Prior to the Civil War, Captain William May of the 23^rd Connecticut Infantry had been a newspaper publisher in Bridgeport, Connecticut. In his diary, Captain May described that during his thirteen months of captivity he "Suffered the pangs of hunger, exposure to all kinds of weather with scant clothing to cover one’s nakedness — the horrors of a vermin-infested camp of thousands of prisoners." He also said that the prison was a "grotesque city of captivity" and a "wigwam metropolis." In the spirit of the Union soldiers who utilized their pre-war skills and experiences to enhance the quality of prison life, May wrote and "published" a newspaper called The Old Flag. Upon his release from Camp Ford in 1864, May smuggled out three issues of the prison newspaper that were published in 1914 after his death in a book entitled The Old Flag. Captain May wrote the copy for his prison newspaper and transcribed it by hand. It covered ongoing happenings of the Camp Ford prison community, national news, chess problems, ads, and hand-drawn pictures.

When Captain Patrick H. White and 1^st Lieutenant Pinckney S. Cone from the Chicago Mercantile Battery were captured at the Battle of Mansfield on April 8, 1864 along with 20 of their soldiers, they were sent to Camp Ford. After Mansfield, the rest of the Chicago Mercantile Battery continued to fight against the Rebels in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. During that time, they heard many rumors about the pending release of their comrades. Despite other Union soldiers being exchanged and freed, White, Cone, and most of the other artillerists remained imprisoned at Camp Ford. They were finally released fourteen months later and rejoined the Battery on May 29^th in New Orleans just in time to be mustered out together on July 3, 1865.

Since there were several months that Captain White’s imprisonment overlapped with that of William May in the summer of 1864, the latter’s first-hand account of life at Camp Ford is valuable in understanding how the men of the Chicago Mercantile Battery lived there at camp. With May’s journalist observation skills, he described Camp Ford in detail as "…a space of half-a-dozen acres, enclosed with a stockade of timbers eight feet high. One-sixth of this area is allotted to the officers, who dwell in log-cabins, erected by themselves or purchased from some former tenant. Each cabin, hut, or ‘she-bang,’ as we term it, shelters and accommodates a mess…the ‘she-bangs’ are arranged in streets, right-angled with a central thoroughfare, called ‘Fifth Avenue’ (a rare Civil War photo of a Camp Ford she-bang)…Besides this area allotted to the officers, our prison habitations stretch on three sides, densely populated as the tenant-houses of a New York ward. What curious abodes! What odd contrivances for shelter! Here upright sticks sustain a simple thatch of leaves; there poles fixed slantwise, and overlaid with bark, compose an Indian lodge. Some householders are satisfied with blankets stretched across two saplings; others a palisaded mansion, eight feet square, with stakes, inserted in the earth, like picket fences, and covered with a roof of twigs…"

Sources: Camp Ford C.S.A., The Story of Union Prisoners in Texas. Texas CW Centennial Advisory Committee: Austin, TX. 1964; Confederate Veteran. Volume 5, 1996; The Old Flag, GAR Dept. of Connecticut. 1914.

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