A Good Day to Die: From Prison to Hospital
by adminSalisbury, N.C. Was once home to one of the Confederacy’s first military prison camps. A warehouse was converted into a prison for Union soldiers and later Confederate and Union deserters and even civilian criminals were housed there. There were a number of small outbuildings and the stockade surrounded a rather pleasant campground with good water and trees. But by 1864 the population had grown from 1,500 to over 28,000. Conditions were so bad that a death toll of 28 had resulted in mass graves for casualties.
Medical care in the Civil War was as poor as conditions in prison camps. The United States last large scale military campaign had been in Mexico in 1846. The numbers of troops committed was comparatively small, logistics involved an invasion and no real prisoner of war activities, Army surgeons were capable of managing the relatively small number of wounded. No one was prepared for the scale of logistics and materials management that the War of 1861 brought.
Medical care for wounded and sick was just as inadequate. For a sick prisoner, being moved to the hospital was the first step into a mass grave. The hospital meant being out of the weather, but that was about all. Medical supplies, food and even being cared for by a doctor or medical steward were no certainty.
Today Salisbury Confederate Prison testifies by the mass grave trenches, stillness and the remaining small house that still stands, as witnesses to how war enacts violence on the already wounded. Their memory endures.