Hello Ken:

Dennis gave me a “heads up” about your posting which prompted me to do an update of Levi Thomas’ entry in the Fort Delaware Society database. He and others arrived at Fort Delaware on 8 APR 1864 from the Alton Military Prison. He was admitted to the Fort Delaware Post & Prison Hospital on 23 SEP 64 and released back to the prison barracks on 5 OCT 64. No cause for treatment was given. Levi was selected from among the sick & debilitated prisoners at Fort Delaware (although “sick & debilitated” seems not have been a hard and fast rule) to be paroled for exchange in the spring of 1865. He was one of 3,499 POWs paroled on 7 MAR 1865 at Fort Delaware and delivered to Confederate authorities at Boulware’s & Cox’s Wharves (not City Point) on the James River over the three day period 10-12 MAR 1865. No further records were found.

While the POW records all show his unit as the 3rd Arkansas Infantry, these were filed with his company muster roll records under the 35th Arkansas Infantry. The War Department clerks who put together the Compiled Military Service Records were clever enough to figure this out.

There were several Company G, 35th AR Infantry muster roll entries covering the period before and after his capture at Helena, AR on 4 JUL 1863. This suggests that the muster rolls were not destroyed by the Confederates prior to the surrender nor captured by the Federals at Helena. So the only thing the Federals knew about Levi is what he told them. On my list of things to do is to sort out the Helena captives in our database from the real 3rd Arkansas Infantry POWs taken at Gettysburg and later in 1864. There appear to be several and the thought occurs to me that perhaps Levi and his comrades decided to give disinformation to their Federal captors and that is how the “3rd Arkansas Infantry” error got into the POW records. Once entered into the record stream, this piece of information just got passed along with each prison transfer. The Alton record of his transfer to Fort Delaware on 4 APR 1864 presents his full name – Levi Whitfield Thomas – which strongly suggests that Levi agreed with the unit designation of 3rd Arkansas Infantry in his POW records. How else would they have known his middle name? Interestingly, by the end of October 1863, Company G, 35th AR Infantry knew that Levi was a POW. It appears that lists of POWs being held by each side were passed between the two War Departments on a routine basis.

Hugh Simmons
Fort Delaware Society
www.fortdelaware.org
society@fortdelaware.org