Fort Delaware  "Starvation In A Land Of Plenty"

The marshy location, inclement weather, brutal treatment, and overcrowded conditions at Fort Delaware prisoner-of-war camp on Pea Patch Island in the middle of the Delaware River all combined to make the Confederate inmates miserable. It was the starvation diet, however, that imposed the greatest hardship and led to the most deaths. In retaliation for suffering endured by Union prisoners in Southern camps, the U.S. government reduced the rations of the Rebel prisoners. The men stared out across the river to fertile fields of grain and corn, yet they sat starving.

"The bacon was rusty and slimy", one inmate remembered about his rations, "the soup was slop... filled with white worms a half inch long... It was a standard joke that the soup was too weak to drown the rice worms and pea bugs, which however came to their end by starvation." A Georgia private wrote, "Our rations consisted of one-fourth of a half-pound loaf of bread, twice a day. Our meat consisted of a very small, thin slice of salt pork of fresh beef, which made about one good mouthful, with one Irish potato occasionally... I was so nearly starved I was reduced from 140 to 80 pounds."

The drinking water provided the prisoners was barely potable. It contained "solid inches of tadpoles and wigglers which was our morning draught in lieu of tea or coffee", remembered an inmate. For bathing and washing their ragged clothes, the prisoners had access only to drainage ditches that crossed the island.

Malnutrition and unhealthful conditions resulted in epidemics. The hospital facilities were totally inadequate to deal with the camp sickness. One prisoner recalled that "physicians, in contract service, have gone daily into the hospitals, saturated with liquor; and without looking at the tongue or feeling the pulse, have tantalized the poor sufferers with the prescription, 'Oh, you must eat!' and without furnishing them with either medicine or meat, have left them to die."

Fascinating Fact:  Alarmed at prison conditions, a group of Fort Delaware neighbors organized a picnic to raise funds to buy vegetables for the prisoners. A squad of Union soldiers descended on the picnic, arrested all the males, and jailed them at Fort McHenry.


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