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Andersonville: A Story of Rebel Military Prisons

by John McElroy · English · Gutenberg #3072 · 1,098,133 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Andersonville: A Story of Rebel Military Prisons

Author: John McElroy


        
Release date: June 1, 2004 [eBook #3072]
                Most recently updated: August 24, 2023

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANDERSONVILLE: A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS ***




                             ANDERSONVILLE
                   A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS

                FIFTEEN MONTHS A GUEST OF THE SO-CALLED
                          SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY

                     A PRIVATE SOLDIERS EXPERIENCE
                                   IN
               RICHMOND, ANDERSONVILLE, SAVANNAH, MILLEN
                        BLACKSHEAR AND FLORENCE


                            BY JOHN McELROY
                      Late of Co. L. 16th Ill Cav.
                                  1879




                           TO THE HONORABLE

                             NOAH H. SWAYNE.

           JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES,
        A JURIST OF DISTINGUISHED TALENTS AND EXALTED CHARACTER;
                        ONE OF THE LAST OF THAT
       ADMIRABLE ARRAY OF PURE PATRIOTS AND SAGACIOUS COUNSELORS,
                                WHO, IN
                    THE YEARS OF THE NATION’S TRIAL,
               FAITHFULLY SURROUNDED THE GREAT PRESIDENT,
                     AND, WITH HIM, BORE THE BURDEN
                                   OF
                         THOSE MOMENTOUS DAYS;
         AND WHOSE WISDOM AND FAIRNESS HAVE DONE SO MUCH SINCE
                                   TO
                      CONSERVE WHAT WAS THEN WON,
         THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED WITH RESPECT AND APPRECIATION,

                              BY THE AUTHOR.




INTRODUCTION.

The fifth part of a century almost has sped with the flight of time
since the outbreak of the Slaveholder’s Rebellion against the United
States. The young men of to-day were then babes in their cradles, or,
if more than that, too young to be appalled by the terror of the times.
Those now graduating from our schools of learning to be teachers of
youth and leaders of public thought, if they are ever prepared to teach
the history of the war for the Union so as to render adequate honor to
its martyrs and heroes, and at the same time impress the obvious moral
to be drawn from it, must derive their knowledge from authors who can
each one say of the thrilling story he is spared to tell: “All of which
I saw, and part of which I was.”

The writer is honored with the privilege of introducing to the reader
a volume written by an author who was an actor and a sufferer in the
scenes he has so vividly and faithfully described, and sent forth to
the public by a publisher whose literary contributions in support of
the loyal cause entitle him to the highest appreciation. Both author
and publisher have had an honorable and efficient part in the great
struggle, and are therefore worthy to hand down to the future a record
of the perils encountered and the sufferings endured by patriotic
soldiers in the prisons of the enemy. The publisher, at the beginning
of the war, entered, with zeal and ardor upon the work of raising
a company of men, intending to lead them to the field. Prevented
from carrying out this design, his energies were directed to a more
effective service. His famous “Nasby Letters” exposed the absurd and
sophistical argumentations of rebels and their sympathisers, in such
broad, attractive and admirable burlesque, as to direct against them
the “loud, long laughter of a world!” The unique and telling satire of
these papers became a power and inspiration to our armies in the field
and to their anxious friends at home, more than equal to the might of
whole battalions poured in upon the enemy. An athlete in logic may
lay an error writhing at his feet, and after all it may recover to do
great mischief. But the sharp wit of the humorist drives it before the
world’s derision into shame and everlasting contempt. These letters
were read and shouted over gleefully at every camp-fire in the Union
Army, and eagerly devoured by crowds of listeners when mails were
opened at country post-offices. Other humorists were content when they
simply amused the reader, but “Nasby’s” jests were arguments--they had
a meaning--they were suggested by the necessities and emergencies of the
Nation’s peril, and written to support, with all earnestness, a most
sacred cause.

The author, when very young, engaged in journalistic work, until the
drum of the recruiting officer called him to join the ranks of his
country’s defenders. As the reader is told, he was made a prisoner.
He took with him into the terrible prison enclosure not only a brave,
vigorous, youthful spirit, but invaluable habits of mind and thought
for storing up the incidents and experiences of his prison life. As a
journalist he had acquired the habit of noticing and memorizing every
striking or thrilling incident, and the experiences of his prison
life were adapted to enstamp themselves indelibly on both feeling and
memory. He speaks from personal experience and from the stand-paint of
tender and complete sympathy with those of his comrades who suffered
more than he did himself. Of his qualifications, the writer of these
introductory words need not speak. The sketches themselves testify to
his ability with such force that no commendation is required.

This work is needed. A generation is arising who do not know what the
preservation of our free government cost in blood and suffering. Even
the men of the passing generation begin to be forgetful, if we may
judge from the recklessness or carelessness of their political action.
The soldier is not always remembered nor honored as he should be. But,
what to the future of the great Republic is more important, there is
great danger of our people under-estimating the bitter animus and
terrible malignity to the Union and its defenders cherished by those
who made war upon it. This is a point we can not afford to be mistaken
about. And yet, right at this point this volume will meet its severest
criticism, and at this point its testimony is most vital and necessary.

Many will be slow to believe all that is here told most truthfully
of the tyranny and cruelty of the captors of our brave boys in
blue. There are no parallels to the cruelties and malignities here
described in Northern society. The system of slavery, maintained for
over two hundred years at the South, had performed a most perverting,
morally desolating, and we might say, demonizing work on the dominant
race, which people bred under our free civilization can not at once
understand, nor scarcely believe when it is declared unto them. This
reluctance to believe unwelcome truths has been the snare of our
national life. We have not been willing to believe how hardened,
despotic, and cruel the wielders of irresponsible power may become.

When the anti-slavery reformers of thirty years ago set forth the
cruelties of the slave system, they were met with a storm of indignant
denial, villification and rebuke. When Theodore D. Weld issued his
“Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses,” to the cruelty of slavery, he
introduced it with a few words, pregnant with sound philosophy, which
can be applied to the work now introduced, and may help the reader
better to accept and appreciate its statements. Mr. Weld said:

“Suppose I should seize you, rob you of your liberty, drive you into
the field, and make you work without pay as long as you lived. Would
that be justice? Would it be kindness? Or would it be monstrous
injustice and cruelty? Now, is the man who robs you every day too
tender-hearted ever to cuff or kick you? He can empty your pockets
without remorse, but if your stomach is empty, it cuts him to the
quick. He can make you work a life-time without pay, but loves you
too well to let you go hungry. He fleeces you of your rights with a
relish, but is shocked if you work bare-headed in summer, or without
warm stockings in winter. He can make you go without your liberty,
but never without a shirt. He can crush in you all hope of bettering
your condition by vowing that you shall die his slave, but though he
can thus cruelly torture your feelings, he will never lacerate your
back--he can break your heart, but is very tender of your skin. He can
strip you of all protection of law, and all comfort in religion, and
thus expose you to all outrages, but if you are exposed to the weather,
half-clad and half-sheltered, how yearn his tender bowels! What! talk
of a man treating you well while robbing you of all you get, and as
fast as you get it? And robbing you of yourself, too, your hands and
feet, your muscles, limbs and senses, your body and mind, your liberty
and earnings, your free speech and rights of conscience, your right to
acquire knowledge, property and reputation, and yet you are content to
believe without question that men who do all this by their slaves have
soft hearts oozing out so lovingly toward their human chattles that
they always keep them well housed and well clad, never push them too
hard in the field, never make their dear backs smart, nor let their
dear stomachs get empty!”

In like manner we may ask, are not the cruelties and oppressions
described in the following pages what we should legitimately expect
from men who, all their lives, have used whip and thumb-screw, shot-gun
and bloodhound, to keep human beings subservient to their will? Are we
to expect nothing but chivalric tenderness and compassion from men who
made war on a tolerant government to make more secure their barbaric
system of oppression?

These things are written because they are true. Duty to the brave
dead, to the heroic living, who have endured the pangs of a hundred
deaths for their country’s sake; duty to the government which depends
on the wisdom and constancy of its good citizens for its support and
perpetuity, calls for this “round, unvarnished tale” of suffering
endured for freedom’s sake.

The publisher of this work urged his friend and associate in journalism
to write and send forth these sketches because the times demanded just
such an expose of the inner hell of the Southern prisons. The tender
mercies of oppressors are cruel. We must accept the truth and act in
view of it. Acting wisely on the warnings of the past, we shall be able
to prevent treason, with all its fearful concomitants, from being again
the scourge and terror of our beloved land.

ROBERT McCUNE.




AUTHOR’S PREFACE

Fifteen months ago--and one month before it was begun--I had no more
idea of writing this book than I have now of taking up my residence in
China.

While I have always been deeply impressed with the idea that the
public should know much more of the history of Andersonville and other
Southern prisons than it does, it had never occurred to me that I was
in any way charged with the duty of increasing that enlightenment.

No affected deprecation of my own abilities had any part is this.
I certainly knew enough of the matter, as did every other boy who
had even a month’s experience in those terrible places, but the
very magnitude of that knowledge overpowered me, by showing me the
vast requirements of the subject-requirements that seemed to make
it presumption for any but the greatest pens in our literature to
attempt the work. One day at Andersonville or Florence would be task
enough for the genius of Carlyle or Hugo; lesser than they would fail
preposterously to rise to the level of the theme. No writer ever
described such a deluge of woes as swept over the unfortunates confined
in Rebel prisons in the last year-and-a-half of the Confederacy’s life.
No man was ever called upon to describe the spectacle and the process
of seventy thousand young, strong, able-bodied men, starving and
rotting to death. Such a gigantic tragedy as this stuns the mind and
benumbs the imagination.

I no more felt myself competent to the task than to accomplish one of
Michael Angelo’s grand creations in sculpture or painting.

