African-Americans at the Start of the Stockade

The first prisoner trains to arrive at Florence came in the night of 14-15 September 1864. There was a critical need to construct a new stockade where nothing of the sort yet existed. Major Frederick Warley, who had been dispatched from Charleston to take the operation in hand, immediately impressed slaves from plantations in Darlington and adjoining Districts (Counties). While the exact number remains unknown, an oral history arose that 1,000 enslaved men were involved.

Whatever their number, they accomplished a herculean task. Starting from scratch, and using twenty-foot logs obtained from felling trees in the immediate area, they constructed a new prison enclosure measuring 725 feet north-south by 1,400 feet east-west. Not only did the logs have to be carried to the site, but they had to be embedded five or six feet into the ground to discourage tunneling. This created a palisade wall fourteen feet tall. But that was not all. To further discourage burrowing, these slave workers were made to excavate a great trench, extending perhaps twenty feet away from the walls, and then heave the dirt thus obtained up against the walls. This was to also to allow the Confederate sentries to stand watch with the top of the logs arriving at their waists. Allowing for an average diameter or twelve inches, the whole project required that 4,250 trees be felled, their upper branches trimmed off, and the resulting logs be set upright in a deep trench – all in just over two weeks.

With the Stockade walls erected, most of the slave workers were sent back to their plantations. A few hundred, perhaps, were kept behind to erect lines of earthwork fortifications to ward off any Yankee incursions that might arrive via the Great PeeDee River.

The Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts

When the first prisoners were herded into the Stockade on Sunday morning, October 2, 1864, no African-Americans were among them. The Confederate Congress had decided in 1863 that any Black men caught fighting in a Yankee uniform would automatically be considered runaway slaves. As such they were not to be forwarded to prison camps, but kept under lock and key pending the identification of their owners. While the Confederate Congress needed to re-assert what it considered the property rights of slave masters, it ignored the fact that many members of the United States Colored Troops had been born as free men in the North. It also assumed that somehow imprisoned runaway slaves would somhow volunteer the names of their former owners.

In Charleston, the first casualties of this policy were the men of the 54th Massachusetts (about whom the movie, “Glory,” would later be made). Those fortunate enough to escape with their lives in the attack on Fort Wagner (July 18, 1863), but unlucky enough to be captured, found themselves interned in the Charleston jail. By June of 1864, their numbers had grown to forty-four, with the addition of prisoners from other Colored Troop regiments taken around Charleston. As the weeks and months wore on, these men ended up serving as nurses in the various military hospitals in the city. In August of 1864, given the impasse in returning these prisoners to their presumed owners, Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon allowed the Southern governors to decide the matter for themselves. It took until 8 December for South Carolina Governor Milledge Bonham to send his Colored Troop prisoners to the Florence Stockade.

Exchange rosters compiled at Wilmington, N.C. in late February and early March of 1865, show that among the thousands of returning Yankees, eighty of them were Afrcan-Americans from Florence: forty-four from the 54th Massachusets, and thirty-six from various other Colored Troops regiments.

Prisoner relics at Florence are of course very scarce. This is not surprising, given the level of destitution of these men. Nevertheless, long-time Florence resident, the late J.R. Fisher found an embossed copper disc on the Stockade site in the 1980s. It carries the name “H. SCOTT” on one side, and “54 MASS” on the other. While nine men named, “Scott,” served in the 54th Massachusetts, none had a given name starting with the letter, “H.” Two had middle names beginning with this letter, but one of these was mustered out of service before the regiment saw action, and the other is not known to have ever been taken prisoner. The identity of the owner of this primitive “dog tag” will probably always remain a mystery.

United States Colored Troops in the Florence National Cemetery

Although African-Americans were interned at Florence, none are buried under named stones in the cemetery. In fact, excepting one woman and a handful of soldiers who are thought to have been Freemasons, and whose graves were very carefully marked by their Southern brethren, all the dead of Florence are buried as unknowns. A burial register is known to have been kept at Florence as it was at Andersonville, but it was lost at war’s end. It was therefore never possible to give each grave a regulation marble headstone.

However, thirty-two stones in the Florence National Cemetery identify the man who sleeps beneath it as a member of the United States Colored Troops. These men died in Charleston in 1865 and 1866. As was the case with white soldiers who died on occupation duty, their remains were interred around the central chapel in the city’s Magnolia Cemetery. Authorization was finally granted for their removal to the Florence National Cemetery at the end of 1866. Work commenced in January of 1867 and was finished by the end of the month.