Alexandria At War With (Madeline Feierstein) Episode Four: A City on Lockdown

Alexandria At War With (Madeline Feierstein) Episode Four: A City on Lockdown

In this episode of Alexandria at War, produced by the American Civil War & UK History podcast, host Daz is joined by historian Madeline Feierstein of Rooted in Place to explore the prisons of Alexandria during the American Civil War.

During the American Civil War, Alexandria became an important Union-controlled city and a key location for holding prisoners. Its position just across the river from Washington made it ideal for detaining captured Confederate soldiers, suspected spies, and civilians accused of disloyalty.
Rather than one large prison, Alexandria had several smaller facilities spread across the city. 

These included converted buildings such as warehouses, a former slave pen (now the Freedom House Museum), and specialised prisons like the Wilkes Street Female Prison for women. Prisoners were often held temporarily before being transferred to larger prisons in Washington.

Conditions were typically harsh, with overcrowding, limited supplies, and poor sanitation, although they were not on the same scale as major prison camps like Andersonville Prison. Overall, Alexandria functioned as a busy detention and processing hub rather than a long-term prison center.

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www.madelinefeierstein.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

To keep up to date with everything of American Civil War and UK history, head over to our website, ACW and UKhistory.com. And remember, this podcast has a PowerPoint presentation that goes along with the show. So if you would like to see the PowerPoint presentation, then head over to our YouTube channel at American Civil War and UK History. Cheers. Hello, hello everyone. I'm Daz and welcome to American Civil War and UK History Podcast. This presentation is available as a video on our YouTube channel or as a podcast from wherever you get your podcast from. And if you're watching on YouTube, remember to hit the subscribe button and give us a big thumbs up. And check out our website at www.acwandukhistory.com for updates, blog posts, and links to all of our social media pages. Alternatively, there is a link available in the podcast description. And joining me again today is Historian of Rooted in Place, Madeline Feisting. Welcome, Madeline.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

Thanks for having me back.

SPEAKER_00 0:57

So this is the fourth episode of a series of five podcasts dedicated to Alexandria during the American Civil War that we're calling Alexandria at War. And as I've just said, this is the fourth episode, City on Lockdown. Okay, Madeline, would you like to um start off with explaining why Alexandria had so many prisons during the war?

SPEAKER_01 1:19

Yeah, so Alexandria's prisons follow a similar vein as the creation of its hospitals, which we covered in episode three with the uh 30 hospitals and contraband medical care. The prisons were mainly created out of necessity. Now, we have a great map on the screen now. It's from the American Battlefield Trust, and it shows the defenses of Washington from episode two. Now, you can see Alexandria's central location, right? It was confiscated to protect Washington, D.C. It's along the really uh commercial and important Potomac River. If we think about Alexandria's location, many of the POWs who came off the Virginia battlefields were being sent, of course, further north to Union prisons. Think about Elmira in New York, Camp Chase in Ohio, as far as Chicago, and even locally to Point Lookout in Maryland. So Alexandria and DC, by extension, became essentially a first stop for many of the Confederate prisoners of war on their journey to their kind of permanent imprisonment. But also, because Alexandria was a lawless town, as we've also covered in this series, we have this rise and wave of Union prisoners who are being arrested in Alexandria. Um they're being arrested for disorderly conduct, as we discussed, thievery, drunkenness, and just disobeying orders. And so we see the establishment of not one, not two, but five military prisons, which is pretty wild to have five prisons in one city. Now, Alexandria is not very large compared to other cities. Um, and today in 2026, Alexandria is a very large city, but back in the 1860s, it was pretty much confined to um like the old town historic district, just a couple miles wide. So to have five prisons is a lot, right? So that's really the main reason for why Alexandria got these prisons. One as a kind of transportation stop for Confederate POWs, and then to house and confine Union prisoners who are already stationed and barracked in the city.

SPEAKER_00 3:33

Excellent, thank you. And uh so you um discuss the five military prisons within Alexandria and the pictures. Um I've got the old one first on one slide, and then it goes into the the what it looks like uh now.