Study of the subject since confirms me in this view, and my only claim
for this book is that it is a contribution--a record of individual
observation and experience--which will add something to the material
which the historian of the future will find available for his work.

The work was begun at the suggestion of Mr. D. R. Locke, (Petroleum V.
Nasby), the eminent political satirist. At first it was only intended
to write a few short serial sketches of prison life for the columns
of the TOLEDO BLADE. The exceeding favor with which the first of the
series was received induced a great widening of their scope, until
finally they took the range they now have.

I know that what is contained herein will be bitterly denied. I am
prepared for this. In my boyhood I witnessed the savagery of the
Slavery agitation--in my youth I felt the fierceness of the hatred
directed against all those who stood by the Nation. I know that hell
hath no fury like the vindictiveness of those who are hurt by the
truth being told of them. I apprehend being assailed by a sirocco
of contradiction and calumny. But I solemnly affirm in advance the
entire and absolute truth of every material fact, statement and
description. I assert that, so far from there being any exaggeration
in any particular, that in no instance has the half of the truth
been told, nor could it be, save by an inspired pen. I am ready to
demonstrate this by any test that the deniers of this may require,
and I am fortified in my position by unsolicited letters from over
3,000 surviving prisoners, warmly indorsing the account as thoroughly
accurate in every respect.

It has been charged that hatred of the South is the animus of this
work. Nothing can be farther from the truth. No one has a deeper love
for every part of our common country than I, and no one to-day will
make more efforts and sacrifices to bring the South to the same plane
of social and material development with the rest of the Nation than I
will. If I could see that the sufferings at Andersonville and elsewhere
contributed in any considerable degree to that end, and I should not
regret that they had been. Blood and tears mark every step in the
progress of the race, and human misery seems unavoidable in securing
human advancement. But I am naturally embittered by the fruitlessness,
as well as the uselessness of the misery of Andersonville. There was
never the least military or other reason for inflicting all that
wretchedness upon men, and, as far as mortal eye can discern, no
earthly good resulted from the martyrdom of those tens of thousands.
I wish I could see some hope that their wantonly shed blood has sown
seeds that will one day blossom, and bear a rich fruitage of benefit to
mankind, but it saddens me beyond expression that I can not.

The years 1864-5 were a season of desperate battles, but in that
time many more Union soldiers were slain behind the Rebel armies, by
starvation and exposure, than were killed in front of them by cannon
and rifle. The country has heard much of the heroism and sacrifices of
those loyal youths who fell on the field of battle; but it has heard
little of the still greater number who died in prison pen. It knows
full well how grandly her sons met death in front of the serried ranks
of treason, and but little of the sublime firmness with which they
endured unto the death, all that the ingenious cruelty of their foes
could inflict upon them while in captivity.

It is to help supply this deficiency that this book is written. It is
a mite contributed to the better remembrance by their countrymen of
those who in this way endured and died that the Nation might live. It
is an offering of testimony to future generations of the measureless
cost of the expiation of a national sin, and of the preservation of our
national unity.

This is all. I know I speak for all those still living comrades who
went with me through the scenes that I have attempted to describe, when
I say that we have no revenges to satisfy, no hatreds to appease. We do
not ask that anyone shall be punished. We only desire that the Nation
shall recognize and remember the grand fidelity of our dead comrades,
and take abundant care that they shall not have died in vain.

For the great mass of Southern people we have only the kindliest
feeling. We but hate a vicious social system, the lingering shadow of
a darker age, to which they yield, and which, by elevating bad men to
power, has proved their own and their country’s bane.

The following story does not claim to be in any sense a history of
Southern prisons. It is simply a record of the experience of one
individual--one boy--who staid all the time with his comrades inside
the prison, and had no better opportunities for gaining information
than any other of his 60,000 companions.

The majority of the illustrations in this work are from the skilled
pencil of Captain O. J. Hopkins, of Toledo, who served through the war
in the ranks of the Forty-second Ohio. His army experience has been of
peculiar value to the work, as it has enabled him to furnish a series
of illustrations whose life-like fidelity of action, pose and detail
are admirable.

Some thirty of the pictures, including the frontispiece, and the
allegorical illustrations of War and Peace, are from the atelier of Mr.
O. Reich, Cincinnati, O.

A word as to the spelling: Having always been an ardent believer in
the reformation of our present preposterous system--or rather, no
system--of orthography, I am anxious to do whatever lies in my power
to promote it. In the following pages the spelling is simplified to
the last degree allowed by Webster. I hope that the time is near when
even that advanced spelling reformer will be left far in the rear by
the progress of a people thoroughly weary of longer slavery to the
orthographical absurdities handed down to us from a remote and grossly
unlearned ancestry.

Toledo, O., Dec. 10, 1879.

JOHN McELROY.




We wait beneath the furnace blast
The pangs of transformation;
Not painlessly doth God recast
And mold anew the nation.
Hot burns the fire
Where wrongs expire;
Nor spares the hand
That from the land
Uproots the ancient evil.

The hand-breadth cloud the sages feared
Its bloody rain is dropping;
The poison plant the fathers spared
All else is overtopping.
East, West, South, North,
It curses the earth;
All justice dies,
And fraud and lies
Live only in its shadow.

Then let the selfish lip be dumb
And hushed the breath of sighing;
Before the joy of peace must come
The pains of purifying.
God give us grace
Each in his place
To bear his lot,
And, murmuring not,
Endure and wait and labor!

WHITTIER






ANDERSONVILLE

A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS




CHAPTER I.

A STRANGE LAND--THE HEART OF THE APPALACHIANS--THE GATEWAY OF AN EMPIRE
--A SEQUESTERED VALE, AND A PRIMITIVE, ARCADIAN, NON-PROGRESSIVE PEOPLE.

A low, square, plainly-hewn stone, set near the summit of the eastern
approach to the formidable natural fortress of Cumberland Gap,
indicates the boundaries of--the three great States of Virginia,
Kentucky and Tennessee. It is such a place as, remembering the old
Greek and Roman myths and superstitions, one would recognize as fitting
to mark the confines of the territories of great masses of strong,
aggressive, and frequently conflicting peoples. There the god Terminus
should have had one of his chief temples, where his shrine would be
shadowed by barriers rising above the clouds, and his sacred solitude
guarded from the rude invasion of armed hosts by range on range of
battlemented rocks, crowning almost inaccessible mountains, interposed
across every approach from the usual haunts of men.

Roundabout the land is full of strangeness and mystery. The throes of
some great convulsion of Nature are written on the face of the four
thousand square miles of territory, of which Cumberland Gap is the
central point. Miles of granite mountains are thrust up like giant
walls, hundreds of feet high, and as smooth and regular as the side of
a monument.

Huge, fantastically-shaped rocks abound everywhere--sometimes rising
into pinnacles on lofty summits--sometimes hanging over the verge of
beetling cliffs, as if placed there in waiting for a time when they
could be hurled down upon the path of an advancing army, and sweep it
away.

Large streams of water burst out in the most unexpected planes,
frequently far up mountain sides, and fall in silver veils upon
stones beaten round by the ceaseless dash for ages. Caves, rich in
quaintly formed stalactites and stalagmites, and their recesses filled
with metallic salts of the most powerful and diverse natures; break
the mountain sides at frequent intervals. Everywhere one is met by
surprises and anomalies. Even the rank vegetation is eccentric, and as
prone to develop into bizarre forms as are the rocks and mountains.

The dreaded panther ranges through the primeval, rarely trodden
forests; every crevice in the rocks has for tenants rattlesnakes or
stealthy copperheads, while long, wonderfully swift “blue racers” haunt
the edges of the woods, and linger around the fields to chill his
blood who catches a glimpse of their upreared heads, with their great,
balefully bright eyes, and “white-collar” encircled throats.

The human events happening here have been in harmony with the natural
ones. It has always been a land of conflict. In 1540--339 years ago
--De Soto, in that energetic but fruitless search for gold which
occupied his later years, penetrated to this region, and found it the
fastness of the Xualans, a bold, aggressive race, continually warring
with its neighbors. When next the white man reached the country--a
century and a half later--he found the Xualans had been swept away by
the conquering Cherokees, and he witnessed there the most sanguinary
contest between Indians of which our annals give any account--a pitched
battle two days in duration, between the invading Shawnees, who lorded
it over what is now Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana--and the Cherokees, who
dominated the country the southeast of the Cumberland range. Again the
Cherokees were victorious, and the discomfited Shawnees retired north
of the Gap.

Then the white man delivered battle for the possession the land, and
bought it with the lives of many gallant adventurers. Half a century
later Boone and his hardy companion followed, and forced their way into
Kentucky.

Another half century saw the Gap the favorite haunt of the greatest
of American bandits--the noted John A. Murrell--and his gang. They
infested the country for years, now waylaying the trader or drover
threading his toilsome way over the lone mountains, now descending upon
some little town, to plunder its stores and houses.

At length Murrell and his band were driven out, and sought a new field
of operations on the Lower Mississippi. They left germs behind them,
however, that developed into horse thieve counterfeiters, and later
into guerrillas and bushwhackers.

When the Rebellion broke out the region at once became the theater of
military operations. Twice Cumberland Gap was seized by the Rebels, and
twice was it wrested away from them. In 1861 it was the point whence
Zollicoffer launched out with his legions to “liberate Kentucky,” and
it was whither they fled, beaten and shattered, after the disasters of
Wild Cat and Mill Springs. In 1862 Kirby Smith led his army through the
Gap on his way to overrun Kentucky and invade the North. Three months
later his beaten forces sought refuge from their pursuers behind its
impregnable fortifications. Another year saw Burnside burst through the
Gap with a conquering force and redeem loyal East Tennessee from its
Rebel oppressors.

Had the South ever been able to separate from the North the boundary
would have been established along this line.

