Salmon
Bickel was born in 1831 in Perry Township, the eighth out of nine children
born to Anthony and Dinah Bickel. He married Susan Harrington in
1855 and they subsequently had two children, John, born in 1857, and
Josephine born in 1858. Salmon
was a school teacher and his wife was one of his former students.
At age thirty-one, he entered
the Union army on November 8, 1862, when he enlisted
for a period of three years. He mustered into Company M of the 7th Ohio Volunteer
Cavalry in Pomeroy, Ohio as a private. During the first year of his service
his unit participated in the chase for Morgan's Raiders. He had served for
just three days short of a year when he was taken prisoner near Rogersville,
Tennessee, on November 6, 1863. The timing of this would turn out to be very
unfortunate. Prisoner exchanges between the North and South had been taking
place on a regular basis, but just at this point the process had become stalled.
The North felt that further exchanges at this point would favor the
South, because the Confederacy was increasingly short of manpower. Also
the South’s
resources were being strained by having to care for the large number
of Union prisoners. The South for its part was insisting on the return
of Negroes serving in Northern Armies.
By chance, Salmon was captured in the same battle and
on the same day as John Ransom, the quartermaster of the 9th Michigan
Cavalry, whose John Ransom’s Andersonville Diary became a best
seller when it was republished in 1986. The day to day accounts of this soldier’s
imprisonment can therefore be useful in following the ordeals that Salmon
would now go through. The Union troops involved in the Battle of Big
Creek, were the 9th Michigan Cavalry, the 7th Ohio Cavalry, and the 2nd
Mounted Tennessee Infantry. (Although a Confederate state, Tennessee
ended up supplying 38,000 troops for the Union cause versus 115,000 for
the Confederacy.)
John Ransom’s diary describes the capture. The
rebel citizens of Rogersville had sponsored a dance and invited all of
the Union officers. He suspected it was a ruse to get the officers away from
their command. Many had not returned by the following morning when the troops
were surprised by a rebel attack. Over a hundred were killed and two to three
hundred wounded before the surrender. Three soldiers from the 2nd Tennessee
were picked out and shot. They were accused of deserting from the Confederate
Army. They had in fact been impressed involuntarily and had escaped after their
first few days and had joined the Union army. These men, as it turned out, may
have been the lucky ones, since they were spared the horrors that would confront
the other ones taken prisoner.
The prisoners were marched to the nearest railway station
in Bristol, Virginia, a little over fifty miles away. They reached Bristol
in two days and were boarded onto cattle cars for the ride to Richmond.
The destination was Belle Isle Prison located on a ten to twelve acre island
in the James River, just outside the city. At the time of his capture
there were about six thousand prisoners here. By the time they were transferred
to Andersonville a few months later, the number had swelled to ten thousand.
There were only tents for about half of the men. The rest had to sleep in the
open, and this was the winter season. Survival would often depend on being warmly
dressed and having at least a blanket. Every night there were some men who died
in their sleep because of the cold. Footwear was at a premium, and if good boots
were recognized by their Southern captors, they were often confiscated. John
Ransom reports that on average about fifteen to twenty-five men died every day,
many from exposure to the extreme cold, but many also from disease and starvation.
Food rations consisted of thin rice soup and corn bread,
but in very small quantities. The men who had been there the longest were described
as being “almost reduced to skeletons, from continued hunger, exposure
and filth.” Men passed the time by picking greybacks (lice) from
each other and from their clothing. Conversation dwelt almost entirely
on the prospects for exchange and a return home.
The last prisoners to arrive were the ones who had to
live outside the tents. They could move into the tents when vacancies
occurred because of death, or if someone became sick enough to be taken to the
hospital on the mainland. No one was admitted to the hospital unless they had
to be carried, and there was very little chance of recovery for the ones admitted.
Fighting among the prisoners was common, and gradually there evolved an
element of predators, whom he called raiders, who would steal from the honest
and the weak.
Food shortage would be a chronic problem for the duration
of the incarceration. Any meat they got was often tainted or infested with maggots,
and getting access to any vegetables was rare. Occasionally one would get an
onion or some beans, but malnutrition soon would set in. In later testimony for
Susan Bickel’s pension application, fellow prisoners would testify that
Salmon had begun to get sick at Belle Isle even before he had been transferred
to Andersonville. The men were familiar with the symptoms of scurvy (weakness,
bleeding, depression, muscular pain, loss of vision, swelling and loosening teeth)
and seemed to be aware that eating fruits and vegetables, to which they didn’t
have any access, could cure it. Dropsy was a term used to describe the
edema (fluid accumulation) that would occur in the advanced state of
starvation when the body becomes protein depleted.