SPEAKER_01 3:48

Yeah, so Alexandria has, like I said, five prisons. We'll start with um the oldest one, the first one that was already there. And this is a great image from the Alexandria Library. Uh, we informally call this just the Alexandria jail, the city jail, the sheriff's office. Now, this photo is post-war, probably between 1880s and 1890s. There's no date on it, but that's the the vibe it gives off. Now, the jail itself was uh established in 1827. Um so this was already here. It was the only one in the city, and it wasn't really big, as you can see. Now, what's really cool is um the the building itself still still remains, and I'll show you that in the next slide in a minute. With this jail, though, because it was the first one, um, this was the first one to be essentially confiscated for military use. Okay, it was housing civilian prisoners, of course, but then when the military government was established, they immediately took this one and started to put in the Union prisoners. We don't really see Confederate POWs right away. Um, now this one we see an average of three to four hundred prisoners at once, and there's about 40 prison staff. Now I'm getting these statistics from the actual prison ledgers themselves, which are housed at the National Archives in DC, which is just down the road from me. Um, so again, three to four hundred, it's pretty small compared to the other ones in town, but as you can see from the image, it's a very small building. So we have the actual right building, and then the wall has a prison yard. And this is really cool. This is an image of the same building, and it's essentially exactly the same. Nothing has changed. There's a red door added, but that's the same exact wall where the prison yard is. And if you can imagine, this is now someone's home. So you can't go in it. Um, there is a historical plaque to the right of it, and this is at the corner of St. Asaf and Princess Streets in Alexandria. Um, this site also, later on post-war, was unfortunately the site of many uh lynchings and civil rights violations in Alexandria's history. Next, I have an uh the next prison. Now, this is not the next to be confiscated, uh, but we call it the Oddfellows Hall prison. Um, so again, most of these prisons were the ones after the jail were confiscated in 62 and 63 as the war starts to heat up. In 1861, we really just have this jail. So on the next slide, I have our Oddfellows Hall. Now, the Oddfellows, right, um, is just like a fraternal organization. Um, before the war, uh about the about 1860, this is where the local militia gathered and trained their soldiers. Um and this is an image that's also, again, closer to turn of the century. But on the next slide, they have the current image, so you can see how the building really hasn't changed, right? So it's pretty much the same structure. Um, this is also uh a two-story building. Average capacity is 250 to 300 prisoners, 50 prison staff on average, which is a lot of prison staff, if you can imagine. Um, now, not all at once. Sometimes the prison staff would be, of course, on the outside guarding. Um, they'd be in the different wards. Um, but this one, again, is relatively small. Um, it's not as discussed, but this one is um pretty central compared to the others. The St. Asaf County uh city jail is pretty much on the outskirts, but Oddfellows Hall is kind of smack in the middle of Old Town. Next, I have a more famous one. This is um a pre-war image. I'd say probably 1830s, 1840s from historic Alexandria. Now, if anyone is familiar with PBS's Mercy Street, um the one of the protagonists, uh James Green, who runs this furniture factory, he has his hotel confiscated, transformed into the mansion house hospital, but also his furniture factory, one of them in town, was confiscated and transformed into the Prince Street Prison, named after the street it is located on. Um now in the show PBS Mercy Street, they show the prison when they're looking for a runaway enslaved person that the the catchers go into the the furniture factory and start interrogating James Green, looking for this man who actually is now working there. So the reason why the furniture factory was confiscated was because James Green was an ardent secessionist living within city limits. And as we know from our prior episodes, you cannot be pro-Confederate, pro-secession, and reside within Alexandria without taking that oath of loyalty. They want to make sure you're not going to cause trouble, and it goes against the whole idea that this is a union-occupied town. So he refuses to take the oath, and he is um actually uh arrested, and then his remaining business was confiscated as a result of his arrest. So he cannot run this factory anymore. This factory was also run on enslaved labor, so there's like a double whammy with it being confiscated. On average, we have uh 400 to 500 uh housed in there and about 100 prison staff, again, a little bit larger. Now, what's cool about the today image is it's it's not exactly the same building. It's the same exact perimeter, the same size. It's been heavily modified, as you can see, but it's the same kind of um, I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here, but this the size of the building, right? Today, the first floor is a parking garage, and then there's condos above. So probably lots of hauntings um in that building. Now, the fourth one is arguably the most famous um jail in Alexandria because the building itself, this image is is quite famous. Um, this is originally the Franklin and Armfield Price and Birch slave auction office. So, as you can see here in this image, we actually have United States Colored Troops stationed outside, which is really interesting. And then you have, of course, the um dealers in slaves across the top. Now, on the left, you see kind of the white wall. That is a prison yard, and that's where the cells were. This building was had already had prison cells embedded into it. Um, and it is exactly what you think it is. This is where enslaved people were housed before, during, and after sale. And if any enslaved person had been arrested for a reason, they would be brought here. Alexandria, as we know from our first episode, was a major um trade, uh, major trader in enslaved people. People would be brought actually up north to Alexandria to be resold. So Alexandria's economy unfortunately prospered from this. So it turned into informally, it has no like one name, but people informally call it the slave pen jail. About three to four hundred people at a time, about 70 prison staff. Um, now the pens were split, actually, they're they're flanking on both sides for men and women. So on the right side of the building, there's actually a similar prison yard. Um, so on the next page, I have the current site, which again is very similar. It's of course, as you can see, there's buildings now on both sides. Those prison yards have been knocked down. Um, this is the modern-day Freedom House Museum at 1315 Duke Street. And this is an amazing museum. If anyone is in Alexandria or plans to go, highly recommend. It tells the story of slavery in Alexandria through the Civil War. There's a big exhibit about um its time as a jail, of course, during the war. They have amazing 3D models and diagrams and lots of maps. What's interesting is this jail was part of a larger complex in this part of Old Town Alexandria. Behind it was Louverture Hospital, which, as we talked about in our last episode, was a massive hospital center for contraband and African American free black people who were in the city. And then there were, of course, barracks for the contraband people also right next to it. So this was one large kind of neighborhood, you could say, for the African-American community. And they recently, this past year, have painted it. It was white. The outside facade was white, um, but then they wanted to bring it back to its Civil War era color, and that's why you can really see it it matches the photo from before. So we're very fortunate to also have this building still standing for educational purposes. And lastly, I've saved this one for last because it is, I guess if you want to say favorite, that's a little weird to say, but it is one that has uh the most uh it's it's physically the largest one, and I just think it has a lot of intense history attached to it. So this is called the Washington Street Prison, of course, named after the street it is located on. Before the war, this was the Mount Vernon Cotton Factory. Now, it has nothing to do with Georgia Washington's Mount Vernon. It's just called that. Established in the 1830s, um, the basement had massive machinery to process cotton. Um, this was, again, physically, like I said, the largest prison. It had nine wards, averaged 1200 to 1,500 prisoners at one time and 130 prison staff. Now, this image of the uh of the prison is from 1865, and these you can see the ground floor was has been whitewashed so that if a prisoner were to escape, you can easily see them illuminated essentially against the white background compared to having being like a brown or black facade there. Um, so that was to help stop people from escaping. And the reason why this building was whitewashed and not the other ones was because there was a major escape incident in October of 1864, where 18 prisoners escaped in one evening at one time. And that was a big hit to the reputation of Alexandria. The 18 ran out the front door and said it was whitewashed to um help prevent that. Now, uh this hospital also had, and on the next slide we have a modern image of it as well. Um, this hospital had the most prisoners sent to hospital, or the most that were receiving medical care. Um, this is also the hospital that has the most egregious treatment of its prisoners. So if you think back to the one before, the slave pen, you would think that one would have like the worst treatment, but actually it was here, and we're gonna get into why this building became so nasty um later on in the episode. Um, so today the Washington Street Prison is a luxury condo building. It's the same building. I've been inside of it. It is um, there's a couple of pieces of the original wood still on the wall in some parts of the building. I've been in the basement, and I will tell you, um, do not go there at night. It is incredibly creepy. Uh so if any of the five prisons were extremely haunted, it's definitely gonna be the Washington Street prison.

