The Florence Stockade

In the late summer of eighteen sixty-four, the Confederate command faced a logistical crisis. General Sherman had taken Atlanta, and the vast prison camp at Andersonville in southern Georgia sat directly in his path. The Confederacy needed somewhere to put approximately thirty thousand Union prisoners, and quickly.

Florence, South Carolina had three things that made it attractive: it sat at the junction of three railroads, it was judged to be safely inland, and the ground was available. In September of eighteen sixty-four, enslaved laborers were put to work building what would become the Florence Stockade, a timber enclosure roughly fourteen hundred feet long and seven hundred twenty-five feet wide, covering twenty-three acres of South Carolina soil.

The structure was primitive by any measure. There were no barracks, no shelter of any kind. A dead line, a boundary marked by stakes set twenty feet from the outer wall, meant that any prisoner who crossed it would be shot immediately. Men dug into the ground to make crude shelters. Food was scarce. Medicine was nearly nonexistent. By the time the prison closed in February of eighteen sixty-five, approximately eighteen thousand Union soldiers had passed through Florence, and around two thousand eight hundred of them had died.

The conditions at Florence were less extreme than Andersonville, where the mortality rate was catastrophically higher, but the essential dynamic was the same: a collapsing Confederate supply system unable or unwilling to maintain the basic welfare of prisoners who had already surrendered.

The Florence Stockade is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A small national cemetery on the grounds holds the remains of many of those who died there. The site sits near what is today a busy commercial corridor, easy to miss from the road. But for the months it operated, it was one of the most miserable places in South Carolina, a fact the landscape gives no outward indication of today.