The transfer to Andersonville took place in early March
1864. It was felt that Belle Isle was too close to Union lines and would
be a tempting target for a military thrust, and was also close enough so
that the Confederate treatment or mistreatment of prisoners would come to Union
attention and retaliation made against their own prisoners. The trip to Andersonville,
which is near Macon, Georgia, would be a seven-day ride in a cattle car
on the train. They would disembark at night to sleep in the woods under heavy
guard.
The horrors of Andersonville have been described in
detail over and over. At its peak there were 27,000 prisoners housed
on twenty-six acres. Some of this was swampy and couldn’t be used
for living. A small, putrid stream ran through the camp, and was the
only source of water. A latrine area along side the stream would overflow when
it rained, and it rained almost every day. The climate was unhealthy, hot and
humid. When the Belle Isle prisoners first arrived it was still uncrowded and
there was wood to burn to cook with. At that time the death rate was about eighteen
to twenty per day. These conditions didn’t last. The camp rapidly filled
up. The wood was used up and the quality and quantity of food rapidly
deteriorated.
In the early days here there were sometimes visitors,
coming to look at the Yankee prisoners, but the sights and the stench soon became
too much and people couldn’t stand to come near. By mid July the death
rate was one hundred sixty-five per day, and it would keep increasing. The bodies
were collected only once per day, and added greatly to the stench. The predators
from Belle Isle continued their raiding tactics here and much of the prisoner’s
sufferings would stem from this. These raiders were finally put down
with the help of the Confederate staff in early July 1864, when six of
their leaders were tried and hanged. But by that time it was too late
for Salmon. He had lasted but two months here.
There was a hospital inside the stockade. Prisoners
who could walk were not admitted, and essentially nobody sent there recovered.
His friends carried Salmon to the stockade hospital on May 12, and he died the
next day. If there is any worse way to die in this world, I haven’t yet
heard of it. Being among friends until the end must have been the only consolation.
John Ransom’s diary records that on May 13, the day Salmon died,
there was a picnic outside the prison, (most assuredly on the upwind
side), complete with band for entertainment. The picnic was given by
the local populace as a send off for some Alabama troops leaving for
the front.
When Salmon was brought to Andersonville, the death
rate for a month was one in sixteen. In November, with Sherman’s
troops nearing and the camp being evacuated, the death rate was one in
three. John Ransom, the diarist, barely survived the ordeal. On September
7, 1864, as he was nearing death, evacuation of the camp had begun. Only
those able to walk were allowed to go. Ransom was unable to walk, but
a companion propped him up and they faked it. He was able to go to a
Confederate hospital in Savannah and he eventually recovered. Col. Wirtz,
the Confederate officer who had been the overseer of the camp was hanged
in Washington DC after the war. The diarist, John Ransom, and many Civil
War historians agree that although Wirtz may have been guilty of mistreatment
of the prisoners, he was also in a way a scapegoat for superiors in the
Confederate army and government who were guilty of the gross criminal
neglect that produced these conditions.
The devastation and havoc exacted by war seldom
stops with the cessation of hostilities. Salmon's widow, Susan, would
continue to pay the price for four decades after peace was declared.
After the war was over she was granted the usual widow's pension but
she forfeited it in 1869 when she married another Civil War veteran,
William Morgan. A daughter, Dora, was born to them in 1872, but the marriage
was apparently rocky. Morgan, as it turned out, was alcoholic and abusive.
During the first ten years of their marriage he was often gone from home
for long periods of time, leaving home to work digging coal,
but not reappearing again for up to four months. About 1880 he left again,
obstensively for work but never again returned. During the long
years that followed, Susan tried to locate him by advertising in newspapers
and by word of mouth, but without success. After he had been gone for
seventeen years, she began to petition the courts to have him declared
dead so that she could again apply for a widow's pension. She made several
attempts at this but each time the petition was denied. Finally in 1903,
twenty-three years after her husband's disappearance, she was granted
a divorce. She then applied for reinstatement of her pension as the widow
of Salmon Bickel. This was granted in 1904. She died about one
year later.
There were other Gallia County soldiers who were taken prisoner at the
same time as Salmon Bickel and who also were imprisoned at Belle Isle and
then Andersonville. Five of them testified for Susan Bickel when
she applied for the widow's pension. They were:
Pvt. Jeb Randolph, Company L 7th OVC
Sgt. H. L. Wood, Company M 7th OVC
Sgt. Samuel J. Kerr, Company L 7th OVC
Sgt. Charles Kiniaid, Co. L 7th OVC
Pvt. Oliver Caviler, a fellow prisoner from Company M 7th OVC
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