CASH MARION CLAYTON (1820 - 1863)
of Pike Co., GA and Tallapoosa Co., AL
Cash Marion Clayton was a private in Co., C, 50th Tennessee Army (CSA). Captured at Fort Donelson in Nashville, Tennessee on February 16, 1862 he was transferred to a prison camp near Chicago, Illinois where he died of smallpox. He is believed to be buried in a mass trench-grave at the Oak Woods cemetery, near Chicago.
Fort Donelson, Tennessee, February 11-16, 1862 - After capturing Fort Henry on February 6, 1862, Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant advanced cross-country to invest Fort Donelson. On February 16, 1862, after the failure of their all-out attack aimed at breaking through Grant’s investment lines, the fort’s 12,000-man garrison surrendered unconditionally. This was a major victory for Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and a catastrophe for the South. It ensured that Kentucky would stay in the Union and opened up Tennessee for a Northern advance along the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. Grant received a promotion to major general for his victory and attained stature in the Western Theater, earning the nom de guerre “Unconditional Surrender.”
After their surrender, the men were marched to the river where there were several old hulks of steam boats that were rotted from bottom to top. They were crowded on the lower decks--one thousand to a boat. With no idea where they were going, they were carried to Cairo, Illinois; the up the Mississippi by way of St. Louis to Alton, Ill. The prisoners were landed there after spending eight days on the lower decks of those old boats, eating and sleeping on stone coal scattered all over the bottom almost knee deep. They were crowded into cattle cars like so many cattle and horses and after a twelve hour ride, through a terrible blizzard, landed at Chicago.
Private Milton Asbury Ryan (1842-1916) of Co. G, 8th Mississippi Regiment wrote,
“We had all our cooking
utensils with us, camp kettles, skillets, ovens, frying pans, coffee pots, tin
pans, tin cups, and plates. We had them on our heads, on our backs, swinging
from our sides, and in our hands. Some of our boys were bareheaded, having their
hats blown off on the way; some had hats and caps with no brims, and some with
no crowns. As we were the first batch of prisoners we were quite a show. The
people had to see us so we were marched out in square to square and from street
to street with thousands of people running over each other to see us. Some would
curse us and call us poor, ignorant devils; some would curse Jeff Davis for
getting us ‘poor ignorant creatures’ into such a trap. I suppose the
children had been told that we had horns and tails, for they crowded near us and
kept saying, “where are their horns and where are their tails, I don’t see
them.”
After we were almost frozen we
were marched two miles to Camp
Douglas Prison. Every step of the way was through ice cold mud. Our
pants legs up to our knees were frozen as stiff as raw hides. The people by the
hundreds followed us to the very gates of the prison, and from that day on it
seemed that they never tired of looking at us. The visited the prison everyday
in great crowds until an order was issued prohibiting it. The some enterprising
Yankee built an observatory just outside the prison wall. It was crowded with
people from morning until night. Camp Douglas had been erected for a rendezvous
and drilling ground for Ill. Troops. Every thing looked new and clean. I think
that we were the first arrival of prisoners. Each barracks had a capacity of 125
prisoners. On each side of the barracks there were three tiers of bunks, one
above another, with a narrow hall between and a heater in the center. The prison
was laid off in squares and had the appearance of a little town. It had a plank
wall around it 15 ft. high with a 3 ft. walk on top for the guards to walk on.
There was a commissary in the center where our rations were kept and issued
every morning. They fed us very well on provisions they would not issue their
own soldiers.
The guards, or Hospital Rats,
as we called them, had never been to the front and seen any service and they
were overbearing and cruel in the extreme. We had some boys who would not take
anything from them. We all got water from Lake Michigan by Hydrant, the guards
as well as prisoners. At first when they came for water and found one of our
buckets under the pump they would kick it over and place theirs in its place.
They never failed to get knocked down when they did this and before they could
recover the one who had done it would be hidden in some barracks and we would
never give each other away. However, they were not long in learning that it was
a risky business.