Between the main ridge upon which Cumberland Gap is situated, and the
next range on the southeast which runs parallel with it, is a narrow,
long, very fruitful valley, walled in on either side for a hundred
miles by tall mountains as a City street is by high buildings. It is
called Powell’s Valley. In it dwell a simple, primitive people, shut
out from the world almost as much as if they lived in New Zealand, and
with the speech, manners and ideas that their fathers brought into the
Valley when they settled it a century ago. There has been but little
change since then. The young men who have annually driven cattle to
the distant markets in Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia, have brought
back occasional stray bits of finery for the “women folks,” and the
latest improved fire-arms for themselves, but this is about all the
innovations the progress of the world has been allowed to make. Wheeled
vehicles are almost unknown; men and women travel on horseback as
they did a century ago, the clothing is the product of the farm and
the busy looms of the women, and life is as rural and Arcadian as any
ever described in a pastoral. The people are rich in cattle, hogs,
horses, sheep and the products of the field. The fat soil brings forth
the substantials of life in opulent plenty. Having this there seems
to be little care for more. Ambition nor avarice, nor yet craving
after luxury, disturb their contented souls or drag them away from the
non-progressive round of simple life bequeathed them by their fathers.




CHAPTER II.

SCARCITY OF FOOD FOR THE ARMY--RAID FOR FORAGE--ENCOUNTER WIT THE
REBELS --SHARP CAVALRY FIGHT--DEFEAT OF THE “JOHNNIES”--POWELL’S VALLEY
OPENED UP.

As the Autumn of 1863 advanced towards Winter the difficulty of
supplying the forces concentrated around Cumberland Gap--as well as
the rest of Burnside’s army in East Tennessee--became greater and
greater. The base of supplies was at Camp Nelson, near Lexington,
Ky., one hundred and eighty miles from the Gap, and all that the Army
used had to be hauled that distance by mule teams over roads that, in
their best state were wretched, and which the copious rains and heavy
traffic had rendered well-nigh impassable. All the country to our
possession had been drained of its stock of whatever would contribute
to the support of man or beast. That portion of Powell’s Valley
extending from the Gap into Virginia was still in the hands of the
Rebels; its stock of products was as yet almost exempt from military
contributions. Consequently a raid was projected to reduce the Valley
to our possession, and secure its much needed stores. It was guarded by
the Sixty-fourth Virginia, a mounted regiment, made up of the young men
of the locality, who had then been in the service about two years.

Maj. C. H. Beer’s third Battalion, Sixteenth Illinois Cavalry--four
companies, each about 75 strong--was sent on the errand of driving
out the Rebels and opening up the Valley for our foraging teams. The
writer was invited to attend the excursion. As he held the honorable,
but not very lucrative position of “high, private” in Company L, of the
Battalion, and the invitation came from his Captain, he did not feel at
liberty to decline. He went, as private soldiers have been in the habit
of doing ever since the days of the old Centurion, who said with the
characteristic boastfulness of one of the lower grades of commissioned
officers when he happens to be a snob:

     For I am also a man set under authority, having under me soldiers,
     and I say unto one, Go; and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he
     cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it.

Rather “airy” talk that for a man who nowadays would take rank with
Captains of infantry.

Three hundred of us responded to the signal of “boots and saddles,”
buckled on three hundred more or less trusty sabers and revolvers,
saddled three hundred more or less gallant steeds, came into line
“as companies” with the automatic listlessness of the old soldiers,
“counted off by fours” in that queer gamut-running style that makes a
company of men “counting off”--each shouting a number in a different
voice from his neighbor--sound like running the scales on some great
organ badly out of tune; something like this:

One. Two. Three. Four. One. Two. Three. Four. One. Two. Three. Four.

Then, as the bugle sounded “Right forward! fours right!” we moved off
at a walk through the melancholy mist that soaked through the very
fiber of man and horse, and reduced the minds of both to a condition of
limp indifference as to things past, present and future.

Whither we were going we knew not, nor cared. Such matters had long
since ceased to excite any interest. A cavalryman soon recognizes
as the least astonishing thing in his existence the signal to “Fall
in!” and start somewhere. He feels that he is the “Poor Joe” of the
Army--under perpetual orders to “move on.”

Down we wound over the road that zig-tagged through the forts,
batteries and rifle-pits covering the eastern ascent to the Flap-past
the wonderful Murrell Spring--so-called because the robber chief had
killed, as he stooped to drink of its crystal waters, a rich drover,
whom he was pretending to pilot through the mountains--down to where
the “Virginia road” turned off sharply to the left and entered Powell’s
Valley. The mist had become a chill, dreary rain, through, which we
plodded silently, until night closed in around us some ten miles from
the Gap. As we halted to go into camp, an indignant Virginian resented
the invasion of the sacred soil by firing at one of the guards moving
out to his place. The guard looked at the fellow contemptuously, as
if he hated to waste powder on a man who had no better sense than to
stay out in such a rain, when he could go in-doors, and the bushwhacker
escaped, without even a return shot.

Fires were built, coffee made, horses rubbed, and we laid down with
feet to the fire to get what sleep we could.

Before morning we were awakened by the bitter cold. It had cleared off
during the night and turned so cold that everything was frozen stiff.
This was better than the rain, at all events. A good fire and a hot cup
of coffee would make the cold quite endurable.

At daylight the bugle sounded “Right forward! fours right!” again, and
the 300 of us resumed our onward plod over the rocky, cedar-crowned
hills.

In the meantime, other things were taking place elsewhere. Our esteemed
friends of the Sixty-fourth Virginia, who were in camp at the little
town of Jonesville, about 40 miles from the Gap, had learned of our
starting up the Valley to drive them out, and they showed that warm
reciprocity characteristic of the Southern soldier, by mounting and
starting down the Valley to drive us out. Nothing could be more
harmonious, it will be perceived. Barring the trifling divergence of
yews as to who was to drive and who be driven, there was perfect accord
in our ideas.

Our numbers were about equal. If I were to say that they considerably
outnumbered us, I would be following the universal precedent. No
soldier-high or low-ever admitted engaging an equal or inferior force
of the enemy.

About 9 o’clock in the morning--Sunday--they rode through the streets
of Jonesville on their way to give us battle. It was here that most of
the members of the Regiment lived. Every man, woman and child in the
town was related in some way to nearly every one of the soldiers.

The women turned out to wave their fathers, husbands, brothers and
lovers on to victory. The old men gathered to give parting counsel and
encouragement to their sons and kindred. The Sixty-fourth rode away to
what hope told them would be a glorious victory.

At noon we are still straggling along without much attempt at soldierly
order, over the rough, frozen hill-sides. It is yet bitterly cold, and
men and horses draw themselves together, as if to expose as little
surface as possible to the unkind elements. Not a word had been spoken
by any one for hours.

The head of the column has just reached the top of the hill, and the
rest of us are strung along for a quarter of a mile or so back.

Suddenly a few shots ring out upon the frosty air from the carbines
of the advance. The general apathy is instantly, replaced by keen
attention, and the boys instinctively range themselves into fours--the
cavalry unit of action. The Major, who is riding about the middle of
the first Company--I--dashes to the front. A glance seems to satisfy
him, for he turns in his saddle and his voice rings out:

“Company I! FOURS LEFT INTO LINE!--MARCH!!”

The Company swings around on the hill-top like a great, jointed toy
snake. As the fours come into line on a trot, we see every man draw
his saber and revolver. The Company raises a mighty cheer and dashes
forward.

Company K presses forward to the ground Company I has just left,
the fours sweep around into line, the sabers and revolvers come out
spontaneously, the men cheer and the Company flings itself forward.

All this time we of Company L can see nothing except what the companies
ahead of us are doing. We are wrought up to the highest pitch. As
Company K clears its ground, we press forward eagerly. Now we go into
line just as we raise the hill, and as my four comes around, I catch
a hurried glimpse through a rift in the smoke of a line of butternut
and gray clad men a hundred yards or so away. Their guns are at their
faces, and I see the smoke and fire spurt from the muzzles. At the same
instant our sabers and revolvers are drawn. We shout in a frenzy of
excitement, and the horses spring forward as if shot from a bow.

I see nothing more until I reach the place where the Rebel line stood.
Then I find it is gone. Looking beyond toward the bottom of the hill,
I see the woods filled with Rebels, flying in disorder and our men
yelling in pursuit. This is the portion of the line which Companies
I and K struck. Here and there are men in butternut clothing, prone
on the frozen ground, wounded and dying. I have just time to notice
closely one middle-aged man lying almost under my horse’s feet. He has
received a carbine bullet through his head and his blood colors a great
space around him.

One brave man, riding a roan horse, attempts to rally his companions.
He halts on a little knoll, wheels his horse to face us, and waves his
hat to draw his companions to him. A tall, lank fellow in the next four
to me--who goes by the nickname of “’Leven Yards”--aims his carbine at
him, and, without checking his horse’s pace, fires. The heavy Sharpe’s
bullet tears a gaping hole through the Rebel’s heart. He drops from his
saddle, his life-blood runs down in little rills on either side of the
knoll, and his riderless horse dashes away in a panic.

At this instant comes an order for the Company to break up into fours
and press on through the forest in pursuit. My four trots off to the
road at the right. A Rebel bugler, who hag been cut off, leaps his
horse into the road in front of us. We all fire at him on the impulse
of the moment. He falls from his horse with a bullet through his back.
Company M, which has remained in column as a reserve, is now thundering
up close behind at a gallop. Its seventy-five powerful horses are
spurning the solid earth with steel-clad hoofs. The man will be ground
into a shapeless mass if left where he has fallen. We spring from our
horses and drag him into a fence corner; then remount and join in the
pursuit.

This happened on the summit of Chestnut Ridge, fifteen miles from
Jonesville.

Late in the afternoon the anxious watchers at Jonesville saw a single
fugitive urging his well-nigh spent horse down the slope of the hill
toward town. In an agony of anxiety they hurried forward to meet him
and learn his news.

