Annette Gee Ford never expected to write a book.
Certainly not a book about her great-great-uncle, who was in charge of Salisbury’s tragically swollen Confederate Prison during its last sad years at the end of the Civil War, when thousands of prisoners died waiting to be exchanged.
She’s married, with three children and seven grandchildren, as well as a job that demands attention. She’s also technical editor on law book publications for the Florida Legislature.
She came to Salisbury in March 1998 with other descendants of Maj. John Gee, a surgeon and commandant of the prison. One of them — who has his name, John Gee Dixon — even spent the night in a house built within an arm’s length of the prison gate.
That visit, paired with the inability to forget her great-great-uncle, led her to write a massive 614-page volume titled “The Captive.”
The title comes from a poem the major wrote at The Old Capitol Prison in Washington, D.C., where he was a prisoner after the war. He had been arrested at his home in Quincy, Fla., where Ford lives, and charged with cruelty to prisoners and murder at the prison in Salisbury.
Later he was moved to Raleigh, where he was tried and acquitted.
That trial was a major news event in both the North and the South — but it never made the history books.
“I don’t know why he was left out,” Ford says.
But he was.
And Ford had to correct that, so she wrote the book. She’ll be back in Salisbury to sell and sign copies at the ninth annual Civil War Show, sponsored by the Central North Carolina Relic Hunters at the Holiday Inn the weekend of Feb. 24-25.
Had her family not visited Salisbury, there would have been no book.
But they came — and visited numerous places and met lots of people.
One was Kevin Cherry, who headed the history room at the Rowan Public Library at the time.
“He told me there was something there on microfilm,” says Ford, “and he thought it was part of that trial.”
They didn’t take the time to look at it then, but she couldn’t get it out of her mind.
“When I got home, I wondered if it could have been that trial. I had known since 1989 that the entire trial had been recorded.”
Just before they came here, she’d written the National Archives and asked about getting a copy of the trial transcript.
“It was going to cost $3,600,” she said, and that was long before she decided to write a book. That was too much money just to satisfy her curiosity, she says.
But after her trip to Salisbury, she discovered that the film Kevin Cherry mentioned was indeed the trial. In 1971 someone had it put on microfilm and donated it to the Rowan Public Library.
And when Ford found out she had access to the transcripts, she knew she had no choice. She had to write a book.
So she came back to Salisbury and printed out 4,000 pages of microfilm. At 10 cents a page that’s $400, but she couldn’t read some of it, and other pages were missing, so she paid a researcher another $600 to copy the missing parts at the National Archives in Washington. Total cost? About $1,000. Much less than $3,600.
Then she spent almost two years typing it herself, from start to finish, adding a biographical sketch of Maj. John Gee before and after the war, some of his poetry and a collection of correspondence from the prison.
It wasn’t an easy job.
“I worked on it at night from the time I came in the door from work until 2 in the morning,” she remembers. And wherever she went, the manuscript went.
“A friend wanted me to go to London for a week when I was proofing the book,” she recalls.
She went. But she took the book with her, reading it on the plane, in the hotel and everywhere they went.
“I said it was the book that went to London.”
Ford had 200 copies printed. It came out in April of last year and sells for $48. She estimates about 50 are still available from her or at Clyde Overcash’s space at the Emporium here in Salisbury or at the Relics Show.
“I don’t expect it to be a best seller,” she says. “My sole purpose for this ‘labor of love’ was a desire that an accurate story of the prison and Maj. Gee’s role in it be made public.”
And that continues to be her goal today.
Inaccuracies about the prison abound. Respected historians research and reprint “the same myths as former writers, because the existence of the trial transcript has been unknown,” she says.
One example lies close to home.
Well-known Statesville historian Louis Brown, who wrote what is considered the definitive book on the prison, questioned the number of supplies Gen. Stoneman found when he arrived here and burned the prison.
“I believe without a doubt,” Ford says, “that the trial is the most accurate way for the history of the prison to be told, because the sworn eyewitness accounts come from former prisoners, guards and citizens of Salisbury, whose accounts are all consistent.”
Even a map of the prison site produced for the trial provides additional information about the exact location of the prison walls — and she includes a copy in her book.
And while she was working to awaken “a sleeping figure in history,” something else happened.
At the trial, prisoners testified the commandant was a kind and gentle doctor who would go three days without sleep to stay in the hospital to look after them.
Her great-great uncle came alive for Ford.
“I feel like I know him,” she says. “He became my best friend. And I feel like I vindicated him.”
Excerpts from ‘The Captive’
Following are some excerpts from Annette Gee Ford’s book, “The Captive”:
Breakout
I was standing on Luke Blackmore’s porch in Salisbury, about 200 yards from the prison ... The first that I heard was Mrs. Murphy screaming out “Oh, my children, oh, my children.” I was not at the prison but could see the prison enclosure. When I went to the porch and looked out, I saw a great commotion toward the garrison and heard a volley of musketry and the boom of a cannon. ... from the noise and the sound of its fall, it passed at the back of Major Backmore’s house ...
— Jessie McCallum (“Miss Jessie”), hospital matron and witness for the defense, with her version of the attempted breakout.
Conditions
At first, from looking in the prison, I saw very few men, a much less number than I had understood was in there. Upon looking more closely, I saw the prisoners coming out from inside the ground; they looked to me very much like ants coming out and retreating to their holes. Smoke was curling out of the ground. Then for the first time, I ascertained that the body of the prisoners were living under the ground. The prisoners were badly clad and looked emaciated and haggard, and had the appearance to me of men who had undergone great suffering.
— George Folk, prosecution witness, who went to the prison to compare it to Northern prisons.
Hunger
As to the suffering of men, I have no language to express it. I have seen men pick up ones from human excrement and clean them and crack them to get the grease out. .. Sometimes we went a day without rations. The longest we went without anything to eat that I recollect was about 56 hours, with only a cup of rice soup.
— Edwin Ireland, former prisoner of war
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