Sometimes our boys, for some
trivial offense, would be punished by putting them in the white oak, as they
called it. It was a guard house made of white oak logs twelve or fourteen inches
in diameter, notched down close with one small window in the end. Inside, the
wall was a dungeon eight or ten feet deep. It was entered by a trap door, a pair
of steps led down into this dark foul hole. It was pitch dark in there; one
could not see his hand before him when the door was closed. One who had not been
is such a place cannot have the least conception of it. I was thrown in this
place for a trivial offense, for attempting to get a bucket of water at a
hospital well while our hydrant was out of fix. I spent four of the most
wretched hours of my life in that terrible place. I was taken out by the same
guard who put me in there, and the cursing he gave me when he let me out would
be a sin for me to repeat. I opened not my mouth; I knew better. I received one
more genteel cursing while wounded in the prisoner’s hospital at Nashville,
which I will speak of later on. There were some of our poor boys, for little
infraction of the prison rules, riding what they called Morgan’s mule every
day. That was one mule that did the worst standing stock still. He was built
after the pattern of those used by carpenters. He was about fifteen feet high;
the legs were nailed to the scantling so one of the sharp edges was turned up,
which made it very painful and uncomfortable to the poor fellow especially when
he had to be ridden bareback, sometimes with heavy weights fastened to his feet
and sometimes with a large beef bone in each hand. This performance was carried
on under the eyes of a guard with a loaded gun, and was kept up for several
days; each ride lasting two hours each day unless the fellow fainted and fell
off from pain and exhaustion. Very few were able to walk after this hellish
Yankee torture but had to be supported to their barracks. There was another
diabolical device invented; that was the ball and chain route. However that was
seldom used unless some of the prisoners attempted to escape and were caught.
The chain was riveted around the ankle and the ball at the other end of the
chain. It was almost as much as the poor fellow could carry. That was one thing
that stuck closer than a brother. It went with him by day and by night, and even
lay by his side in his cold naked bunk at night.”
Camp Douglas, originally constructed at Thirty-first Street and Cottage Grove Avenue as a Union Army training post, served as a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp. Between 1862 and 1865, the camp housed about twenty-six thousand prisoners in temporary, wooden barracks. By March 31, 1863, mortality was out of control, and diseases claimed 706 prisoners. If true, the toll in two months (Feb and Mar) was only 277 short of the entire 1862 record. Suspiciously, there are not Camp Douglas returns in the official records for March 1863. The Tribune appears to have counted the dead carefully and indicated that the toll could have been upwards of 700. Cash Marion Clayton was claimed in the toll of February, 1863 dying on the 19th of smallpox (a disease that would explain the high mortality rate) at the age of 42.
As a result of harsh conditions, some four thousand men died at the camp; they were buried in unmarked paupers' graves in Chicago's City Cemetery, located at the southeast corner of what is now Lincoln Park. In 1867, the remains were reburied at Oak Woods Cemetery, about five miles south of the camp. Oak Woods Cemetery could have become the largest Confederate burial site outside of the South, but subsequent events made it impossible to learn the number buried there.
On September 1, 1880, General Bingham reported, that many of the graves are sunken and many of the corner stakes are missing. There is evidences that one of the sections has been used as a roadway. The ground around these lots has been raised and improved which gives them the sunken appearance. The mound area was later filled in to the level of the rest of the cemetery. Other than the modest obelisk on this mound, completed in 1893 by sympathizers from the South, from Chicago, and other parts of the North, there was nothing to distinguish this burial site. Thirty years later, bronze tablets were added with a partial list of the dead. About 100,000 sympathetic persons, including President Grover Cleveland, attended the dedication of the edifice on Memorial Day, 1895. Since that time, nothing has been done to memorialize these unfortunate Confederate prisoners of war, other than a small gathering of supporters each year on Memorial Day.
Compiled from:
- Research by C. B. Pritchet, Jr.
- Experience of a Confederate Soldier in Camp and Prison in the Civil War 1861-1865, by Milton Asbury Ryan
- A Sketch in the Life of John J. Clayton, 1904, John Jones Clayton
- Travelogue of Cash M. Clayton, 1863, Unpublished