The first messenger who rushed into Job’s presence to announce the
beginning of the series of misfortunes which were to afflict the
upright man of Uz is a type of all the cowards who, before or since
then, have been the first to speed away from the field of battle to
spread the news of disaster. He said:

    “And the Sabeans fell upon them, and took them away; yea, they have
    slain the servants with the edge of the sword; and I only am escaped
    alone to tell thee.”

So this fleeing Virginian shouted to his expectant friends:

“The boys are all cut to pieces; I’m the only one that got away.”

The terrible extent of his words was belied a little later, by the
appearance on the distant summit of the hill of a considerable mob
of fugitives, flying at the utmost speed of their nearly exhausted
horses. As they came on down the hill as almost equally disorganized
crowd of pursuers appeared on the summit, yelling in voices hoarse
with continued shouting, and pouring an incessant fire of carbine and
revolver bullets upon the hapless men of the Sixty-fourth Virginia.

The two masses of men swept on through the town. Beyond it, the road
branched in several directions, the pursued scattered on each of these,
and the worn-out pursuers gave up the chase.

Returning to Jonesville, we took an account of stock, and found that
we were “ahead” one hundred and fifteen prisoners, nearly that many
horses, and a considerable quantity of small arms. How many of the
enemy had been killed and wounded could not be told, as they were
scattered over the whole fifteen miles between where the fight occurred
and the pursuit ended. Our loss was trifling.

Comparing notes around the camp-fires in the evening, we found that
our success had been owing to the Major’s instinct, his grasp of the
situation, and the soldierly way in which he took advantage of it. When
he reached the summit of the hill he found the Rebel line nearly formed
and ready for action. A moment’s hesitation might have been fatal to
us. At his command Company I went into line with the thought-like
celerity of trained cavalry, and instantly dashed through the right
of the Rebel line. Company K followed and plunged through the Rebel
center, and when we of Company L arrived on the ground, and charged the
left, the last vestige of resistance was swept away. The whole affair
did not probably occupy more than fifteen minutes.

This was the way Powell’s Valley was opened to our foragers.




CHAPTER III.

LIVING OFF THE ENEMY--REVELING IN THE FATNESS OF THE COUNTRY--SOLDIERLY
PURVEYING AND CAMP COOKERY--SUSCEPTIBLE TEAMSTERS AND THEIR TENDENCY TO
FLIGHTINESS--MAKING SOLDIER’S BED.

For weeks we rode up and down--hither and thither--along the length
of the narrow, granite-walled Valley; between mountains so lofty that
the sun labored slowly over them in the morning, occupying half the
forenoon in getting to where his rays would reach the stream that ran
through the Valley’s center. Perpetual shadow reigned on the northern
and western faces of these towering Nights--not enough warmth and
sunshine reaching them in the cold months to check the growth of the
ever-lengthening icicles hanging from the jutting cliffs, or melt the
arabesque frost-forms with which the many dashing cascades decorated
the adjacent rocks and shrubbery. Occasionally we would see where some
little stream ran down over the face of the bare, black rocks for many
hundred feet, and then its course would be a long band of sheeny white,
like a great rich, spotless scarf of satin, festooning the war-grimed
walls of some old castle.

Our duty now was to break up any nuclei of concentration that the
Rebels might attempt to form, and to guard our foragers--that is, the
teamsters and employee of the Quartermaster’s Department--who were
loading grain into wagons and hauling it away.

This last was an arduous task. There is no man in the world that needs
as much protection as an Army teamster. He is worse in this respect
than a New England manufacturer, or an old maid on her travels. He is
given to sudden fears and causeless panics. Very innocent cedars have
a fashion of assuming in his eyes the appearance of desperate Rebels
armed with murderous guns, and there is no telling what moment a rock
may take such a form as to freeze his young blood, and make each
particular hair stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine.
One has to be particular about snapping caps in his neighborhood,
and give to him careful warning before discharging a carbine to
clean it. His first impulse, when anything occurs to jar upon his
delicate nerves, is to cut his wheel-mule loose and retire with the
precipitation of a man having an appointment to keep and being behind
time. There is no man who can get as much speed out of a mule as a
teamster falling back from the neighborhood of heavy firing.

This nervous tremor was not peculiar to the engineers of our
transportation department. It was noticeable in the gentry who carted
the scanty provisions of the Rebels. One of Wheeler’s cavalrymen told
me that the brigade to which he belonged was one evening ordered to
move at daybreak. The night was rainy, and it was thought best to
discharge the guns and reload before starting. Unfortunately, it was
neglected to inform the teamsters of this, and at the first discharge
they varnished from the scene with such energy that it was over a week
before the brigade succeeded in getting them back again.

Why association with the mule should thus demoralize a man, has
always been a puzzle to me, for while the mule, as Col. Ingersoll has
remarked, is an animal without pride of ancestry or hope of posterity,
he is still not a coward by any means. It is beyond dispute that a
full-grown and active lioness once attacked a mule in the grounds
of the Cincinnati Zoological Garden, and was ignominiously beaten,
receiving injuries from which she died shortly afterward.

The apparition of a badly-scared teamster urging one of his wheel mules
at break-neck speed over the rough ground, yelling for protection
against “them Johnnies,” who had appeared on some hilltop in sight of
where he was gathering corn, was an almost hourly occurrence. Of course
the squad dispatched to his assistance found nobody.

Still, there were plenty of Rebels in the country, and they hung around
our front, exchanging shots with us at long taw, and occasionally
treating us to a volley at close range, from some favorable point.
But we had the decided advantage of them at this game. Our Sharpe’s
carbines were much superior in every way to their Enfields. They
would shoot much farther, and a great deal more rapidly, so that the
Virginians were not long in discovering that they were losing more than
they gained in this useless warfare.

Once they played a sharp practical joke upon us. Copper River is a
deep, exceedingly rapid mountain stream, with a very slippery rocky
bottom. The Rebels blockaded a ford in such a way that it was almost
impossible for a horse to keep his feet. Then they tolled us off in
pursuit of a small party to this ford. When we came to it there was
a light line of skirmishers on the opposite bank, who popped away at
us industriously. Our boys formed in line, gave the customary, cheer,
and dashed in to carry the ford at a charge. As they did so at least
one-half of the horses went down as if they were shot, and rolled over
their riders in the swift running, ice-cold waters. The Rebels yelled
a triumphant laugh, as they galloped away, and the laugh was re-echoed
by our fellows, who were as quick to see the joke as the other side. We
tried to get even with them by a sharp chase, but we gave it up after a
few miles, without having taken any prisoners.

But, after all, there was much to make our sojourn in the Valley
endurable. Though we did not wear fine linen, we fared sumptuously--for
soldiers--every day. The cavalryman is always charged by the infantry
and artillery with having a finer and surer scent for the good things
in the country than any other man in the service. He is believed to
have an instinct that will unfailingly lead him, in the dankest night,
to the roosting place of the most desirable poultry, and after he has
camped in a neighborhood for awhile it would require a close chemical
analysis to find a trace of ham.

We did our best to sustain the reputation of our arm of the service.
We found the most delicious hams packed away in the ash-houses. They
were small, and had that; exquisite nutty flavor, peculiar to mast-fed
bacon. Then there was an abundance of the delightful little apple known
as “romanites.” There were turnips, pumpkins, cabbages, potatoes, and
the usual products of the field in plenty, even profusion. The corn
in the fields furnished an ample supply of breadstuff. We carried it
to and ground it in the quaintest, rudest little mills that can be
imagined outside of the primitive affairs by which the women of Arabia
coarsely powder the grain for the family meal. Sometimes the mill would
consist only of four stout posts thrust into the ground at the edge of
some stream. A line of boulders reaching diagonally across the stream
answered for a dam, by diverting a portion of the volume of water to a
channel at the side, where it moved a clumsily constructed wheel, that
turned two small stones, not larger than good-sized grindstones. Over
this would be a shed made by resting poles in forked posts stuck into
the ground, and covering these with clapboards held in place by large
flat stones. They resembled the mills of the gods--in grinding slowly.
It used to seem that a healthy man could eat the meal faster than they
ground it.

But what savory meals we used to concoct around the campfires, out of
the rich materials collected during the day’s ride! Such stews, such
soups, such broils, such wonderful commixtures of things diverse in
nature and antagonistic in properties such daring culinary experiments
in combining materials never before attempted to be combined. The
French say of untasteful arrangement of hues in dress “that the colors
swear at each other.” I have often thought the same thing of the
heterogeneities that go to make up a soldier’s pot-a feu.

But for all that they never failed to taste deliciously after a long
day’s ride. They were washed down by a tincupful of coffee strong
enough to tan leather, then came a brier-wood pipeful of fragrant
kinnikinnic, and a seat by the ruddy, sparkling fire of aromatic cedar
logs, that diffused at once warmth, and spicy, pleasing incense. A
chat over the events of the day, and the prospect of the morrow, the
wonderful merits of each man’s horse, and the disgusting irregularities
of the mails from home, lasted until the silver-voiced bugle rang out
the sweet, mournful tattoo of the Regulations, to the flowing cadences
of which the boys had arranged the absurdly incongruous words:

          “S-a-y--D-e-u-t-c-h-e-r-will-you fight-mit Sigel!
          Zwei-glass of lager-bier, ja! ja! JA!”

Words were fitted to all the calls, which generally bore some
relativeness to the signal, but these were as, destitute of congruity
as of sense.

Tattoo always produces an impression of extreme loneliness. As its
weird, half-availing notes ring out and are answered back from
the distant rocks shrouded in night, and perhaps concealing the
lurking foe, the soldier remembers that he is far away from home and
friends--deep in the enemy’s country, encompassed on every hand by
those in deadly hostility to him, who are perhaps even then maturing
the preparations for his destruction.

As the tattoo sounds, the boys arise from around the fire, visit the
horse line, see that their horses are securely tied, rub off from
the fetlocks and legs such specks of mud as may have escaped the
cleaning in the early evening, and if possible, smuggle their faithful
four-footed friends a few ears of corn, or another bunch of hay.

