“Yours Most Obedient”

Father Peter Whelan
Wexford Priest in the American South

On October 25, 1858, as Vicar General of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Savannah, Fr. Peter Whelan penned a short letter. Sent from Edgefield, South Carolina (about 26 miles [42 km] north of Augusta, Georgia), its valediction read, “Yours most obedient, P. Whelan.” The phrase functions well as a summary of Whelan’s ethos and practice as a Catholic priest in a majority-Protestant territory: the Southeastern United States of the mid-nineteenth century. Whelan was born in a farmhouse (that still stands) in the townland or district of Loughnageer in the barony of Shelmaliere West in County Wexford, southeast Ireland. Loughnageer is part of the civil parish (local administrative zone) of Clongeen, which is also the name of the village closest to the Whelan homestead.

Fr. Whelan Timeline

1802 \ Loughnageer

PW was born in Loughnageer townland, south-central County Wexford, Ireland, the son of a farming couple, William Whelan and Marcella Colfer. His paternal grandmother was a Rossiter.

1822-1824 \ Birchfield College, Kilkenny

PW received instruction at Birchfield College in Kilkenny.

The Bishop of Ossory (Dr. John Thomas Troy) founded Birchfield College in 1782 in response to a piece of legislation passed that year by the Dublin-based parliament known as Grattan’s Parliament: “An Act to allow Persons professing the Popish Religion to teach School in this Kingdom [Ireland], and for regulating the Education of Papists.” In recognition of the new law, which was far from a carte blanche, Birchfield took as its motto Hiems Transiit (“winter has passed”). During its first decade, the institution was just a a “minor seminary” or secondary school. Beginning in 1792, however, Birchfield added a major seminary program for candidates for the Roman Catholic priesthood. It was the first such theological seminary in Ireland, predating Maynooth by three years. In time, Birchfield’s major seminary adopted the name St. Kieran’s College, and it would supply significant numbers of priests to the foreign missions. In 1820, Rev. Patrick Kelly, President of Birchfield College, was consecrated the first bishop of the American diocese of Richmond, although he returned to Ireland in July 1822 to fulfill the role of Bishop of Waterford and Lismore.

before (or perhaps during) 1829 \ emigration

PW emigrated to Charleston, South Carolina, apparently responding to a call for trainee priests issued by Cork-man Rev. Dr. John England (1786-1842), the first Bishop of Charleston, a diocese established in 1820. The grandson of a hedge-school master, England, who had both legal and religious degrees, had risen to prominence in Ireland in association with Daniel O’Connell’s political campaign for Catholic Emancipation. Reflecting (in the late 1840s) on England’s work on behalf of O’Connell’s “democratic insurrection,” the sometime Lord Mayor of Cork city, William Trant Fagan, wrote, “[England] was a man of great powers of mind, amazing intellectual energy; possessing, too, a masculine eloquence and a stern unflinching determination, well suited of a popular leader.” On September 21, 1820, mere days before his thirty-fourth birthday, England (then the parish priest of Bandon, County Cork) “received [in Cork city] the grace of Episcopal Consecration” in anticipation of his departure for Charleston. Over time, he acquired the moniker “the steam bishop” due to his energetic leadership of the Charleston diocese, which originally spanned North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. On January 8, 1826, he became the first Catholic cleric to address, by invitation, the United States Congress. The nation’s president, John Quincy Adams, was present for England’s two-hour discourse, delivered in the chamber of the House of Representatives.

1830-1837 \ Charleston, then North Carolina

In Charleston on November 21, 1830, PW was ordained a priest by Bishop England. The host for the event was the community rendered official by the South Carolina General Assembly when (on December 20, 1823) it “created and declared a body politic and corporate, by the name and style of the Roman Catholic Cathedral Church of St. Finnbarr.” (Finbar is the patron saint of the city of Cork, England’s birthplace, as well as the diocese of Cork.)

