In early July 1863, as they marched north into Pennsylvania, it’s unlikely that any of General Robert E. Lee’s Confederate soldiers were pondering eternity in an obscure burial ground in New Jersey. Yet that was the fate that awaited 925 unfortunate rebels who were captured during the pivotal battle of Gettysburg and shipped to Fort Delaware, a Union Army outpost in the middle of the Delaware River.
Among the Confederate POWs was Private Monroe M. Harris of Company B, 42nd Mississippi Infantry. A farmer and Tennessee native, Harris arrived at Fort Delaware on July 6, 1863. Too sick to leave after the last shots of the Civil War were fired, Harris died of pneumonia there on June 26, 1865, according to the Fort Delaware Society (fortdelaware.org). He was 37 and had the distinction of being the last Gettysburg POW to die at the fort.
Fort Delaware, located on Pea Patch Island, lacked burial space. So Harris and other prisoners ended up at Finn’s Point National Cemetery in the Salem County town of Pennsville. Located next to Fort Mott State Park, the burial ground contains the bodies of 2,436 Confederate prisoners of war and 135 Union soldiers who died at Fort Delaware.
“Finn’s Point was chosen as a cemetery because of its proximity to Fort Delaware,” says Sara Amy Leach, senior historian for the National Cemetery Administration in Washington, D.C. “The island was in an area that suffered from a high water table and had little space for most burials.”
Conditions at Fort Delaware, located about a mile and a half from the cemetery, were not as bad as at the notorious Confederate-run POW camp in Andersonville, Georgia, explains Civil War historian James M. McPherson, professor emeritus at Princeton University. Still, malnutrition, neglect, and disease—particularly smallpox and dysentery—took their toll on Confederate prisoners and their Union guards.
Finn’s Point was designated a national cemetery in 1875 after bodies on Fort Delaware were reburied on the mainland. Two memorials pay tribute to the dead. The Confederate monument, an 85-foot-tall concrete and marble obelisk with bronze tablets listing the names of the prisoners who were buried there, was built in 1910. The smaller, Union monument was originally erected in 1879 and consists of six marble pillars supporting a roof that shelters a pyramid.
The memorials are in the process of being “repaired and conserved” in time for next year’s Civil War sesquicentennial, according to Leach.
The project is using funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. “It is probably the first comprehensive treatment of these in decades,” Leach says.
The Three Forts Ferry, which stops at Fort Delaware and Fort Mott, offers a chance to see Civil War history firsthand. Fort Mott itself is a New Jersey State Park with fortifications dating to the era of the Spanish-American War. For information, call 856-935-3218.
Tom Wilk is an author and frequent contributor. He lives in Pitman.