SPEAKER_00 14:43

So yeah. Can I just ask, what was the conditions like in these prisons for these prisoners? And again, were these prisoners um union soldiers or confederate?

SPEAKER_01 14:53

There's gonna be a mix. Now, what's confusing for a lot of people is like I said at the beginning, this is the first stop for many Confederate POWs, but it's not meant to be a permanent um housing situation. They're not intended to stay here for a very long time. They're here for a few days, a few weeks, maybe a month, before they're transferred up to New York or out to Ohio or out to Maryland. Um, but they're never intended to stay here very long. Uh so mostly what we're seeing in these prisons are the Union prisoners. So there's more union than Confederate because the Confederates are constantly being shuffled out. Now, a lot of them, the Confederate POWs, were being treated in Alexandria for medical issues prior to being sent elsewhere. So even if you have a lot of Confederate POWs in the building, many of them actually aren't currently there. They're being treated at the hospital. So they're registered in the ledger, but they're not in the facility itself. So it kind of distorts the numbers a bit. With the conditions, I mean, most of them are across the board relatively the same. Um, none of these buildings were meant to be prisons, aside from the original Alexandria City jail. Um, these were businesses. This was a furniture factory, this was a meeting hall, this was a cotton factory, a slave pen. This was not meant to be a place of comfort. So we're noticing in the medical ledgers a lot of mentions of it being really cold in the winter, um, it being extremely stifling in the summer, many mentions of scurvy, that the prisoners are not receiving enough uh vitamin C from their rations. Um, many of them didn't have enough clothes, and then many were not being bathed or washed. Um so what we'll talk about in this episode is kind of how it got to this point. Again, we're seeing a consistent treatment of the prisoners. There's not going to be, aside from the Washington Street prison, many intentional abuses of prisoners. Um, but yeah, we'll can get into that in a second.

