The Yankee Plague Escaped Union Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy by Lorien Foote The University of North Carolina Press (2016)
As the Confederate armies faced crushing defeats in the last year of the war, Union soldiers held prisoner in the South were moved from place to place by their captors to keep them away from the advancing Union armies. Prisoners of war were transported from vulnerable depots in Virginia to the Carolinas and Georgia where they would be less likely to be liberated. Along the way south, many prisoners broke free, or else escaped from the hastily constructed camps that were supposed to contain them. The Yankee Plague Escaped Union Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy by Lorien Foote tells the story of the men who escaped by the hundreds and the impact of this plague of Yankees on communities in the Confederacy.
Many areas of the South which had been isolated from the immediate dangers of the Civil War found themselves invaded by fugitive Yankees. The presence of these escapees was emblematic of the declining potency of the Confederate state. They were at large because the rebel army was too weak to properly guard them, and when they appeared in a community, the Confederates lacked the personnel to arrest them. Civilians took on the role of manhunters. According to Foote:
“Local residents in the Carolinas mobilized to hunt the escaped prisoners. They formed pickets on the roads and patrolled on horseback the paths and byways through the woods. Anyone who spotted a fugitive sent for help, and neighbors rallied to the hunt with lanterns and bloodhounds. But at the same time, white and black southerners organized to assist the Yankees. When the townspeople of Jalapa, South Carolina, formed a picket on the road to intercept some escapees, slaves in the area formed a counter-picket on the road below in order to alert the Yankees and guide them around the trap their masters had set.”
Confederate loyalty and dissent, and the rump nation’s unbridgeable racial divide were on full display in the range of reactions to the escapees.
Confederate officials unleashed the avalanche of escapes when they moved prisoners from Georgia to South Carolina in September 1864. Instead of placing them in a stockage, the Confederates placed them in open fields. Foote writes that “Nine hundred Federal prisoners escaped: 400 enlisted men from Florence and 500 officers from Charleston, Columbia, and points in between.” By the winter, more than a brigade’s worth of Federal were at large in the Carolinas. A south Carolina newspaper said of the escapees that “They seem to be everywhere. They actually cover the land like the locusts of Egypt.”
The escaped “prisoners moved through a landscape where slavery was breaking down, where the government no longer provided local security, where home fronts merged with battle fronts, where movement broke through and altered imagined sovereign borders, and where military defense against invasion crumbled,” Foote writes.
This book goes beyond the individual escape stories that many of us are familiar with. It looks at prison breaks as a mass social phenomenon. Foote describes the ways men escaped, often through the negligence or connivance of their captors and what they encountered on their paths to freedom or recapture. It also examines the special vulnerability to escapees of rural communities without men, and the networks black and white Southern Unionists constructed to provide a new kind of underground railroad for the fugitives.
Yankee Plague is a useful contribution to the emerging field of captivity studies.
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