If not too tired, and everything else is favorable, the cavalryman has
prepared himself a comfortable couch for the night. He always sleeps
with a chum. The two have gathered enough small tufts of pine or cedar
to make a comfortable, springy, mattress-like foundation. On this is
laid the poncho or rubber blanket. Next comes one of their overcoats,
and upon this they lie, covering themselves with the two blankets and
the other overcoat, their feet towards the fire, their boots at the
foot, and their belts, with revolver, saber and carbine, at the sides
of the bed. It is surprising what an amount of comfort a man can get
out of such a couch, and how, at an alarm, he springs from it, almost
instantly dressed and armed.

Half an hour after tattoo the bugle rings out another sadly sweet
strain, that hath a dying sound.




CHAPTER IV.

A BITTER COLD MORNING AND A WARM AWAKENING--TROUBLE ALL ALONG THE LINE
--FIERCE CONFLICTS, ASSAULTS AND DEFENSE--PROLONGED AND DESPERATE
STRUGGLE ENDING WITH A SURRENDER.

The night had been the most intensely cold that the country had
known for many years. Peach and other tender trees had been killed
by the frosty rigor, and sentinels had been frozen to death in our
neighborhood. The deep snow on which we made our beds, the icy covering
of the streams near us, the limbs of the trees above us, had been
cracking with loud noises all night, from the bitter cold.

We were camped around Jonesville, each of the four companies lying on
one of the roads leading from the town. Company L lay about a mile from
the Court House. On a knoll at the end of the village toward us, and at
a point where two roads separated,--one of which led to us,--stood a
three-inch Rodman rifle, belonging to the Twenty-second Ohio Battery.
It and its squad of eighteen men, under command of Lieutenant Alger and
Sergeant Davis, had been sent up to us a few days before from the Gap.

The comfortless gray dawn was crawling sluggishly over the
mountain-tops, as if numb as the animal and vegetable life which had
been shrinking all the long hours under the fierce chill.

The Major’s bugler had saluted the morn with the lively, ringing
tarr-r-r-a-ta-ara of the Regulation reveille, and the company buglers,
as fast as they could thaw out their mouth-pieces, were answering him.

I lay on my bed, dreading to get up, and yet not anxious to lie still.
It was a question which would be the more uncomfortable. I turned over,
to see if there was not another position in which it would be warmer,
and began wishing for the thousandth time that the efforts for the
amelioration of the horrors of warfare would progress to such a point
as to put a stop to all Winter soldiering, so that a fellow could go
home as soon as cold weather began, sit around a comfortable stove in
a country store; and tell camp stories until the Spring was far enough
advanced to let him go back to the front wearing a straw hat and a
linen duster.

Then I began wondering how much longer I would dare lie there, before
the Orderly Sergeant would draw me out by the heels, and accompany the
operation with numerous unkind and sulphurous remarks.

This cogitation, was abruptly terminated by hearing an excited shout
from the Captain:

“Turn Out!--COMPANY L!! TURNOUT!!!”

Almost at the same instant rose that shrill, piercing Rebel yell, which
one who has once heard it rarely forgets, and this was followed by a
crashing volley from apparently a regiment of rifles.

I arose-promptly.

There was evidently something of more interest on hand than the weather.

Cap, overcoat, boots and revolver belt went on, and eyes opened at
about the same instant.

As I snatched up my carbine, I looked out in front, and the whole woods
appeared to be full of Rebels, rushing toward us, all yelling and some
firing. My Captain and First Lieutenant had taken up position on the
right front of the tents, and part of the boys were running up to form
a line alongside them. The Second Lieutenant had stationed himself on a
knoll on the left front, and about a third of the company was rallying
around him.

My chum was a silent, sententious sort of a chap, and as we ran forward
to the Captain’s line, he remarked earnestly:

“Well: this beats hell!”

I thought he had a clear idea of the situation.

All this occupied an inappreciably short space of time. The Rebels
had not stopped to reload, but were rushing impetuously toward us. We
gave them a hot, rolling volley from our carbines. Many fell, more
stopped to load and reply, but the mass surged straight forward at us.
Then our fire grew so deadly that they showed a disposition to cover
themselves behind the rocks and trees. Again they were urged forward;
and a body of them headed by their Colonel, mounted on a white horse,
pushed forward through the gap between us and the Second Lieutenant.
The Rebel Colonel dashed up to the Second Lieutenant, and ordered him
to surrender. The latter-a gallant old graybeard--cursed the Rebel
bitterly and snapped his now empty revolver in his face. The Colonel
fired and killed him, whereupon his squad, with two of its Sergeants
killed and half its numbers on the ground, surrendered.

The Rebels in our front and flank pressed us with equal closeness. It
seemed as if it was absolutely impossible to check their rush for an
instant, and as we saw the fate of our companions the Captain gave
the word for every man to look out for himself. We ran back a little
distance, sprang over the fence into the fields, and rushed toward
Town, the Rebels encouraging us to make good time by a sharp fire into
our backs from the fence.

While we were vainly attempting to stem the onset of the column dashed
against us, better success was secured elsewhere. Another column swept
down the other road, upon which there was only an outlying picket.
This had to come back on the run before the overwhelming numbers, and
the Rebels galloped straight for the three-inch Rodman. Company M was
the first to get saddled and mounted, and now came up at a steady,
swinging gallop, in two platoons, saber and revolver in hand, and led
by two Sergeants-Key and McWright,--printer boys from Bloomington,
Illinois. They divined the object of the Rebel dash, and strained every
nerve to reach the gun first. The Rebels were too near, and got the
gun and turned it. Before they could fire it, Company M struck them
headlong, but they took the terrible impact without flinching, and
for a few minutes there was fierce hand-to-hand work, with sword and
pistol. The Rebel leader sank under a half-dozen simultaneous wounds,
and fell dead almost under the gun. Men dropped from their horses each
instant, and the riderless steeds fled away. The scale of victory was
turned by the Major dashing against the Rebel left flank at the head of
Company I, and a portion of the artillery squad. The Rebels gave ground
slowly, and were packed into a dense mass in the lane up which they
had charged. After they had been crowded back, say fifty yards, word
was passed through our men to open to the right and left on the sides
of the road. The artillerymen had turned the gun and loaded it with a
solid shot. Instantly a wide lane opened through our ranks; the man
with the lanyard drew the fatal cord, fire burst from the primer and
the muzzle, the long gun sprang up and recoiled, and there seemed to
be a demoniac yell in its ear-splitting crash, as the heavy ball left
the mouth, and tore its bloody way through the bodies of the struggling
mass of men and horses.

This ended it. The Rebels gave way in disorder, and our men fell back
to give the gun an opportunity to throw shell and canister.

The Rebels now saw that we were not to be run over like a field of
cornstalks, and they fell back to devise further tactics, giving us a
breathing spell to get ourselves in shape for defense.

The dullest could see that we were in a desperate situation. Critical
positions were no new experience to us, as they never are to a cavalry
command after a few months in the field, but, though the pitcher goes
often to the well, it is broken at last, and our time was evidently at
hand. The narrow throat of the Valley, through which lay the road back
to the Gap, was held by a force of Rebels evidently much superior to
our own, and strongly posted. The road was a slender, tortuous one,
winding through rocks and gorges. Nowhere was there room enough to
move with even a platoon front against the enemy, and this precluded
all chances of cutting out. The best we could do was a slow, difficult
movement, in column of fours, and this would have been suicide. On the
other side of the Town the Rebels were massed stronger, while to the
right and left rose the steep mountain sides. We were caught-trapped as
surely as a rat ever was in a wire trap.

As we learned afterwards, a whole division of cavalry, under command of
the noted Rebel, Major General Sam Jones, had been sent to effect our
capture, to offset in a measure Longstreet’s repulse at Knoxville. A
gross overestimate of our numbers had caused the sending of so large a
force on this errand, and the rough treatment we gave the two columns
that attacked us first confirmed the Rebel General’s ideas of our
strength, and led him to adopt cautious tactics, instead of crushing us
out speedily, by a determined advance of all parts of his encircling
lines.

The lull in the fight did not last long. A portion of the Rebel line on
the east rushed forward to gain a more commanding position.

We concentrated in that direction and drove it back, the Rodman
assisting with a couple of well-aimed shells.--This was followed by a
similar but more successful attempt by another part of the Rebel line,
and so it went on all day--the Rebels rushing up first on this side,
and then on that, and we, hastily collecting at the exposed points,
seeking to drive them back. We were frequently successful; we were on
the inside, and had the advantage of the short interior lines, so that
our few men and our breech-loaders told to a good purpose.

There were frequent crises in the struggle, that at some times gave
encouragement, but never hope. Once a determined onset was made
from the East, and was met by the equally determined resistance of
nearly our whole force. Our fire was so galling that a large number
of our foes crowded into a house on a knoll, and making loopholes in
its walls, began replying to us pretty sharply. We sent word to our
faithful artillerists, who trained the gun upon the house. The first
shell screamed over the roof, and burst harmlessly beyond. We suspended
fire to watch the next. It crashed through the side; for an instant
all was deathly still; we thought it had gone on through. Then came a
roar and a crash; the clapboards flew off the roof, and smoke poured
out; panic-stricken Rebels rushed from the doors and sprang from the
windows--like bees from a disturbed hive; the shell had burst among
the confined mass of men inside! We afterwards heard that twenty-five
were killed there.

At another time a considerable force of rebels gained the cover of a
fence in easy range of our main force. Companies L and K were ordered
to charge forward on foot and dislodge them. Away we went, under a
fire that seemed to drop a man at every step. A hundred yards in front
of the Rebels was a little cover, and behind this our men lay down as
if by one impulse. Then came a close, desperate duel at short range.
It was a question between Northern pluck and Southern courage, as to
which could stand the most punishment. Lying as flat as possible on the
crusted snow, only raising the head or body enough to load and aim, the
men on both sides, with their teeth set, their glaring eyes fastened
on the foe, their nerves as tense as tightly-drawn steel wires, rained
shot on each other as fast as excited hands could crowd cartridges into
the guns and discharge them.

