Civil War Prisons

Lewis Payne, a prisoner at the Washington Navy Yard, April, 1865. Photograph by Alexander Gardner.

This image from the archive was recently posted on the Prison Photography site.

In his 1866 volume Battle-Pieces, Herman Melville imagined the experience of a soldier in one of the infamous Civil War prisons:

In the Prison Pen

Listless he eyes the palisades
And sentries in the glare;
‘Tis barren as a pelican-beach–
But his world is ended there.

Nothing to do; and vacant hands
Bring on the idiot-pain;
He tries to think–to recollect,
But the blur is on his brain.

Around him swarm the plaining ghosts
Like those on Virgil’s shore–
A wilderness of faces dim,
And pale ones gashed and hoar.

A smiting sun. No shed, no tree;
He totters to his lair–
A den that sick hands dug in earth
Ere famine wasted there,

Or, dropping in his place, he swoons,
Walled in by throngs that press,
Till forth from the throngs they bear him dead–
Dead in his meagreness.