PW had studied for the priesthood in the Philosophical and Classical Seminary of Charleston, founded by Bishop England in 1822. In 1836, England would separate into two discrete institutions the Seminary’s branch that offered a general secondary education to boys and its branch that trained future Roman Catholic priests, naming the latter in honor of St. John the Baptist. England’s efforts to establish a free-standing divinity college received mention in President John Quincy Adam’s diary entry for Christmas Day of 1825: “Rode to the Roman Catholic Church of St. Patrick’s [in Washington, DC], and heard the Mass performed. Also a Discourse [sermon] upon the day, delivered by the Bishop of Charleston, John England. … He expressed very liberal principles of religious toleration, and besought charitable contributions for the Establishment of a Catholic theological seminary at Charleston — for which a Collection was taken up.”

After his ordination, PW served as Bishop England’s secretary for two years; and then he performed parochial duties in such North Carolina communities as Raleigh, Greensboro, and Fayetteville.

We do not know precisely how, when still in Ireland, PW became acquainted with the opportunities in Charleston and its hinterland. In his essay subtitled “Catholic Seminary Studies in Antebellum America” (published in the September 2004 issue of the journal Church History), Philip Gleason quotes Bishop John England as stating, in 1833, “[L]arge numbers of our brethren in faith ‘are crying for the bread of life, and there is none [i.e. there are no priests in the US] to break it for them.’” Some of England’s propaganda efforts, conducted in Ireland on behalf of the Charleston diocese, received attention in an article, “The American Mission,” that appeared on the front page of the June 24, 1833, edition of The Freeman’s Journal, the Dublin-based daily newspaper often identified with Irish constitutional nationalism.

1837-1854 \ the “farmer-priest” at Locust Grove

PW fulfilled the role of pastor of the Church of the Purification of Our Blessed Lady at Locust Grove, Georgia’s oldest Catholic community, about 54 miles (86.5 km) west of Augusta, near the small town of Sharon. Bishop England (who died in 1842) observed that Locust Grove “was fixed in 1794 or ’95 by the settlement of [some Catholics] from Maryland.” Having acknowledged the “[e]xcellent schools” established by the “Catholic colonists” at Locust Grove, Lucian Lamar Knights’s A Standard History of Georgia and Georgians (1917) noted the 18-year ministry there of “Father Peter Whelan, the farmer-priest, as he was called.” The March 21, 1846, edition of United States Catholic Miscellany (America’s first national Catholic weekly newspaper, founded by Bishop England) reported glowingly on one aspect of Whelan’s work at Locust Grove: “[T]here is not a congregation, remote and rural as it is, in which, taking proportionate numbers into the scale, we find the youth are more moral, orderly and better instructed.”

On July 3, 1850, the Diocese of Savannah came into being to serve Georgia and a portion of Florida.

1854 \ Augusta, then Savannah

PW left Locust Grove and travelled to Most Holy Trinity Church in Augusta, Georgia, where two fellow Wexford-men served as priests: Rev. John Barry (from near Oylegate), pastor; Rev. Gregory Duggan (from Murrintown), associate pastor. PW’s help was sought because Duggan had become ill during the yellow fever epidemic that ravaged both Augusta and Savannah between August and November of 1854. After the first Bishop of Savannah, Dublin-man Francis Xavier Gartland, died from the disease in Savannah, PW relocated to that city. Savannah’s Irish neighborhoods (Old Fort in the east and Yamacraw and Frogtown in the west) suffered disproportionately during the epidemic. One of the front-line doctors, Richard Joseph Nunn, a native of Wexford town, had recently graduated from the Savannah College of Medicine; he would go on to become a highly respected national leader in the field of public health. Complicating the response to the crisis, a major hurricane swept over Savannah on September 8 and 9, 1854. Under the headline, “Awful Gale!” the September 9 edition of city’s Daily Morning News characterized the event as “the severest and most destructive storm that has visited [Savannah] since October, 1824.” Immediately prior to that article, the newspaper indicated that of the 17 yellow fever victims interred in Savannah the previous day, 11 were natives of Ireland.

