Fort Mifflin

This guide to Fort Mifflin in Philadelphia opens on August twenty-sixth, eighteen sixty-four, when ninety Union soldiers crossed the river for the only execution ever carried out inside these walls. It traces Private William Henry Howe's path there: his 1862 desertion pleading illness, the deadly enrolling-officer raid on his home in Montgomery County, and his capture after weeks spent clawing a tunnel from the cell now called Casemate Eleven. You'll hear how newspapers split over his court martial, including a comparison to a Black soldier's lighter sentence in the same county. Stand at the edge of the moat he tried to cross in the dark.