The Bull Ring at City Point was the Union provost marshal’s prison, where Union soldiers charged with or convicted of desertion, murder, rape, disobedience, theft, drunkenness, and other crimes were confined in three large one-story barracks enclosed by high wooden fences and guarded day and night. At its entrance stood a wooden bar with short ropes used to tie prisoners by the hands or thumbs as punishment. Conditions were notoriously harsh and unsanitary; Sanitary Commission agent William Howell Reed called it “a pen of filth and vermin” and reported that an officer who had been imprisoned at Richmond said he would rather spend six months in Libby Prison than one in the Bull Ring. Shelter and sanitary facilities were primitive or absent, and witnesses recalled men huddling in rain, snow, and frost without protection. The court-martial board tried an average of four cases a day, and sentencing could be severe, with five men in one day seen sent off to execution. During the last week of the war and in the two weeks before the surrender at Appomattox Court House, the Bull Ring was also used to confine captured Confederate soldiers awaiting transport to prison camps in the North; so many passed through City Point, about 14,000 in that period, that some overflow prisoners slept outside the enclosure, among them Generals Richard S. Ewell, Joseph B. Kershaw, and G.W. Custis Lee.

Photo: Bernard Fisher

Photo: Bernard Fisher

Hopewell, Virginia · USA