SPEAKER_00 16:53

Awesome. Okay, let's talk about who was in charge of these prisons.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

All right. So, as we talked about in a prior episode, we have our provost marshal, Henry Horatio Wells, H H Wells. Um, if you were arrested in Alexandria, let's say you're a union soldier committing crimes or debauchery or you're just a rascal, right? You would be sent, um, you'd be arrested and put in one of the prisons temporarily, and then you would go before the provost marshal to have your verdict read out. If you need a trial, if you need to be sent something like greater, maybe you're gonna be shipped out to a um a union prison camp up north or just discharged, right? Um, the provost marshal um in Alexandria handled all civil and military matters. So there was no civil court. So even if you were a civilian who committed a crime, you would go before the provost marshal um because we have extreme martial law in the city now. So in each prison, we're gonna see a warden uh who's gonna be essentially in charge of each prison, usually a captain rank. And then there's gonna be each prison has their own set of guards who are assigned to that one building. That's why we saw a lot of um these facilities have huge staff counts, right? We're seeing 50 to 80 to 130 in one, right? It's because a lot of them, again, have many wards, like the Washington Street Prison had nine wards, and you need, you know, for a capacity of 1,500, um, you need a good ratio of prisoner to guard. So you need like a dozen over a dozen guards for that. So Provost Marshal Wells, he's in charge of the actual crimes, um, sentencing people because most of the sentences range from hard labor to just confinement. Um, extreme cases were just a full court martial and dishonorable discharge. Um, some prisoners, if they were extremely violent, would be sent elsewhere, um, just sent out of the city, because a member of the city has a mission here. They are trying to protect DC, and we do not want um the, if especially an incredibly violent prisoner to escape by accident. So if it's somebody who'd be in a danger to the city or a danger to operations, they gotta go. Now on the next slide, I have an image of um our unfortunate, notorious main character of the episode. This is superintendent of military prisons in the city, Captain Rufus D. Petit. Now, his name is people have said his name differently, uh Petit, Petit. I say petit because I'm the French pronunciation, I'm assuming. Um now, this guy, this guy is the reason why the prisons have such a pretty bad rap, and especially the Washington Street prison. So a little bit about him. He was commissioned in August of 1861 with the first New York Light Artillery, Battery B. He engaged in many notable battles, including Antinum. Now, in May of 1863, after Chancellorsville, he was medically discharged. But he re-enlisted in the Veteran Reserve Corps. So he was sent home to New York, decided that in 1864, um, I want to still serve my country in some capacity that we see a lot of soldiers do. But because of his experience, because of his um reputation, he was given a very big job, which was superintendent of military prisons in Alexandria. That had not existed before Petit's appointment. So he's with the 12th Veteran Reserve Corps, but he's essentially part of the military government. He's part of the head administration here. And that's what gets him into Alexandria. Now, we're seeing that with Petit, he wrote, starting in July of 1864, tri-monthly reports for each prison. And these reports are so thankfully digitized and available online through the Alexandria Library's special collections. So if you just Google Rufus Petit Alexandria prisons, you'll come up with one of the first results to be these um amazing ledgers, his the letters he would send to military governor Slough reporting essentially every week or every 10 days what the conditions were like, how many were sick, how many escaped, how many guard, um, do we need heating? Do we need um, for example, he wrote often, I need potatoes, tomatoes, um, and some fruits for the scurvy that we're experiencing, or the men don't have a designated station to wash themselves, or there's no extra clothing. So he would report this stuff to the governor, but again, reporting, as we know, is one thing. It was a military government's fault at the end for not supplying these prisons properly. They confiscated them before furnishing them with the proper amenities and necessities you need to run a prison. So we have 1,500 guys in the Washington Street prison before it got a heating mechanism, right? So a little messy there. So Rufus Petit, Captain Petit, is our kind of head guy, and he will have a really intense story, as I will talk about in this episode.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

Excellent. Okay, so explain the connection between uh Desertion and uh these prisoners.

