Point Lookout, MD – They fought at Fredericksburg and at Chancellorsville, marched across the Shenandoah Valley with Stonewall Jackson in 1862 before making the charge through cornfields at Antietam; then were captured at Gettysburg.
They died at Point Lookout.
Before the American Civil War, Point Lookout was a summer resort where the well-to-do would relax on seasonal vacations.
For former Confederate soldiers captured after one of the most historic battles in American History, Point Lookout became a living hell.
Gettysburg was the battle that brought a sudden need for a prisoner of war camp. In slightly under two years, more than 50,000 captured rebel soldiers would pass through its gates. The editor of The St. Mary’s Beacon in Leonardtown was arrested and incarcerated there for writing inflammatory editorials calling President Abraham Lincoln a “despot.”
It was a perfect prison.
Bordered by the Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River, where fierce tidal currents made escape by swimming virtually impossible, an imposing 15-foot wooden gate to the north and armed Union guards throughout, Point Lookout quickly became the largest Civil War prison in the north.
The Hammond Hospital for Union soldiers opened on the point in August 1862. When the prisoner of war camp was hastily established there almost a year later in resort buildings, a 40-acre prison compound just north of the hospital was surrounded by a 15-foot tall fence.
At first, conditions at the prison were not as bad as they would eventually become. More than 1,700 Confederates were held there barely a month after Gettysburg, but by the end of 1863 that number reached 9,000. By the following summer numbers swelled to way beyond the facility’s estimated capacity at over 15,000. At war’s end, an estimated 20,000 prisoners were housed there.
As the population increased, conditions for the prisoners rapidly deteriorated.
There was no housing for the captives, so they slept in canvas tents, woefully inadequate shelter for the bitterly cold winters on the exposed and open point. Rations and potable water became scarce. Diseases such as typhoid fever and malaria swept through the camp with merciless efficiency. Nearly 4,000 died.
North of Point Lookout stand two obelisk monuments to the Confederate dead surrounded by a wrought iron fence. The first of these, a smaller white marker, is the first Confederate monument in the United States, erected by the state of Maryland just 10 years after the bloodiest conflict in American History to that point had ended.
Lee’s surrender at Appomattox closed the prison in 1865 and the following year the U.S. Quartermaster General’s office surveyed the peninsula. Their mission: consideration of making Point Lookout a national cemetery.
There were Union soldiers buried at Point Lookout as well, who had died at Hammond Hospital. These were reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery, ironically the home of Confederate General Robert E. Lee before the war.
In 1870, the state of Maryland transferred more than 3,000 Confederate remains to a mass grave further north along the peninsula near Tanner Creek, the present-day Point Lookout Confederate Cemetery. The 25-foot white marble obelisk placed at the site by the state of Maryland in 1876 was the first Confederate monument erected in the United States following the bitter conflict.
The federal government assumed ownership of the site in 1910 and marked the common grave of the Confederate soldiers with an 80-foot obelisk hewn of granite.
The white Maryland obelisk was actually moved from its present location to the site of one of the original prison cemeteries when the new monument was erected in 1911, but was returned to its present site after the government sold the properties to private owners.
County legend has it that a severe hurricane which struck the region in 1933 opened up a previously unknown Confederate burial site when the storm ripped off a huge chunk of mainland from the point.
Another legend hails from former Park Ranger Donnie Hammett, who one day discovered an elderly woman dressed in black along the shoreline at Point Lookout and asked if there was anything he could help her with. “I’m looking for the graves,” she told him. When he tried to explain that the Confederate dead were interred under the monuments, she told him he was wrong. “Oh, they’re here,” she insisted.
Hammett looked away for a second in puzzlement, and when he looked back he found he was standing alone on the beach.
Contact Joseph Norris at joe.norris@thebaynet.com