1857

John Barry was consecrated as second Bishop of Savannah, with PW being appointed Vicar General, the next-highest diocesan position.

1859

Upon Barry’s sudden death in November 1859, PW was made Administrator of the Savannah diocese, a role he fulfilled until the Vatican’s appointment, on July 14, 1861, of Frenchman Augustin Verot as the new (third) bishop.

On April 12, 1861, the American Civil War began; it would continue until May 9, 1865

November 1861 - April 1862 / Fort Pulaski

On November 24, 1861, Union forces began targeting Fort Pulaski (Cockspur Island), which defends the mouth of the Savannah River, around 14 miles (22.5 km) east of the city of Savannah. Nearing 60 years of age, PW voluntarily served as chaplain to Catholic soldiers in the Confederate garrison at the fort, many of whom belonged to the Montgomery Guards, one of Savannah’s Irish militia units. (In the Confederate Army, the Montgomery Guards initially functioned as part of the 1st Georgia Volunteer Infantry Regiment.)

From at least early February 1862, PW embedded at Fort Pulaski on a full-time basis. It was supposed that, being seven-and-a-half feet thick, the pentagon-shaped structure’s solid brick walls would be invincible; thus, the Union strategy was a siege, aimed at starving the garrison (under Savannah native Colonel Charles Hart Olmstead) into surrender. The 112-day siege ended with a successful Union bombardment over a 30-hour period on April 11 and 12, 1862, the Parrott rifle-cannon, patented in 1861, proving crucial to the victory.

Deeming him a “noble old christian hero,” F.D. Lee and J.L. Agnew’s Historical Record of the City of Savannah (1869) records that “Reverend Father P. Whelan was in the fort during the siege, and by his calmness and cheering words did much to encourage the members of garrison [around 385 individuals] during the severe ordeal. After the surrender he was offered his liberty, but refused to accept the offer, and underwent all the rigors of imprisonment [on Governor’s Island, New York City] with those he loved and to whom he was endeared.”

In the June 1917 issue of The Georgia Historical Quarterly, Olmstead wrote that during the siege of Fort Pulaski, “Rev. Peter Whelan served as Volunteer Chaplain to the Montgomery Guards, but he will be remembers as a faithful comrade and friend to the entire garrison — a man who lived up to the teachings of the Master whom he followed.”

April - August 1862 / New York City

Beginning on April 13, 1862, the Union victors transported the members of the Fort Pulaski garrison to a prison facility on Governor’s Island, New York City, where PW concentrated on the regular soldiers (as opposed to the officers), who endured spartan conditions in a circular defensive building, Castle Williams. In his 1987 Georgia Historical Quarterly (GHQ) article, “The Prison Ministry of Father Peter Whelan,” Peter J. Meaney explains that as part of a strategy to ensure food and other supplies for the prisoners, Whelan wrote (on May 3, 1862) from Castle Williams “to the Reverend William Quinn, pastor of St. Peter’s Church on Barclay Street” in Lower Manhattan. Although granted parole on May 11, 1862, PW chose to remain until a prisoner-exchange agreement permitted the entire Georgia group to return to Savannah in August 1862.

In The Memoirs of Charles H. Olmstead (published in GHQ in 1960), Olmstead recalled PW as providing “a very beautiful demonstration [during the imprisonment at Governor’s Island] of what genuine religion means.”

June - October 1864

PW served as the principal Roman Catholic priest at Camp Sumter, the notorious Confederate prisoner-of-war camp better known as Andersonville. The next section of this webpage explores his pastoral and humanitarian efforts there, which yielded for the Wexford priest a remarkable moniker: The Angel of Andersonville.

