[Excerpts Editor's Note: Monument erected by the NYC Army Reserve, on May 10, 1877, in memory oi the Veteran Union Soldiers and Sailors buried at the Civil War Cemetery on Hart Island. The monument still stands on Hart Island, although the remains of these dead were removed to Cypress Hills National Cemetery in 1941.]

It, too, was nothing more than a concentration camp. The first POWs arrived on April 7 and were immediately placed into a stockade enclosure of about four acres. "Two thousand and twenty-nine prisoners of war were received," noted Henry W Wessells, the prison commandant. "They seem to be healthy with few exceptions, and tolerably well clothed ... The guard is entirely insufficient consisting of a small detachment sent with them from City Point. Three hundred and fifty effective men are required." …

Hart Island originally served as a draft rendezvous camp for this area of New York. Colonel Hoffman suggested using the site to confine POWs as early as August 1864, and added that "the guard and prisoners ... be placed in old tents until it becomes absolutely necessary to put them in quarters, when sheds may [then] be erected by the labor of prisoners."

Although tents were used for the overflow, for the most part a portion of the rendezvous barracks were used for both guards and prisoners from the day the prison began its operation. Within three weeks, a total of 3,413 POWs were crammed into the post's tiny enclosed area.

"We were placed in wards of a hundred to each ward, with three rows of bunks and two men to a bunk," advised J. S. Kimbrough, Company K, 14th Georgia. "The first ward was composed mostly of jail birds, blacklegs, and toughs from Petersburg, and their nocturnal rounds of robbery and thieving were a terror to the camp."

"Our rations," Kimbrough continued, "consisted of four hard tacks, a small piece of pickled beef or mule, and a cup of soup per day. Often have I eaten my two day's rations at one meal and subsisted upon water and wind until the next drawing." …

Hart Island wasn't completely cleared of prisoners until July 1865. Within those four months, nearly 7 percent of all those "healthy and tolerably well clothed" prisoners had died. "The largest portion of deaths," declared U.S. Medical Inspector George Lyman, "occurred from chronic diarrhea, brought with them, and pneumonia, which began to appear a few days after their arrival.... The men being poorly clad, the weather wet and cold, and the barracks provided with no other bedding than such as the prisoners brought with them, the pneumonia cases developed rapidly ... increased, probably, to some extent by the crowded and unventilated condition of the barracks."

Nearby Fort Schuyler, having a capacity of five hundred prisoners, also came into use as a POW facility in 1864. This fort, named for the Revolutionary War general Philip J. Schuyler, had been acquired by the Federal government in 1833 and was located on a Bronx peninsula where Long Island Sound joined the East River. Although briefly manned as a defensive post during the Civil War, when it came into use as a prison, the POWs were held within several large rooms of the fort's interior.

About the same time, Riker's Island, in the East River south of Fort Schuyler, was also pressed into use. There were only about two or three storage buildings on the site and fresh water was scarce, yet authorities estimated the island was capable of holding up to one thousand prisoners. Within a short time barracks were built for the guard, and Confederate prisoners were moved onto the island. Water was eventually supplied by cisterns filled with runoff water from the roofs.

Another New York City location used for confining POWs for various periods before the war ended included Ward's Island in the East River just west of Riker's Island.