Not a word was said.

The shallower enthusiasm that expresses itself in oaths and shouts
had given way to the deep, voiceless rage of men in a death grapple.
The Rebel line was a rolling torrent of flame, their bullets shrieked
angrily as they flew past, they struck the snow in front of us,
and threw its cold flakes in faces that were white with the fires
of consuming hate; they buried themselves with a dull thud in the
quivering bodies of the enraged combatants.

Minutes passed; they seemed hours.

Would the villains, scoundrels, hell-hounds, sons of vipers never go?

At length a few Rebels sprang up and tried to fly. They were shot down
instantly.

Then the whole line rose and ran!

The relief was so great that we jumped to our feet and cheered wildly,
forgetting in our excitement to make use of our victory by shooting
down our flying enemies.

Nor was an element of fun lacking. A Second Lieutenant was ordered
to take a party of skirmishers to the top of a hill and engage those
of the Rebels stationed on another hill-top across a ravine. He had
but lately joined us from the Regular Army, where he was a Drill
Sergeant. Naturally, he was very methodical in his way, and scorned
to do otherwise under fire than he would upon the parade ground. He
moved his little command to the hill-top, in close order, and faced
them to the front. The Johnnies received them with a yell and a volley,
whereat the boys winced a little, much to the Lieutenant’s disgust, who
swore at them; then had them count off with great deliberation, and
deployed them as coolly as if them was not an enemy within a hundred
miles. After the line deployed, he “dressed” it, commanded “Front!” and
“Begin, firing!” his attention was called another way for an instant,
and when he looked back again, there was not a man of his nicely formed
skirmish line visible. The logs and stones had evidently been put there
for the use of skirmishers, the boys thought, and in an instant they
availed themselves of their shelter.

Never was there an angrier man than that Second Lieutenant; he
brandished his saber and swore; he seemed to feel that all his
soldierly reputation was gone, but the boys stuck to their shelter for
all that, informing him that when the Rebels would stand out in the
open field and take their fire, they would likewise.

Despite all our efforts, the Rebel line crawled up closer an closer to
us; we were driven back from knoll to knoll, and from one fence after
another. We had maintained the unequal struggle for eight hours; over
one-fourth of our number were stretched upon the snow, killed or badly
wounded. Our cartridges were nearly all gone; the cannon had fired its
last shot long ago, and having a blank cartridge left, had shot the
rammer at a gathering party of the enemy.

Just as the Winter sun was going down upon a day of gloom the bugle
called us all up on the hillside. Then the Rebels saw for the first
time how few there were, and began an almost simultaneous charge all
along the line. The Major raised piece of a shelter tent upon a pole.
The line halted. An officer rode out from it, followed by two privates.

Approaching the Major, he said, “Who is in command this force?”

The Major replied: “I am.”

“Then, Sir, I demand your sword.”

“What is your rank, Sir!”

“I am Adjutant of the Sixty-fourth Virginia.”

The punctillious soul of the old “Regular”--for such the Major was
swelled up instantly, and he answered:

“By ---, sir, I will never surrender to my inferior in rank!”

The Adjutant reined his horse back. His two followers leveled their
pieces at the Major and waited orders to fire. They were covered by a
dozen carbines in the hands of our men. The Adjutant ordered his men to
“recover arms,” and rode away with them. He presently returned with a
Colonel, and to him the Major handed his saber.

As the men realized what was being done, the first thought of many
of them was to snatch out the cylinder’s of their revolvers, and the
slides of their carbines, and throw them away, so as to make the arms
useless.

We were overcome with rage and humiliation at being compelled to yield
to an enemy whom we had hated so bitterly. As we stood there on the
bleak mountain-side, the biting wind soughing through the leafless
branches, the shadows of a gloomy winter night closing around us, the
groans and shrieks of our wounded mingling with the triumphant yells of
the Rebels plundering our tents, it seemed as if Fate could press to
man’s lips no cup with bitterer dregs in it than this.




CHAPTER V.

THE REACTION--DEPRESSION--BITTING COLD--SHARP HUNGER AND SAD REFLEXION.

          “Of being taken by the Insolent foe.”--Othello.


The night that followed was inexpressibly dreary: The high-wrought
nervous tension, which had been protracted through the long hours
that the fight lasted, was succeeded by a proportionate mental
depression, such as naturally follows any strain upon the mind.
This was intensified in our cases by the sharp sting of defeat, the
humiliation of having to yield ourselves, our horses and our arms into
the possession of the enemy, the uncertainty as to the future, and the
sorrow we felt at the loss of so many of our comrades.

Company L had suffered very severely, but our chief regret was for the
gallant Osgood, our Second Lieutenant. He, above all others, was our
trusted leader. The Captain and First Lieutenant were brave men, and
good enough soldiers, but Osgood was the one “whose adoption tried,
we grappled to our souls with hooks of steel.” There was never any
difficulty in getting all the volunteers he wanted for a scouting
party. A quiet, pleasant spoken gentleman, past middle age, he looked
much better fitted for the office of Justice of the Peace, to which
his fellow-citizens of Urbana, Illinois, had elected and reelected
him, than to command a troop of rough riders in a great civil war. But
none more gallant than he ever vaulted into saddle to do battle for
the right. He went into the Army solely as a matter of principle, and
did his duty with the unflagging zeal of an olden Puritan fighting for
liberty and his soul’s salvation. He was a superb horseman--as all the
older Illinoisans are and, for all his two-score years and ten, he
recognized few superiors for strength and activity in the Battalion. A
radical, uncompromising Abolitionist, he had frequently asserted that
he would rather die than yield to a Rebel, and he kept his word in this
as in everything else.

As for him, it was probably the way he desired to die. No one believed
more ardently than he that

               Whether on the scaffold high,
               Or in the battle’s van;
               The fittest place for man to die,
               Is where he dies for man.

Among the many who had lost chums and friends was Ned Johnson, of
Company K. Ned was a young Englishman, with much of the suggestiveness
of the bull-dog common to the lower class of that nation. His fist was
readier than his tongue. His chum, Walter Savage was of the same surly
type. The two had come from England twelve years before, and had been
together ever since. Savage was killed in the struggle for the fence
described in the preceding chapter. Ned could not realize for a while
that his friend was dead. It was only when the body rapidly stiffened
on its icy bed, and the eyes which had been gleaming deadly hate when
he was stricken down were glazed over with the dull film of death, that
he believed he was gone from him forever. Then his rage was terrible.
For the rest of the day he was at the head of every assault upon the
enemy. His voice could ever be heard above the firing, cursing the
Rebels bitterly, and urging the boys to “Stand up to ’em! Stand right
up to ’em! Don’t give a inch! Let them have the best you got in the
shop! Shoot low, and don’t waste a cartridge!”

When we surrendered, Ned seemed to yield sullenly to the inevitable.
He threw his belt and apparently his revolver with it upon the snow. A
guard was formed around us, and we gathered about the fires that were
started. Ned sat apart, his arms folded, his head upon his breast,
brooding bitterly upon Walter’s death. A horseman, evidently a Colonel
or General, clattered up to give some directions concerning us. At the
sound of his voice Ned raised his head and gave him a swift glance;
the gold stars upon the Rebel’s collar led him to believe that he was
the commander of the enemy. Ned sprang to his feet, made a long stride
forward, snatched from the breast of his overcoat the revolver he had
been hiding there, cocked it and leveled it at the Rebel’s breast.
Before he could pull the trigger Orderly Sergeant Charles Bentley, of
his Company, who was watching him, leaped forward, caught his wrist
and threw the revolver up. Others joined in, took the weapon away, and
handed it over to the officer, who then ordered us all to be searched
for arms, and rode away.

All our dejection could not make us forget that we were intensely
hungry. We had eaten nothing all day. The fight began before we had
time to get any breakfast, and of course there was no interval for
refreshments during the engagement. The Rebels were no better off than
we, having been marched rapidly all night in order to come upon us by
daylight.

Late in the evening a few sacks of meal were given us, and we took the
first lesson in an art that long and painful practice afterward was to
make very familiar to us. We had nothing to mix the meal in, and it
looked as if we would have to eat it dry, until a happy thought struck
some one that our caps would do for kneading troughs. At once every
cap was devoted to this. Getting water from an adjacent spring, each
man made a little wad of dough--unsalted--and spreading it upon a flat
stone or a chip, set it up in front of the fire to bake. As soon as it
was browned on one side, it was pulled off the stone, and the other
side turned to the fire. It was a very primitive way of cooking and I
became thoroughly disgusted with it. It was fortunate for me that I
little dreamed that this was the way I should have to get my meals for
the next fifteen months.

After somewhat of the edge had been taken off our hunger by this food,
we crouched around the fires, talked over the events of the day,
speculated as to what was to be done with us, and snatched such sleep
as the biting cold would permit.




CHAPTER VI.

“ON TO RICHMOND!”--MARCHING ON FOOT OVER THE MOUNTAINS--MY HORSE HAS A
NEW RIDER--UNSOPHISTICATED MOUNTAIN GIRLS--DISCUSSING THE ISSUES OF THE
WAR--PARTING WITH “HIATOGA.”

At dawn we were gathered together, more meal issued to us, which we
cooked in the same way, and then were started under heavy guard to
march on foot over the mountains to Bristol, a station at the point
where the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad crosses the line between
Virginia and Tennessee.

As we were preparing to set out a Sergeant of the First Virginia
cavalry came galloping up to us on my horse! The sight of my faithful
“Hiatoga” bestrid by a Rebel, wrung my heart. During the action I had
forgotten him, but when it ceased I began to worry about his fate. As
he and his rider came near I called out to him; he stopped and gave
a whinny of recognition, which seemed also a plaintive appeal for an
explanation of the changed condition of affairs.