February 6, 1871

On February 6, 1871, PW died, aged 69. Four days later, his funeral procession proved the largest ever witnessed in Savannah. Crowds lined the streets as 86 carriages and buggies accompanied the body, contained in an elaborate iron casket, from the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist on Drayton Street to Catholic Cemetery. On the day of the funeral (February 10), page 3 of Savannah’s Morning News asserted that Whelan, “one of [the] brightest ornaments” of the Catholic Church, “had so endeared himself to our citizens by his life of purity and active benevolence that his loss will be generally felt and deplored.” During his final years, PW ministered in the city of Savannah, serving for a spell as the pastor of the city’s second Catholic parish, St. Patrick’s, founded in 1863 (and located in a former cotton warehouse until 1882). At the time of his death, PW, in failing health, was associated with the cathedral parish, whose pastoral team also included Rev. William John Hamilton, another cleric who had experienced the Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp.

Rev. Peter Whelan (1802-1871)

The Angel of Andersonville

Andersonville: Confederate Prison; Officially Called Camp Sumter

Camp Sumter, the Confederate prisoner-of-war installation commonly known as Andersonville, operated from February 1864 to April 1865. Father Peter Whelan’s ministry as the leading Catholic priest on the site extended between June and October of 1864, during which time the inmate population reached its greatest number. August 1864 saw 33,000 Union soldiers crowded into a facility Intended to accommodate 10,000 (after a June 1864 expansion of the grounds to 25.6 acres [10.4 hectares]). Little more than a rectangular stockade, the prison’s 15-foot-high pine-pole perimeter enclosed two small hills, with a stream, which became an open sewer, running between them. While some sources refer to the place as Camp Sumpter, the correct spelling is Sumter, the name of a Georgia county, whose capital is Americus. The camp was constructed near the rail-stop village of Andersonville, 9 miles (14 km) north of Americus, in a neighboring county.

In his diary entry for June 9, 1864, prisoner Samuel J. Gibson, a corporal in the 103rd Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, labeled Andersonville “this Hell-upon-earth of a Prison.” On June 28, he wrote, “If this is not Hell itself it must be pandemonium, … Hell Gate. Heaven forbid I should ever see a worse place, the day is intensely hot …. Men are dropping dead on all sides.” One notes that the average temperature at Andersonville during June, July, and August is 92˚ Fahrenheit (33˚ Celsius).

Over the 14 months of its existence, Andersonville held around 45,000 Union soldiers, of whom perhaps as many as 13,000 died amid unspeakable conditions of filth and disease (especially scurvy, diarrhea, and dysentery). On November 10, 1865 — almost seven months after the Civil War ended — the camp commander, 41-year-old Captain Henry Wirz (a Swiss-born Catholic), was hanged in Washington, DC, once a Military Commission convicted him of war crimes. At Wirz’s trial, those who testified included Irish (Derry City) native Fr. William John Hamilton, pastor of the Catholic Church of the Assumption in the city of Macon, Georgia, 60 miles (97.5 km) northeast of Andersonville. (As a seminarian at All Hallow’s in Dublin, he had responded to a call for priests for the American South, issued by Wexford-man Fr. John Barry, who would become the second Bishop of Savannah.) Due to the small number of Catholics in rural Georgia, Andersonville and Americus fell within Hamilton’s pastoral zone.

Answering a prosecution inquiry at Wirz’s trial, Hamilton recalled: “In the month of August [1864] … we had three [Catholic] priests there [in the Andersonville prison] constantly,” two of whom were “from Savannah.” The Savannah priests were Peter Whelan and “Father Clavreil [Henry Paul Clavreul], a French clergyman.” Clavreul (1835-1923) would later recall that Whelan “assisted the [Andersonville] prisoners not only by his ministrations as a priest, but also by material help, through his influence among the Catholics of Georgia.” He added, “As for me, unknown and without influence, I could only weep over the miseries I hourly encountered.”

