Jones was born in 1817 on Sarah "Sally" Ellzey's plantation south of Goose Creek between the present Evergreen Mills and Arcola. "John was the pet of his mistress during his boyhood," Holmes wrote. He was a house slave but was turned out in the fields at age 12.

His desire to escape from slavery began after he sat on his grandmother's knee and she pointed out a flock of geese flying northward. Holmes said she told the youngster "that far beyond the hills over which the geese were flying lay a northern country, where all were free."

Ellzey and her plantation overseer, William Rollins, had always treated Jones well, Holmes said, but as Ellzey aged, the future became uncertain. In early summer 1844, Jones and four other slaves, two of whom were his half-brothers, escaped. Jones and his half-brother, George Jones, reached Elmira, population 6,000, on July 5.

John Jones did not describe his route through Loudoun other than to say that the five of them covered 18 miles to the Potomac River in two days. Their path was probably the traditional one taken by escapees: along the wooded Catoctin Mountain to the Potomac by the Broken Islands west of Point of Rocks. That spot was fordable because of several Indian fish traps made of rock and linking the islets with the two shores.

They walked at night and rested in an abandoned barn during the day. They carried a change of clothes, food for four days and money earned while working on other plantations. Jones had secured a pistol, and his belt held a carving knife, the only time, he said, he ever stole from Ellzey.

In Elmira, Jones met rebuffs because of his race, but most people accepted him as a hard worker who would tackle any job. Schoolmaster Hugh Riddle taught Jones to read and write, and he became a Christian and sexton of the white First Baptist Church in 1847, a post he held for 43 years. He volunteered as a janitor at the YMCA, ushered at lectures and tolled the church bell that signaled the fire engines.

Jones and his half-brother, who became sexton at Park Congregational Church, ,which was active in the movement to liberate slaves, also were cogs in the Underground Railroad. People known as conductors were subject to having their homes searched after 1850 when a new, more stringent, Fugitive Slave Act was passed, imposing heavy penalties on anyone who aided a slave's escape.

John Jones recalled that he was usually tipped off when a federal agent was in the area. Slaves would then leave his house and stay in the fields. He estimated that he helped 800 escapees in the 1850s and early '60s.

Jones married Rachel Swailes in 1856. Horigan told me that Rachel's brother, Stephen, a lieutenant in the 54th Mass Infantry, was the first or one of the first black officers in the Union Army. The Joneses had two children, but Horigan and others have found no living descendants.

When Elmira's Woodlawn Cemetery opened in 1857, Jones dug the first graves and was hired by the Union Army to bury Confederate prisoners. He received $2.50 a burial; prisoner helpers got 5 cents and three meals a day.

The army did not provide grave markers, so Jones devised his own, a piece of wood on which he painted the name of the interred, date of death and other details he received from prison authorities. Horigan told me that those details were also put in bottles placed under the corpse's armpit. All of the bottles and messages survive.

As Jones prepared to bury a soldier named John R. Rollins, he wondered whether he was the son of the overseer at the Ellzey farm. He contacted the family and, confirming that it was the man he had known 20 years earlier, assured the Rollinses that their son had received a proper burial. In 1873, Jones helped the family move Rollins's remains to the Ellzey graveyard in Loudoun.

Conditions leading to the deaths of 2,950 prisoners from July 1864 to July 1865 are verified by numerous accounts and letters that, as Horigan put it, "constituted a Gothic tale of misery and death."

Prisoners ate twice a day, standing at chest-high tables. They were given 15 minutes to devour, as one inmate noted, a "small piece of loaf bread and a small piece of salt pork or pickled beef each, and in the afternoon a small piece of bread and a tin plate of soup." The soup, another prisoner recalled, was a mix "of onions, rotten hulls, roots and dirt."

Prisoners sold dead rats -- tastes "much like squirrel," said one -- for 5 cents apiece. Stray cats and dogs -- "tasted like mutton," said another -- were also fair game. The prisoners received no fruits or vegetables, and a few beans were in the soup. The few prisoners who had money could buy food and sundries from salesmen allowed inside the camp. But after Aug. 10, 1864, these salesman, known as sutlers, were not permitted to sell food.

A stagnant lagoon created in the 1850s for two state fairs on the camp grounds was a haven for mosquitoes and rats, and into its stinking waters poured as many as 2,600 gallons of urine each day. Contaminated water then leached into nine nearby wells that provided drinking water for the
prisoners.

"The rebs are dying quite fast from 8 to 30 a day," a Union officer stationed at the camp wrote in October 1864.

Inmates began leaving Camp Chemung after a prisoner-exchange agreement in February 1865. The South had lost the war, although not yet officially, and the North had no need to worry about prisoners returning to fight. The last prisoners left the camp July 11, three months after Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered.

In early 1866, Camp Chemung's barracks and materials were sold at auction or dismantled. The 2 1/2-acre Confederate graveyard became part of Woodlawn National Cemetery in 1874. In 1907, tombstones replaced Jones's decaying wooden markers.

Jones returned to Loudoun once, in 1868, the year George died. He found the Ellzey homestead in ruins, and the only family member about was William Ellzey, who welcomed Jones and allowed him to stay at his house for several days. Jones visited the grave of Sally Ellzey, who had died 15 years earlier.

Jones died Dec. 26, 1900, at 83. Obituaries featured his accomplishments and said he was "the wealthiest colored man in this part of the state." Jones's remains rest in his beloved Woodlawn Cemetery. Holmes wrote of the internment: "Who thinks the angels in Heaven stopped to ask whether this man's skin was white or black when his soul entered the pearly gates?"

On June 22, 1997, the anniversary of Jones's birth, students from Elmira's Southside High School placed a plaque by his grave as Union and Confederate reenactors saluted with 21 guns.

Two student quotes are included on the plaque: "He risked his life to escape bondage, then dedicated his life to bury those who might enslave him" and "The moment you resolve injustice, nothing can hinder you to show others the way."

Autographed copies of Horigan's book are available at the Loudoun Museum in Leesburg or may be ordered from the author by mail at 604 W. Clinton St., Elmira, N.Y. 14901; e-mail, bjh1164@aol.com; or fax, 607-737-5921. The price is $26.95. Clay Holmes's 1912 book has been reprinted by the Chemung Historical Society, 415 E. Water St., Elmira, N.Y. 14901, 706-734-4167. The cost is $75.

Eugene Scheel is a Waterford historian and mapmaker.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company"