SPEAKER_01 22:03

Yeah, so there's a great book written in I think 1920, 1921, by Ellen Lowry on desertion. And she had done this extensive study on the topic because up until 1920, no one really wanted to talk about desertion, right? It's a taboo subject. Um, but in our world in 2026, we're very comfortable discussing this. Um, and we understand how common it was, right? She was looking, she was trying to tally up really how many people did truly desert. And we won't know the true number because there are so many people that got away with it or that we are unaccounted for. But essentially, she configured about 200,000 Union and 100,000 Confederate, which is likely more. Um, this became, of course, a major problem. And we're all familiar with the punishment for desertion. Uh, towards the middle and end of the war, it turned into a capital crime. Um, because of how often this was happening, uh, the government needed to deter those interested in desertion. So in Alexandria, many, many times soldiers would be um arrested if they were found malingering or loitering in the city without assignment. Or if someone's story didn't really add up. Uh I'll give an example. In many of the hospitals, soldiers gave fake names or fake regiments. There's no reason for this, right? There's no reason for a soldier to lie about who they are unless they are on the run. So desertion followed soldiers in many aspects. Many soldiers would desert from the field and they ran to Alexandria because this was the next nearest city and trying to get north, uh, especially off the Virginia battlefields. And then they were injured or sick and they sought treatment. Um, now these surgeons, of course, were extremely well aware of this. And if anyone's story didn't check out, that soldier would be reported to the provost marshal who would then investigate. So I see in the hospital ledgers a lot of soldiers who, instead of being discharged and returned to the field, returned to duty, or furloughed or discharged medically, they were sent to the provost marshal. That is their discharge kind of line there. Now, also we have soldiers who are lingering without assignment, those who are causing the crime problems, those who are just not following orders, not returning to their barracks. Desertion is a strong word. It can be as severe as literally running away, or it can be not fulfilling your duty. And so many soldiers who were found um wandering off post, sleeping on post, especially, um, those who were scheming with other soldiers to commit crimes, they would also be um put in jail temporarily to kind of assess their situation. Um, and then of course, disorderly conduct, any disobedience, um, especially in regards to returning to the front, uh, would be treated as suspected desertion and then leading to imprisonment.

SPEAKER_00 24:58

Okay, so how were um Confederate POWs treated?

SPEAKER_01 25:03

Yeah, now we this is really interesting because Alexandria is, at the end of the day, was a Confederate city that was occupied by the Union. And as we've talked about repeatedly in the series, two-thirds of the population fled to Dixie. So it's not really a Confederate city by the time the troops come in. Um, it's you're not allowed to be openly secessionists after a while. Um, but this is a, as you can see in this Alexandria Gazette article from July of 62, um, they save space in the Gazette by just putting multiple pieces of information in one paragraph and separating topics by dashes, just little pieces of info, as newspapers did in this time period. And as you can see right in the middle, a letter from one of the Confederate prisoners from this place, recently captured in one of the battles before Richmond, and now confined at Governor's Island, states that the prisoners from Alexandria are all well and comfortably accommodated. So that is a big statement. And now I will say there was some propaganda um being issued intentionally. If there was rumors, of course, of Confederates being mistreated by the Union, that would that would cause a lot of PR problems for the Union. And as we know, the can many of the um Union troops represented by the Confederacy were not treated equally. We know that Elmira in New York was a hellhole for many of these Confederate POWs. But especially in the Department of Washington, if word got out that Confederate POWs were being really mistreated and interrogated, uh, that would lead to more problems between the governments, right? Prisoner exchange and whatnot. So overall, we are not seeing intentional um torture, we're not seeing intentional like interrogation, but of course, they're not fully welcome. There's other instances of um the prisoners when they're coming into Alexandria being paraded down the street, and some people would be cheering because they have such no sympathies, and some people would be um screaming and yelling and cursing at them. Um most of the Confederate POWs are actually going to be put in the slave pen. So if you think about the original reason for that building, right, it was a symbolic measure on the part of the Union to house Confederates in the same place that they're fighting for. And many Union soldiers who had never seen slavery firsthand, maybe they're from you know parts of the country, of course, that had already abolished it, many of them came to the slave pen jail as a tourist site, not only to see rebels firsthand, but also to see evidence of slavery, to see chains, to see those um auction blocks and things like that. Now, we see Confederates and Union prisoners being housed in the same building. And many people ask me, how on earth did you house Union and Confederates together without them killing each other? And in my opinion, they were not put in the same room. They're not put in the same, you know, cell, of course. That'd be too dangerous. They're likely separated for their safety. And also at the same time, you're all in the same position. They're all prisoners. It's not like the union has any type of advantage over them at that point. These prisoners are in the same situation. You got the same conditions, same treatment, essentially. Now, there's a scene in Mercy Street when um, I forget his name, but one of the uh Confederates is who is suffering from PTSD. He's being treated in the mansion house hospital, and there's an armed guard right by his bed or right at the door where he's being treated. And that is very true. That's a very uh realistic example of how different the Confederates are being treated, especially across the medical care situation. If they had to be removed from prison and taken to a hospital because the prison could not care for them, they would be transferred under armed guard and returned under armed guard. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:00