During the Witz hearings, Hamilton explained that after his second visit to Andersonville, in May 1864, he “wrote to our bishop [Augustin Verot, third Bishop of Savannah]” to inform him “that there were many Catholics” among the prisoners “and that they required the services of a priest.” Verot responded by “[sending] up Father Whelan” from Savannah, where the Wexford-born cleric occupied the post of diocesan Vicar General. (Verot himself made two trips to Camp Sumter, noting on one of the occasions the “horrible stench” and the “continuous sight of death.”) According to Hamilton, “Father Whelan remained there [Andersonville] for four months constantly,” beginning in early June 1864. For his part, Fr. Clavreul was present from mid-July until August 20. After Clavruel’s health-related return to Savannah, Whelan received some short-term assistance at Andersonville from two other priests: Rev. Anselm Usannez of Spring Hill College, a Jesuit institution in Mobile, Alabama; and Kerry-man Rev. John Francis Kirby of Most Holy Trinity Church in Augusta, Georgia. (Kirby was an assistant priest at Trinity, the principal pastor being Wexford-man Rev. Gregory Duggan.)

Arguably, one of the most influential prisoner memoirs about Andersonville, John McElroy’s Andersonville: A Story of Rebel Military Prisons (1879), mistakes Hamilton (1834-1884) for Whelan (1802-1871). McElroy was a member of the 16th Illinois Cavalry and still a teenager when at Andersonville, between February and October 1864. McElroy’s book, which debuted in 1879, declared, “The only minister who came into the Stockade was a Catholic priest, middle-aged, tall, slender, and unmistakably devout. He was unwearied in his attention to the sick, and the whole day could be seen moving around through the prison, attending to those who needed spiritual consolation.” While the text names the individual as Hamilton, that Derry-man served at Andersonville only intermittently, for, in addition to discharging his parochial duties in Macon, he also ministered at that city’s Camp Oglethorpe, another Confederate prisoner-of-war facility. (One notes that in 1869, F.D. Lee and J.L. Agnew’s Historical Record of the City of Savannah identifies both Whelan and Hamilton as “officiat[ing]” under Bishop Verot in the Savannah parish centered on “St. John’s cathedral, a magnificent and capacious edifice, located on the east side of Drayton, at the corner of Perry street.”)

Hamilton insisted (at Wirz’s trial) that he and Whelan “were not chaplains at Andersonville.” He elaborated, “[W]e never held any commissions from the confederate government and received no remuneration for our services.” As Irishmen at Camp Sumter, Hamilton and Whelan encountered many Irish-born and Irish-American Union soldiers. According to historian Damien Shields, the National Cemetery at Andersonville “almost certainly contains more Irish casualties from the American Civil War than any other location in the United States.” Thus far, Shield’s Andersonville Irish Project has identified three Union graves at the National Cemetery containing natives of County Wexford: James Duffy, Private, Company A, 18th Massachusetts Infantry (died May 31, 1864, before Whelan arrived); Lawrence Murphy, Private, Company E, 170th New York Infantry (died August 17, 1864, during Whelan’s camp ministry); Hugh Doyle, Sergeant, Company B, 164th New York Infantry (died September 10, 1864, also during Whelan’s camp ministry).

Whelan’s Testimony at Wirz’s Trial (in Washington, DC)

As the November 1865 war-crimes trial of Camp Sumter commander Henry Wirz proceeded, Fr. Peter Whelan testified for the defense, recalling that he served as a priest at Andersonville from “about the 16th of June till near the 1st of October, 1864.” His essential argument in the Washington courtroom was that Wirz “never put any obstacles” in the way of his attempts to provide aid, physical or spiritual, to the Union prisoners, whether in “the stockade or the hospital” at Andersonville. Without being prompted, Whelan indicated that he “never saw or heard of [Wirz’s] using any personal violence … so as to produce death.” Later, in response to a direct question, Whelan said, “I never heard of [Wirz’s] killing a man, or striking a man with a pistol, or kicking a man to death.” (In his address to the court, as the trial neared its end, Wirz quoted from Whelan’s testimony and characterized the Irishman as “that good, pious, simple-minded, God-fearing and man-loving priest, whose self-sacrificing labors there [at Andersonville] entitle him to the reverence of all who witnessed or may ever read of them.”)

