The camp, wrote one observer, was “full of what were once human beings. Nevertheless, twelve thousand Union prisoners were confined there by December. Worse, the stockade was built in a swampy bog six of the prison’s twenty-four acres were completely unusable. The faltering Southern nation simply could not provide basic necessities. Although Confederate leaders periodically expressed concern about a prisoner mutiny, and particularly about sabotage to rail lines, such fears revealed more about the declining fortunes of the Confederacy than they did about the health and strength of the inmates. They found conditions no better at Florence. Many had been transferred from a temporary facility in Charleston, where smallpox, yellow fever, and scurvy ran rampant. Confederate leaders using slave labor worked quickly on a stockade prison, but it was still incomplete when the first prisoners arrived. Neither the town nor the camp was ready for the sudden rush of Union prisoners–six thousand of whom arrived on September 17. As a result, in September 1864 Confederate authorities began transferring thousands of Union prisoners from these sites to Florence.įlorence was chosen because of its proximity to three converging railroad lines. Sherman on September 1 made the prison camps at Andersonville and Millen, Georgia, vulnerable to Federal forces.
The fall of Atlanta to General William T. A backwater for much of the Civil War– a contemporary newspaper described the town as a “name rather than a place”–Florence had an initiation to the conflict that was both deadly and controversial.
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