Okay. Thank you. Okay, so explain uh superintendent's uh petite's court martial.

SPEAKER_01 29:09

Yes, I save the most exciting topic for last because this is a guy who I think everyone should know about. We know about Henry Wirtz uh from the Al Andersonville prison. We know about the nasty commandant of Andersonville, right? But Superintendent Petit had done some very egregious things in his term as superintendent of Alexandria's prisons, and no one really knows about him. And it's part of my mission here to to educate all y'all. So, as we know, he took this position in July of 1864. He had been medically discharged from Chancellor'sville, and it was not a physical disability. We're under our understanding is he suffered from post-traumatic stress and was unable to command his troops. Now, he probably was also physically injured. I've not looked too much into that. Um, but when he came back to the Veteran Reserve Corps, he had this uh mission to kind of root out deserters. Uh, he had this vendetta against them that honestly for the time period was a little extreme. He was convinced that if you just look on the street, there's probably dozens of deserters just getting away with it, wandering around, subverting the Union war effort. So we're seeing how um his reputation and his actions caught up with him. This is an uh October 1865 newspaper report from the Alexandria Gazette. It says Captain Petit of the 12th Regiment Veteran Reserve Corps, keeper of the military prison Alexandria, against whom charges have been preferred of cruelty towards prisoners and trusted in his care, will be tried before the court-martial, um, of which Major Green is president. And then we get Colonel Burnham as a judge advocate. So working backwards, October 1865, he is court-martialed for apparent cruelty towards prisoners. And we know that he has um this vendetta against deserters. Now he's going to use the Washington Street prison, that large one, the physically biggest one, as kind of his headquarters for this mission. And the Washington Street prison houses mainly Union prisoners. There's not many Confederates. But when the war ends and Alexandria is packing up in the summer of 1865, many of the prisoners who had been left there reported that they had been interrogated in a very cruel way, that they had essentially been uh had their arms hung up and that they were standing, that they had been beaten, starved. Um, that Petit was interrogating them to find out who they really were, because he did not believe that their name was correct or the regiment was correct, or that something was wrong in their story. Like they've been separated from their regiment, and they're the only one from their company, maybe in Alexandria. And he's like, Why are you here? Where's the rest of your company? Where's your regiment? And so he thought immediately, oh, you ran away and you're in Alexandria to seek medical treatment or to have her new new assignment or just to make your way home. Maybe that was true. Maybe he was right. Maybe there were actually disorders. However, these guys adamantly said, No, I am John Smith, like this is who I am. Um, I was separated from my regiment. Um, I got lost, and I followed a different regiment up to Alexandria before I so I can come come back and find my guys. Or, no, I was injured and carted off on this wagon, and then I passed out, and here I am in Alexandria. I don't know where my regiment is. Or, no, I actually have furlough papers or discharge papers, I just don't have them on me. Don't you believe my story? So there was a whole bunch of scenarios here. But what we're seeing here is that um those charges were levied against him, and here's actually kind of what undid everything. In um in the Washington Street prison, the warden of that one, Captain H.H. Foster, wrote a scathing letter against these, what he called false allegations. He was actually writing a letter in defense of Superintendent Petit. And he called these guys scoundrels, rascals, bounty hunters, um, that they're just out here for the money, they're not here actually to serve their country, that they're so um poor and uneducated, they don't even know what they're writing, um, that there's no reason to even have a trial, the war is over. Um, but it did go to trial because enough people came forward. Um, and this is all, um, of course, we had a massive investigation occur really uh starting in April, right after uh Lee's surrender to Grant, because I think the city at that time was in a position where we're starting to relax. We don't have to defend as much, we can actually look at these issues. It was impossible for uh prisoner to get their opinion heard, their grievances heard at the height of the war. So now we're starting to see it being investigated. So in November, though, we're gonna see a delay in the trial because all of those witnesses, people that had worked in the city, who were guards in the prison, and even the prisoners themselves, they were sent home. They were discharged. The war is over. So in November, they're having problems even getting people to come down to testify. But finally, a few months later, in January of 1866, uh, Petit is found guilty of his actions and dishonorably discharged from the military, not allowed to re-enlist as he had done after Chancellorsville. Uh, he returns home to New York, and then he is uh gonna have a quiet rural farm life until his death in 1890. Now, his pension record does not list any dependents, only his death, because he could not file for an official pension due to the agreements with his dishonorable discharge. So not only was he removed from the military, he was um exempt from a pension, which was another kind of consequence of his actions. But Petit is uh an unfortunate main character in the story of Alexandria's prisons, and he focused a lot of his interrogation efforts in that Washington Street prison. Although all the four other ones did have egregious conditions, Washington Street itself became what many historians in Alexandria call the Andersonville of the North, which I know Elmira also gets that reputation, but maybe we can have two Andersonville. So, yeah, that's Captain Petit.