The Sergeant was a pleasant, gentlemanly boy of about my own age. He
rode up to me and inquired if it was my horse, to which I replied in
the affirmative, and asked permission to take from the saddle pockets
some letters, pictures and other trinkets. He granted this, and we
became friends from thence on until we separated. He rode by my side as
we plodded over the steep, slippery hills, and we beguiled the way by
chatting of the thousand things that soldiers find to talk about, and
exchanged reminiscences of the service on both sides. But the subject
he was fondest of was that which I relished least: my--now his--horse.
Into the open ulcer of my heart he poured the acid of all manner of
questions concerning my lost steed’s qualities and capabilities: would
he swim? how was he in fording? did he jump well! how did he stand
fire? I smothered my irritation, and answered as pleasantly as I could.

In the afternoon of the third day after the capture, we came up to
where a party of rustic belles were collected at “quilting.” The
“Yankees” were instantly objects of greater interest than the parade of
a menagerie would have been. The Sergeant told the girls we were going
to camp for the night a mile or so ahead, and if they would be at a
certain house, he would have a Yankee for them for close inspection.
After halting, the Sergeant obtained leave to take me out with a
guard, and I was presently ushered into a room in which the damsels
were massed in force, --a carnation-checked, staring, open-mouthed,
linsey-clad crowd, as ignorant of corsets and gloves as of Hebrew, and
with a propensity to giggle that was chronic and irrepressible. When
we entered the room there was a general giggle, and then a shower of
comments upon my appearance,--each sentence punctuated with the chorus
of feminine cachination. A remark was made about my hair and eyes, and
their risibles gave way; judgment was passed on my nose, and then came
a ripple of laughter. I got very red in the face, and uncomfortable
generally. Attention was called to the size of my feet and hands, and
the usual chorus followed. Those useful members of my body seemed to
swell up as they do to a young man at his first party.

Then I saw that in the minds of these bucolic maidens I was scarcely,
if at all, human; they did not understand that I belonged to the
race; I was a “Yankee”--a something of the non-human class, as the
gorilla or the chimpanzee. They felt as free to discuss my points
before my face as they would to talk of a horse or a wild animal in a
show. My equanimity was partially restored by this reflection, but I
was still too young to escape embarrassment and irritation at being
thus dissected and giggled at by a party of girls, even if they were
ignorant Virginia mountaineers.

I turned around to speak to the Sergeant, and in so doing showed my
back to the ladies. The hum of comment deepened into surprise, that
half stopped and then intensified the giggle.

I was puzzled for a minute, and then the direction of their glances,
and their remarks explained it all. At the rear of the lower part of
the cavalry jacket, about where the upper ornamental buttons are on
the tail of a frock coat, are two funny tabs, about the size of small
pin-cushions. They are fastened by the edge, and stick out straight
behind. Their use is to support the heavy belt in the rear, as the
buttons do in front. When the belt is off it would puzzle the Seven
Wise Men to guess what they are for. The unsophisticated young ladies,
with that swift intuition which is one of lovely woman’s salient mental
traits, immediately jumped at the conclusion that the projections
covered some peculiar conformation of the Yankee anatomy--some
incipient, dromedary-like humps, or perchance the horns of which they
had heard so much.

This anatomical phenomena was discussed intently for a few minutes,
during which I heard one of the girls inquire whether “it would hurt
him to cut ’em off?” and another hazarded the opinion that “it would
probably bleed him to death.”

Then a new idea seized them, and they said to the Sergeant “Make him
sing! Make him sing!”

This was too much for the Sergeant, who had been intensely amused at
the girls’ wonderment. He turned to me, very red in the face, with:

“Sergeant: the girls want to hear you sing.”

I replied that I could not sing a note. Said he:

“Oh, come now. I know better than that; I never seed or heerd of a
Yankee that couldn’t sing.”

I nevertheless assured him that there really were some Yankees that
did not have any musical accomplishments, and that I was one of that
unfortunate number. I asked him to get the ladies to sing for me, and
to this they acceded quite readily. One girl, with a fair soprano, who
seemed to be the leader of the crowd, sang “The Homespun Dress,” a song
very popular in the South, and having the same tune as the “Bonnie Blue
Flag.” It began,

               I envy not the Northern girl
               Their silks and jewels fine,

and proceeded to compare the homespun habiliments of the Southern women
to the finery and frippery of the ladies on the other side of Mason and
Dixon’s line in a manner very disadvantageous to the latter.

The rest of the girls made a fine exhibition of the lung-power acquired
in climbing their precipitous mountains, when they came in on the chorus

               Hurra! Hurra! for southern rights Hurra!
               Hurra for the homespun dress,
               The Southern ladies wear.

This ended the entertainment.

On our journey to Bristol we met many Rebel soldiers, of all ranks, and
a small number of citizens. As the conscription had then been enforced
pretty sharply for over a year the only able-bodied men seen in civil
life were those who had some trade which exempted them from being
forced into active service. It greatly astonished us at first to find
that nearly all the mechanics were included among the exempts, or could
be if they chose; but a very little reflection showed us the wisdom of
such a policy. The South is as nearly a purely agricultural country
as is Russia or South America. The people have, little inclination
or capacity for anything else than pastoral pursuits. Consequently
mechanics are very scarce, and manufactories much scarcer. The limited
quantity of products of mechanical skill needed by the people was
mostly imported from the North or Europe. Both these sources of supply
were cutoff by the war, and the country was thrown upon its own slender
manufacturing resources. To force its mechanics into the army would
therefore be suicidal. The Army would gain a few thousand men, but its
operations would be embarrassed, if not stopped altogether, by a want
of supplies. This condition of affairs reminded one of the singular
paucity of mechanical skill among the Bedouins of the desert, which
renders the life of a blacksmith sacred. No matter how bitter the feud
between tribes, no one will kill the other’s workers of iron, and
instances are told of warriors saving their lives at critical periods
by falling on their knees and making with their garments an imitation
of the action of a smith’s bellows.

All whom we met were eager to discuss with us the causes, phases and
progress of the war, and whenever opportunity offered or could be
made, those of us who were inclined to talk were speedily involved in
an argument with crowds of soldiers and citizens. But, owing to the
polemic poverty of our opponents, the argument was more in name than
in fact. Like all people of slender or untrained intellectual powers
they labored under the hallucination that asserting was reasoning, and
the emphatic reiteration of bald statements, logic. The narrow round
which all from highest to lowest--traveled was sometimes comical, and
sometimes irritating, according to one’s mood! The dispute invariably
began by their asking:

“Well, what are you ’uns down here a-fightin’ we ’uns for?”

As this was replied to the newt one followed:

“Why are you’uns takin’ our niggers away from we ’uns for?”

Then came:

“What do you ’uns put our niggers to fightin’ we’uns for?” The windup
always was: “Well, let me tell you, sir, you can never whip people that
are fighting for liberty, sir.”

Even General Giltner, who had achieved considerable military reputation
as commander of a division of Kentucky cavalry, seemed to be as
slenderly furnished with logical ammunition as the balance, for as he
halted by us he opened the conversation with the well-worn formula:

“Well: what are you ’uns down here a-fighting we’uns for?”

The question had become raspingly monotonous to me, whom he addressed,
and I replied with marked acerbity:

“Because we are the Northern mudsills whom you affect to despise, and
we came down here to lick you into respecting us.”

The answer seemed to tickle him, a pleasanter light came into his
sinister gray eyes, he laughed lightly, and bade us a kindly good day.

Four days after our capture we arrived in Bristol. The guards who had
brought us over the mountains were relieved by others, the Sergeant
bade me good by, struck his spurs into “Hiatoga’s” sides, and he and my
faithful horse were soon lost to view in the darkness.

A new and keener sense of desolation came over me at the final
separation from my tried and true four-footed friend, who had been
my constant companion through so many perils and hardships. We had
endured together the Winter’s cold, the dispiriting drench of the rain,
the fatigue of the long march, the discomforts of the muddy camp, the
gripings of hunger, the weariness of the drill and review, the perils
of the vidette post, the courier service, the scout and the fight. We
had shared in common

               The whips and scorns of time,
               The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
               The insolence of office, and the spurns

which a patient private and his horse of the unworthy take; we had had
our frequently recurring rows with other fellows and their horses, over
questions of precedence at watering places, and grass-plots, had had
lively tilts with guards of forage piles in surreptitious attempts to
get additional rations, sometimes coming off victorious and sometimes
being driven off ingloriously. I had often gone hungry that he might
have the only ear of corn obtainable. I am not skilled enough in horse
lore to speak of his points or pedigree. I only know that his strong
limbs never failed me, and that he was always ready for duty and ever
willing.

Now at last our paths diverged. I was retired from actual service to
a prison, and he bore his new master off to battle against his old
friends.

               ...........................

Packed closely in old, dilapidated stock and box cars, as if cattle
in shipment to market, we pounded along slowly, and apparently
interminably, toward the Rebel capital.

The railroads of the South were already in very bad condition. They
were never more than passably good, even in their best estate, but now,
with a large part of the skilled men engaged upon them escaped back to
the North, with all renewal, improvement, or any but the most necessary
repairs stopped for three years, and with a marked absence of even
ordinary skill and care in their management, they were as nearly ruined
as they could well be and still run.

One of the severe embarrassments under which the roads labored was
a lack of oil. There is very little fatty matter of any kind in the
South. The climate and the food plants do not favor the accumulation of
adipose tissue by animals, and there is no other source of supply. Lard
oil and tallow were very scarce and held at exorbitant prices.

Attempts were made to obtain lubricants from the peanut and the cotton
seed. The first yielded a fine bland oil, resembling the ordinary grade
of olive oil, but it was entirely too expensive for use in the arts.
The cotton seed oil could be produced much cheaper, but it had in it
such a quantity of gummy matter as to render it worse than useless for
employment on machinery.

