Carte de visite by Alexander Gardner of Washington, D.C. May 1864 marked the beginning of the end for Gen. Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia.
At Belle Plain on May 13, the Union supply base bustled with activity as the Overland Campaign got underway earlier in the month. In recent days the battles of The Wilderness and Spotsylvania resulted in mass casualties.
Wounded soldiers transported from makeshift field hospitals in the vicinity of the battlefield arrived hourly at Belle Plain in horse-drawn ambulances. Many were in dire condition. Attendants reached into ambulances, grabbed stretcher handles, and delicately lifted desperately wounded soldiers out of the way so that supply wagons loaded with food, medicine, blankets, ammunition and just about everything else an army on the move needs could pass.
As the stretchers with their precious cargo wait for an outbound transport vessel to take them for care in Washington, D.C., relief workers from the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC) moved too and fro and provided aid to the waiting patients. These stalwart men and women from across the Union worked tirelessly, often until they collapsed from exhaustion.
One of these caregivers is pictured here. He is Alfred Janson Bloor, the assistant secretary of the USSC. A son of Scotland who had just celebrated his 36th birthday, Bloor had left his homeland and immigrated to New York City with his family as a teenager. Settling in Brooklyn, he embarked on a career as an architect and worked with some of the best in the profession, including the talented Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed New York City’s Central Park.
When war came, Olmsted became a general secretary of the USSC. Bloor joined him as an assistant secretary. The nonprofit organization raised huge sums of money and spent it on myriad supplies for the troops.
In his role, Bloor communicated with movers and shakers in the federal government, among them President Abraham Lincoln, Senator Charles Sumner, Chief of Nurses Dorothea Dix, and many more.
Bloor also spent time in the field for brief periods to get a better understanding of the needs of the soldiers and how best to keep them supplied.
His aforementioned May 1864 visit to Belle Plain was one of these trips. On May 14, he wrote a letter describing how the movement of wounded was interrupted by Union guards marching Confederate prisoners of war fresh from The Wilderness and Spotsylvania, including two generals, to Northern prisons.
The generals are George Hume Steuart of Maryland and Edward Johnson of Kentucky. Both were captured at Spotsylvania during the fighting in the Bloody Angle at the Mule Shoe Salient. Steuart famously refused to shake the hand of Union Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, who he had known in the old army before the war.
Bloor also mentioned Belle Isle Prison in Richmond, which had become notorious for the poor conditions and consequent suffering by Union prisoners of war; Fort Pillow, Tennessee, where just a month earlier Confederate soldiers under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest murdered Black U.S. soldiers; and Fort Delaware, where many of these prisoners were headed.
Here’s the excerpt of Bloor’s letter:
During the repast we discover that there is a suspension of ambulances and stretchers to allow the passage of some thousands of rebel prisoners from Dixie to the land of the free in Fort Delaware and elsewhere, the freedom of such strongholds being the kind they seem most to appreciate. Pretty soon there marched along, under guard, three men dressed in rebel gray, and unarmed. Except for the black feather, cavalier fashion, across the front of the hat, and for the three stars on the upturned collar of one of them, they might have been taken, so far as dress was concerned, for privates; but these insignia showed the rank of a brigadier general in the Confederate service.
This was General Steuart, a handsome fellow, some thirty-five years old, I should judge; and who endeavored to conceal his feelings beneath a jaunty and somewhat defiant manner. His older companion, wrapped up in a gray overcoat, without any insignia of rank visible, and whose grizzly hair showed through sundry rents the most "shocking bad hat” I ever saw, is Major General Johnson; and the third prisoner is his adjutant general. Being brought to a halt they sit down on some boxes, and Johnson draws from his pocket a copy of the Washington “Morning Chronicle,” and, picking out the war news, reads something in a low tone to Steuart, who answers by a nervous laugh.
Not placing implicit confidence myself in the war news of most of our newspapers, I fancy they may have discovered some slight mistake, and therefore feel no inclination to resent their raillery, but the crowd around are not so lenient, probably thinking strongly on the subject of Belle Isle and Fort Pillow, and the murmurs increase until there is, for a minute, danger of violence being offered to the prisoners; but a few stern words from the captain of the guard and the ringing of the bayonets of the latter soon restore order, and the generals and adjutant are marched quietly off to the boat that is to convey them to Fort Delaware, or wherever else. In a little while they are followed by a multitude of rebel officers—four hundred in number it is said—of every rank from colonel to second lieutenant, but none with any marks of rank detectable, except in the few cases where the coat collar was turned up, or where one or two, more dandyfied than the rest, had decorated the lapels of their coats with their insignia.
At first I thought they were privates, for even apart from their dress, they presented, in the mass, little evidence of superiority to the rank and file of our men, but I was told that the large body of their fellow-prisoners of the rank and file who followed them—they came shortly after, but I was too busy to look at them—were decidedly inferior to them in all respects.
One of them, almost a boy, entered into a political argument with one of his guards, an old sergeant from New York, who stood by me, embracing the questions of slavery, the constitutional right of secession, &c., and which, notwithstanding my suggestion that if verbal argument had proved of any avail to settle the differences between the North and South they who were now disputing would not have been called upon to fight each other, finally grew general and warm, and was only finished by the party being marched off to their quarters.
Bloor’s full letter, and seven others letters about his experiences, were sent to correspondents, all women and all officials in the Sanitary Commission, to help them appreciate the benefits of their labors and those of the larger organization.
These letters were published as a 68-page book titled “Letters from the Army of the Potomac” and circulated among Commission members.
Bloor remained active with the USSC through the rest of the war, and afterward returned to his career as an architect. He served as an officer in numerous professional organizations, and was a founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Bloor lived until 1917, dying after a stroke at age 89.
