Notable Prisoners
On July 1, 1863, Newell Burch, serving with the 154th New York Volunteers, was captured near the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. For the next few days, he was held behind the lines as Lee’s army and that of General George Meade flung themselves at each other in the greatest battle ever fought in North America. When the defeated Confederate Army decided to withdraw to Virginia Burch, with other prisoners, was offered in exchange. When the offer was rebuffed, he withdrew southward with the battered Confederate Army, reaching Richmond Virginia long before his comrades in the Union Army of the Potomac.
He was temporarily held in Richmond’s Belle Isle prison before being transferred to Camp Sumter, arriving in late winter of 1864. Burch survived the war and left a detailed diary of his experiences, including his experience in treating gangrene in other prisoners. By the time the war ended he had spent 21 months as a prisoner of war, the longest-tenured POW of the Civil War. Burch’s diary provides a great deal of information on the workings of both Belle Isle and Andersonville prisons, as well as the morale of the Army of Northern Virginia in the days following the Battle of Gettysburg.
Dorence Atwater was one of the first arrivals at Andersonville and was tasked by his captors with recording a list of all prisoners who died at the camp. Diligent in his work, Atwater kept a second copy for himself, which he kept hidden from his captors, having rightly concluded from the prevailing conditions in the camp that the original would never be seen by official Union eyes. Eventually, he recorded the names of over 13,000 Union prisoners and upon his departure from the camp he carried the list with him in his laundry bag.
After the war, Atwater’s list was instrumental in identifying many of the grave markers in the National Cemetery which grew out of the Camp Sumter graveyard. Eventually, the death list was presented to Horace Greeley, who ensured its publication in the New York Times, which prompted the until then lax federal government to publish an official copy.
Atwater eventually became United States Consul to Tahiti, and after marrying a Royal Princess of the Island he alternated his time between residences in Tahiti and San Francisco. He lived through the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906, although his home was destroyed, and eventually died in 1910, still in possession of the original list.