While Whelan’s full-time presence at Andersonville ended in October 1864, he presented to the Judge Advocate the following anecdote: “I applied to [Witz] in January, 1865, about taking to the prisoners some provisions. I borrowed $16,000 [in Confederate money] and went down to Andersonville [from Savannah]. I spoke to Captain Witz, and he freely gave me permission to purchase flour for the prisoners.” Whelan continued, “I gave the money to a gentleman in Americus of the name of Wynne, and he purchased the flour.” Asked whether the flour had been baked into bread and distributed to the prisoners, Whelan responded, “I cannot say …. After the purchase of the flour I went to Macon, and did not return to Andersonville any more.” In fact, the bread was produced.

Later in his testimony, Whelan further reflected on the flour initiative: “It was in January, 1865, that I bought [the] flour …. It was for every person in the prison. I made no distinction as to sect or creed as far as body was concerned. As far as the soul was concerned any one who asked me to administer to him I attended to.” Although not invoked during the priest’s remarks at the Wriz trial, we know that Whelan borrowed the CSA $16,000 from Henry Horne, a French-born Catholic merchant in Macon, one of whose sons would later become that city’s mayor. (Especially given the inflation that bedeviled Confederate currency, it is difficult to calculate the value of CSA $16,000 in early 1865; one estimate is the equivalent of $8,782 in present-day United States currency.) When Horne found himself needing repayment, Whelan managed to secure $400 in gold, essentially by drawing on his own assets.

As discussed elsewhere on this webpage, during portions of 1885 and 1866, Whelan became embroiled in a public argument with the Adjutant General’s Corps, a Washington-headquartered United States Army unit, over its unwillingness to reimburse the $400-in-gold expenditure, notwithstanding the fact that “Fr. Whelan’s bread” had undoubtedly saved the lives of some US soldiers.

Whelan’s Andersonville Labor

Whelan’s words at Wirz’s trial offer insights into his daily routine at Andersonville. He stated, “My duties … were very onerous. They occupied the whole of my time. My health was somewhat impaired from it. I entered the stockade about nine o’clock in the morning. That was the time the prisoners could take most rest. I remained there sometimes till four and sometimes till five o’clock. … I was occupied with my own business and nobody’s else.”

Whelan recollected: “I have seen persons [Andersonville inmates] … who were sick and the quality of food [prison rations] was such that they could not use it. … The prisoners looked, some of them, very emaciated …. I cannot tell you to how many dying persons [at Andersonville] I have administered spiritual aid. Perhaps it might have been fifteen hundred or two thousand.”

In his dispute over the flour money, Whelan penned a letter (dated May 21, 1866) to E.D. Townsend, the Assistant Adjutant General, in Washington, DC. It appeared in several newspapers, including Savannah’s Daily News and Herald of June 4, 1866. Referring to the sustenance provided by the bread, Whelan insisted that “many” of “the Federal prisoners at Andersonville, … under God, owe to me the preservation of their lives.” He further stated: “I gave the prisoners my time and labor during the months of June, July, August and September of 1864. I gave them all the money I had of my own, besides the flour bought with the money borrowed of Mr. Horne [merchant in Macon, Georgia]. My duties as a Catholic Priest brought me daily … in close contact with the sick and dying, when I had to inhale effluvium for hours on hours, and be covered, as with a coat, with vermin.” Whelan continued,

Whelan concluded his letter to the Assistant Adjutant General by blaming the overcrowding at Andersonville on the suspension of the practice of prisoner-exchange: “Had men in authority … pity and mercy … [the prisoners’] parole and exchange would have … not stopped, and as a consequence, the many thousands of them who fell the victims of prison life, and are now sleeping the sleep of death in their graves, North and South, would be living and enjoying the pleasing society of their family and friends. They are dead, upon whom is their blood?” The problem originated with the Confederacy’s refusal, during the exchange negotiations, to accord equal status to African-American as to white Union prisoners.

