We have suffered everything but death: Travails of a Shiloh P.O.W.

By the time John Baker of Battery B, 1st Michigan Light Artillery was exchanged more than six months after being captured at the Battle of Shiloh, the artilleryman had traveled through seven of the eleven states of the Confederacy, and lost his brother to typhoid fever at Cahaba, Alabama.

“We have suffered everything but death and that has started us in the face,” he wrote to the editors of the Hillsdale Standard. “There has been 270 men who have died since our captivity began. We have been without clothing and have been obliged to live upon corn meal and bacon. I have never seen any meat but what was rotten, and no one but God can tell what we have suffered.”

John Baker’s travelogue of Confederate captivity was compiled from a pair of letters he wrote to his hometown newspaper the Hillsdale Standard in 1862.

 

During his six months of captivity, John Baker never received any new clothing and as time passed, his uniform became more ragged. That said, a common activity for prisoners of war was to "skirmish" with the lice that tended to congregate in the seams of their clothing as depicted above in Alonzo Cooper's book In and Out of Rebel Prisons. The technique was to turn your shirt inside out and look for the critters along the seams. Once you found one, you popped it between your thumb nails, the louse often making a slight popping sound as it burst which led to soldiers calling it "skirmishing." Unfortunately, this "skirmishing" was a common activity for most soldiers in the field. The only solution was frequent boiling and washing of your uniform which could be done while in camp but proved very difficult to keep up with in the field or on campaign. 

          Last Sunday, April 6, 1862, the enemy attacked us at Pittsburg Landing with a force three times the number of ours. They attacked us at daybreak and our battery was called into the field about 8 o’clock. We responded promptly and fought all day without flinching. At 5 p.m., the infantry fell back into the woods and left our battery to take the fire of the enemy. We fought until we could do no more; then we were surrounded and cut off from retreat.

          Our loss in the battery was 10 men wounded (some fatally I fear) and 20 horses. Some of our men had four horses shot from under them. Our battery was ordered out as skirmishers when we found ourselves between the fire of the enemy and our army, but we saved a battery which had been left in the morning and brought off some 20 horses. While there the balls whistled about us in every direction and one grazed my neck, the sudden friction creating a smart for a long time. Neither George nor I suffered serious injury. Thanks to a kind Providence for the protection of my brother and myself on the battlefield.

          After being taken prisoners on April 6th, the next day we were marched 20 miles through mud knee deep and that night we were put into cattle cars [at Corinth] under guard for the night. On Tuesday the 8th we were taken to Memphis and it was Wednesday morning before we got something to ear, the first we had eaten since Sunday morning. It consisted of hard crackers and fat pork.

          We left Memphis the following Sunday April 13th for Mobile, Alabama and arrived there on the 16th. We stayed in Mobile until the 20th then left on a boat for Cahaba, Alabama where we arrived on the 22nd.

Cahaba prisoner of war camp was located at the confluence of the Cahaba and Alabama River near Selma and housed Federal prisoners of war as early as May of 1862. John Baker's brother George died here of typhoid fever on May 6, 1862, just a few days before the prisoners were sent on to Montgomery, Alabama then Chattanooga, Tennessee. 

          My brother George Baker died on the 6th of May with typhoid fever. He was out of his head all of the time talking of his friends that he had left behind him. I was also sick at the time with typhus. We left Cahaba on May 8, 1862, and arrived at Montgomery the next day. There I found Lieutenant Arnett, just after Lieutenant Bloss was shot by the guard. We left Montgomery on May 24th and arrived at Chattanooga, Tennessee on the 26th. Then we traveled to Bridgeport, Alabama on the 28th and left for Belfound Landing, arriving on the 31st. We were refused by General [Ormsby M.] Mitchel and returned to Macon, Georgia on June 18, 1862.

          We remained at Macon all summer and left for our lines again on October 9th, traveling through the capital of South Carolina [Columbia], through Augusta, Georgia, then through Raleigh, North Carolina, and arrived at Richmond, Virginia on October 17th. We marched 25 miles to Aiken’s Landing on the 19th where we were exchanged. On the 20th we arrived at Fortress Monroe, then Washington, D.C. on the 21st and got to Portsmouth Grove on November 2nd.

We have suffered everything but death and that has started us in the face. There has been 270 men who have died since our captivity began. We have been without clothing and have been obliged to live upon corn meal and bacon. I have never seen any meat but what was rotten, and no one but God can tell what we have suffered.

Sources:

Letters from Private John H. Baker, Battery B, 1st Michigan Light Artillery, Hillsdale Standard (Michigan), May 20, 1862, pg. 2, and November 18, 1862, pg. 3

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