Richmond Prisons Under John Winder

As provost marshal of Richmond (1862-1864) and commissary general of Confederate prisons (1864-1865), John Winder oversaw wartime prisons in the Confederate capital, including Libby Prison, Belle Isle, and Castle Thunder, which are shown in the following photographs. After Richmond succumbed to Union forces in April 1865, a small group of occupying soldiers and civilians mill around Libby Prison, a converted shipping and grocery company previously used to imprison captured Union soldiers and located at Cary and 20th streets in an isolated section of Richmond; in a rare example of Confederate field photography, an 1863 image shows the pitched tents of Union captives in Belle Isle prison camp, which was situated on an island in the James River south of downtown Richmond; and, in the aftermath of the Confederate withdrawal from Richmond, a Union guard stands next to the barred windows of Castle Thunder, a former tobacco warehouse on Richmonds Tobacco Row that the Confederates had used as a prison for political prisoners. The prisons under Winders oversight were notorious—particularly in the North—for their bleak and at times harrowing conditions.