Whelan and the Hanging of the Raiders

A notable element in Whelan’s testimony at the Wirz trial was his account of the hanging, on July 11, 1864, of six leading members — the so-called chieftains — of a gang of Union prisoners, known as the Raiders. The Regulators, a policing gang, proved key to identifying and rounding up the six (Collins, Curtis, Delaney, Munn, Sarsfield, Sullivan), who were court-martialed and put in the stocks prior to their execution. Several of those who gave evidence to the Military Commission investigating Wirz discussed the Raiders. George Conway of the 3rd New York Artillery stated, “They [the Raiders] robbed [fellow] prisoners and cut their throats. … There was much fear on the part of the peaceable prisoners. The peaceable prisoners were assaulted and beaten by them very frequently.”

For his part, Whelan explained, “I administered to five [of the six Raiders] … who were hanged. There was one of them who was not a Catholic. … I visited them the evening before they were hanged and gave them all the consolations of religion that it was possible for me to do.” Whelan revealed that Wirz refused his request “to delay their execution”; and he also confirmed that after the event “there were no more robberies in the stockade, at least none that were publicly notorious.” In his diary entry for July 11, 1864, prisoner John L. Ransom of the 9th Michigan Cavalry noted that “the good Catholic priest [Whelan] attended the [six] condemned [Raiders]” at the gallows. Unsurprisingly, another prisoner-diarist, Samuel J. Gibson of the 103rd Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, also recorded the execution, observing, “[S]ix men of the ‘Raiders’ … were hung by our own men; with the concurrence of the Reb. [Confederate] authorities.” The next day, he reflected, “The tragical scene at the execution of the ‘Raiders’ … still haunts my mind, I hardly know what to think of it. — That they were guilty and deserved their fate I have no doubt …. To day about 300 more prisoners are brought in. There must now be 30000 men here.”

Inmate John McElroy’s Andersonville: A Story of Rebel Military Prisons (1879) conveys Whelan’s role during the hanging of the Raiders’ chieftains: “A little after noon [on July 11, 1864] the South Gate opened, and Wirz rode in …. Behind him walked the faithful old priest [Whelan], wearing his Church's purple insignia of the deepest sorrow, and reading the service for the condemned. The six doomed men followed, walking between double ranks of Rebel guards. … [T]he priest closed the book upon which he had kept his eyes bent since his entrance, and facing the multitude … began a plea for mercy. … The silence seemed to become even more profound as the priest [made] his appeal. For a minute every ear was strained to catch what he said. Then, as the nearest of the thousands comprehended what he was saying they raised a shout of ‘No! No! NO!’ ‘Hang them! Hang them!’ ‘Don't let them go! Never!’”

“I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me” — Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 25, Verses 35-36

In his 1865 memoir, Fourteen Months in Southern Prisons, Henry M. Davidson of the 1st Ohio Light Artillery described his experiences in the “roofless enclosure” that was Andersonville, beginning with his arrival there on April 20, 1864 and continuing until his escape in early September of that year. Respecting available shelter, he reflected, “Scatted about … were the ‘houses’ of the prisoners; these consisted of pieces of shelter tents, or remnants of blankets stretched upon boughs of pine trees; but few of the prisoners possessed these accommodations, and the majority were either with no covering at all, or had dug holes in the ground into which they crawled for shelter.”

We assume Davidson was referring to Whelan when, with reference to the camp hospital, he recalled, “A Catholic Priest visited … almost daily, and ministered freely and faithfully to the wants of the dying. I am sorry to be unable to state his name, for he was the only clergyman, as far as I remember, that ever visited us. He was a noble man, a hero, — for by coming here, he exposed himself to great danger of infection with the diseases. He seemed actuated by the holiest motives, kneeling down by the side of the decaying bodies of living men, in the stench and filth of the gangrene wards, and interceding with Heaven for that mercy to the sufferers, which they could not obtain on earth. Many and many a time have I seen him thus praying with the dying, consoling alike the Protestant and the believers in his own peculiar faith. His services were more than welcome to many, and were sought by all; for in his kind and sympathizing looks, his meek, earnest appearance, the despairing prisoners read that all humanity had not forsaken mankind.”

Recognition, North and South, of Whelan’s Work at Andersonville (1865)