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Re: The 3rd Arkansas Regiment(s)
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Not to mention another bit of 3rd Arkansas trivia involving Colonel Manning... Manning was wounded on the second day at Gettysburg, and recuperated only to be wounded again and captured during Longstreet's counterattack in the Wilderness on May 5... He was sent to Fort Delaware as a POW, and from there was selected in 1864 as one of 600 Confederate officer prisoners to be given special "retaliatory" treatment in response to the privations suffered by Union prisoners at Andersonville and elsewhere.

The officers were first transported to Morris Island, SC, and used as "human shields" for Federal batteries shelling Fort Sumter and the city of Charleston. Housed on the open sand beaches in pup tents, given reduced rations, and guarded by the "famous" 54th Massachusetts Infantry. It was not pleasant. The prisoners' meager rations often consisted of only two pieces of hardtack a day. On a good day, a prisoner might receive some "worm eaten hard tack, a little chunk of bacon one half inch square" and a bowl of bean soup made, it was rumored, on a formula of "three beans to a half quart of water," remembered Thomas Pickney, a captain in the 4th South Carolina Cavalry.

After 45 days of continuous exposure to shellfire and the weather, they were finally taken out of their miserable pen and transferred to Fort Pulaski near Savannah, GA.

The men spent a miserable cold, dreary winter there, 13 dying of disease. In March 1865, the survivors were shipped back to Fort Delaware, where 25 more succumbed to illness. There they remained until after the war ended. The last man of the group was not released until July 1865.

The harsh and unusual conditions of their imprisonment inspired one of the captives, John O. Murray, to record his experiences in the 1905 book The Immortal Six-Hundred. The name he gave the group stuck, and today they are still referred to as the "Immortal 600."

Colonel Vann Manning of the 3rd Arkansas was the second-ranking officer of the Immortals. Twenty-some-odd other Arkansas officers were included among their ranks, most prisoners from Port Hudson and various skirmishes in the Trans-Mississippi.

Tom

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3rd Ark.
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