Thirteen Confederate officers lie in individually unmarked graves, now named together on one marker, in the small cemetery at the northwest corner of Fort Pulaski on Cockspur Island. They were among the prisoners known in the South as the Immortal Six Hundred, held at the fort from October 1864 to March 1865. Before that they had been kept on Morris Island at the mouth of Charleston Harbor, in the line of fire of Confederate guns, in reply to Union officers held in Charleston under Union shelling. Exchanges had stopped because the Confederacy would not treat captured Black soldiers as prisoners of war on equal terms, and General Ulysses S. Grant refused to exchange these men. More than 500 of them arrived on Cockspur Island on 23 October 1864 and were crowded into the fort's casemates.
For 42 days they were issued a retaliation ration of 10 ounces of moldy cornmeal and half a pint of soured pickles, set in answer to conditions at Andersonville and other Confederate prisons. The thirteen who died, most of them from dehydration brought on by dysentery, were buried beside the fort.
The Union commander, Colonel Philip Brown, tried to improve their conditions and was often overruled, by the account on the marker at the graves. Lieutenant Birney of the 49th Georgia Infantry died on 11 November 1864 and was buried the next day with a Union military escort. On 1 March 1865 the prisoner Capt. Henry Dickinson and a comrade named Cantwell painted headboards for the thirteen graves, but the provost marshal refused to let them be placed.
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32.0275, -80.8916
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