SPEAKER_00 35:33

Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay, so um thank you again. That is a great uh episode on the prisons. Um, but just before we wrap up here uh on this episode, um, tell us about obviously these buildings are now still around and they still exist. So um are you know some of them homes now, and obviously, like you said, some of them are condos. And again, so is there any uh suspicious activity that goes on in those places at night? And I'm talking about spooky goings on.

SPEAKER_01 36:03

Oh, yeah, absolutely. So yes, the only building that is essentially open for to walk around would be the uh Freedom House Museum, which was the slave pen jail. Of course, you can enter the Washington Street prison, the Prince Street um prison, um, but it is a condo building, so you can't just easily access it. There's a of course access code. And then Oddfellows Hall and the jail are now private residences. But the fact that all five of these buildings still stand to some degree, that's also pretty amazing. Because if you think about it, especially after your building was a prison, you'd think you'd just knock it down. But because these buildings, many of them were businesses, they went back to being businesses. Like the Washington Street Prison became a law office at one point. Um, the jail went back to being a jail. Um, and then the furniture factory, of course, James Green's furniture empire ended, and it just changed hands multiple times before its ultimate renovation. Um the prisons themselves, there is a um in Washington Street Prison in the uh cupola at the top, there's actually a it's it's kind of hard to explain. There's a dummy, there's like a um a mannequin of a Union soldier just chilling up there, and he's kind of creepy looking. Um, and he is said to represent the spirits of the soldiers who had died in the prison. Um, again, we have 1,500 at any given point over the course of like 10 months with the conditions that prison had. But um, he's a regular tourist attraction, you can see him from the street. Um, so yeah, there's a lot of spooky happenings. Um, especially I have friends who live in these buildings, and there's a lot of uh rapping sounds on the walls, the basement just when I went down there, I didn't get very far into it. Um, it just really felt angry. It felt like people were almost like people were trying to grab me to tell me something. Like, you must know, like you must know about this place. Because again, a lot of the guys in that prison, especially, didn't get their voices heard until January of 1866 when Petit was brought to justice for what he did. Um, the Freedom House Museum, again, it's been very renovated, but the main structure still stands. That also has a very eerie feeling because of its history with slavery. Um, and if you stand outside the Prince Street Prison, which is now a parking garage and condo building, um, there's just a really bad vibe, um, kind of an angry vibe. And I I take a lot of walking tours around Alexandria, and we pass by these buildings, and you can kind of feel the uh eeriness emanating off of the bricks.

SPEAKER_00 38:36

Awesome. Okay, well, thank you very much, Madeline. Again, um, again, ladies and gentlemen, this is part of a series. This is episode four. If you want to see the previous three episodes, uh the playlist is available on our YouTube channel, uh Alexandra at War. And uh all that is left to say, Madeline, is cheers.

SPEAKER_01 38:55

Cheers, thanks so much.

unknown 38:56

Uh