This scarcity of oleaginous matter produced a corresponding scarcity of
soap and similar detergents, but this was a deprivation which caused
the Rebels, as a whole, as little inconvenience as any that they
suffered from. I have seen many thousands of them who were obviously
greatly in need of soap, but if they were rent with any suffering on
that account they concealed it with marvelous self-control.

There seemed to be a scanty supply of oil provided for the locomotives,
but the cars had to run with unlubricated axles, and the screaking and
groaning of the grinding journals in the dry boxes was sometimes almost
deafening, especially when we were going around a curve.

Our engine went off the wretched track several times, but as she was
not running much faster than a man could walk, the worst consequence to
us was a severe jolting. She was small, and was easily pried back upon
the track, and sent again upon her wheezy, straining way.

The depression which had weighed us down for a night and a day after
our capture had now been succeeded by a more cheerful feeling. We began
to look upon our condition as the fortune of war. We were proud of our
resistance to overwhelming numbers. We knew we had sold ourselves at a
price which, if the Rebels had it to do over again, they would not pay
for us. We believed that we had killed and seriously wounded as many
of them as they had killed, wounded and captured of us. We had nothing
to blame ourselves for. Moreover, we began to be buoyed up with the
expectation that we would be exchanged immediately upon our arrival at
Richmond, and the Rebel officers confidently assured us that this would
be so. There was then a temporary hitch in the exchange, but it would
all be straightened out in a few days, and it might not be a month
until we were again marching out of Cumberland Gap, on an avenging
foray against some of the force which had assisted in our capture.

Fortunately for this delusive hopefulness there was no weird and boding
Cassandra to pierce the veil of the future for us, and reveal the
length and the ghastly horror of the Valley of the Shadow of Death,
through which we must pass for hundreds of sad days, stretching out
into long months of suffering and death. Happily there was no one to
tell us that of every five in that party four would never stand under
the Stars and Stripes again, but succumbing to chronic starvation,
long-continued exposure, the bullet of the brutal guard, the loathsome
scurvy, the hideous gangrene, and the heartsickness of hope deferred,
would find respite from pain low in the barren sands of that hungry
Southern soil.

Were every doom foretokened by appropriate omens, the ravens along our
route would have croaked themselves hoarse.

But, far from being oppressed by any presentiment of coming evil, we
began to appreciate and enjoy the picturesque grandeur of the scenery
through which we were moving. The rugged sternness of the Appalachian
mountain range, in whose rock-ribbed heart we had fought our losing
fight, was now softening into less strong, but more graceful outlines
as we approached the pine-clad, sandy plains of the seaboard, upon
which Richmond is built. We were skirting along the eastern base of
the great Blue Ridge, about whose distant and lofty summits hung a
perpetual veil of deep, dark, but translucent blue, which refracted the
slanting rays of the morning and evening sun into masses of color more
gorgeous than a dreamer’s vision of an enchanted land. At Lynchburg
we saw the famed Peaks of Otter--twenty miles away--lifting their
proud heads far into the clouds, like giant watch-towers sentineling
the gateway that the mighty waters of the James had forced through
the barriers of solid adamant lying across their path to the far-off
sea. What we had seen many miles back start from the mountain sides
as slender rivulets, brawling over the worn boulders, were now great,
rushing, full-tide streams, enough of them in any fifty miles of our
journey to furnish water power for all the factories of New England.
Their amazing opulence of mechanical energy has lain unutilized, almost
unnoticed; in the two and one-half centuries that the white man has
dwelt near them, while in Massachusetts and her near neighbors every
rill that can turn a wheel has been put into harness and forced to do
its share of labor for the benefit of the men who have made themselves
its masters.

Here is one of the differences between the two sections: In the North
man was set free, and the elements made to do his work. In the South
man was the degraded slave, and the elements wantoned on in undisturbed
freedom.

As we went on, the Valleys of the James and the Appomattox, down which
our way lay, broadened into an expanse of arable acres, and the faces
of those streams were frequently flecked by gem-like little islands.




CHAPTER VII.

ENTERING RICHMOND--DISAPPOINTMENT AT ITS APPEARANCE--EVERYBODY IN
UNIFORM--CURLED DARLINGS OF THE CAPITAL--THE REBEL FLAG--LIBBY PRISON
--DICK TURNER--SEARCHING THE NEW COMERS.

Early on the tenth morning after our capture we were told that we were
about to enter Richmond. Instantly all were keenly observant of every
detail in the surroundings of a City that was then the object of the
hopes and fears of thirty-five millions of people--a City assailing
which seventy-five thousand brave men had already laid down their
lives, defending which an equal number had died, and which, before
it fell, was to cost the life blood of another one hundred and fifty
thousand valiant assailants and defenders.

So much had been said and written about Richmond that our boyish
minds had wrought up the most extravagant expectations of it and its
defenses. We anticipated seeing a City differing widely from anything
ever seen before; some anomaly of nature displayed in its site, itself
guarded by imposing and impregnable fortifications, with powerful forts
and heavy guns, perhaps even walls, castles, postern gates, moats and
ditches, and all the other panoply of defensive warfare, with which
romantic history had made us familiar.

We were disappointed--badly disappointed--in seeing nothing of this
as we slowly rolled along. The spires and the tall chimneys of the
factories rose in the distance very much as they had in other Cities
we had visited. We passed a single line of breastworks of bare yellow
sand, but the scrubby pines in front were not cut away, and there were
no signs that there had ever been any immediate expectation of use
for the works. A redoubt or two--without guns--could be made out, and
this was all. Grim-visaged war had few wrinkles on his front in that
neighborhood. They were then seaming his brow on the Rappahannock,
seventy miles away, where the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of
the Potomac lay confronting each other.

At one of the stopping places I had been separated from my companions
by entering a car in which were a number of East Tennesseeans, captured
in the operations around Knoxville, and whom the Rebels, in accordance
with their usual custom, were treating with studied contumely. I had
always had a very warm side for these simple rustics of the mountains
and valleys. I knew much of their unwavering fidelity to the Union, of
the firm steadfastness with which they endured persecution for their
country’s sake, and made sacrifices even unto death; and, as in those
days I estimated all men simply by their devotion to the great cause
of National integrity, (a habit that still clings to me) I rated these
men very highly. I had gone into their car to do my little to encourage
them, and when I attempted to return to my own I was prevented by the
guard.

Crossing the long bridge, our train came to a halt on the other side
of the river with the usual clamor of bell and whistle, the usual
seemingly purposeless and vacillating, almost dizzying, running
backward and forward on a network of sidetracks and switches, that
seemed unavoidably necessary, a dozen years ago, in getting a train
into a City.

Still unable to regain my comrades and share their fortunes, I was
marched off with the Tennesseeans through the City to the office of
some one who had charge of the prisoners of war.

The streets we passed through were lined with retail stores, in which
business was being carried on very much as in peaceful times. Many
people were on the streets, but the greater part of the men wore some
sort of a uniform. Though numbers of these were in active service, yet
the wearing of a military garb did not necessarily imply this. Nearly
every able-bodied man in Richmond was; enrolled in some sort of an
organization, and armed, and drilled regularly. Even the members of the
Confederate Congress were uniformed and attached, in theory at least,
to the Home Guards.

It was obvious even to the casual glimpse of a passing prisoner of war,
that the City did not lack its full share of the class which formed
so large an element of the society of Washington and other Northern
Cities during the war--the dainty carpet soldiers, heros of the
promenade and the boudoir, who strutted in uniforms when the enemy was
far off, and wore citizen’s clothes when he was close at hand. There
were many curled darlings displaying their fine forms in the nattiest
of uniforms, whose gloss had never suffered from so much as a heavy
dew, let alone a rainy day on the march. The Confederate gray could be
made into a very dressy garb. With the sleeves lavishly embroidered
with gold lace, and the collar decorated with stars indicating the
wearer’s rank--silver for the field officers, and gold for the higher
grade,--the feet compressed into high-heeled, high-instepped boots,
(no Virginian is himself without a fine pair of skin-tight boots)
and the head covered with a fine, soft, broad-brimmed hat, trimmed
with a gold cord, from which a bullion tassel dangled several inches
down the wearer’s back, you had a military swell, caparisoned for
conquest--among the fair sex.

On our way we passed the noted Capitol of Virginia--a handsome marble
building,--of the column-fronted Grecian temple style. It stands
in the center of the City. Upon the grounds is Crawford’s famous
equestrian statue of Washington, surrounded by smaller statues of other
Revolutionary patriots.

The Confederate Congress was then in session in the Capitol, and also
the Legislature of Virginia, a fact indicated by the State flag of
Virginia floating from the southern end of the building, and the new
flag of the Confederacy from the northern end. This was the first time
I had seen the latter, which had been recently adopted, and I examined
it with some interest. The design was exceedingly plain. Simply a white
banner, with a red field in the corner where the blue field with stars
is in ours. The two blue stripes were drawn diagonally across this
field in the shape of a letter X, and in these were thirteen white
stars, corresponding to the number of States claimed to be in the
Confederacy.

The battle-flag was simply the red field. My examination of all this
was necessarily very brief. The guards felt that I was in Richmond
for other purposes than to study architecture, statuary and heraldry,
and besides they were in a hurry to be relieved of us and get their
breakfast, so my art-education was abbreviated sharply.

We did not excite much attention on the streets. Prisoners had by that
time become too common in Richmond to create any interest. Occasionally
passers by would fling opprobrious epithets at “the East Tennessee
traitors,” but that was all.

The commandant of the prisons directed the Tennesseeans to be taken to
Castle Lightning--a prison used to confine the Rebel deserters, among
whom they also classed the East Tennesseeans, and sometimes the West
Virginians, Kentuckians, Marylanders and Missourians found fighting
against them. Such of our men as deserted to them were also lodged
there, as the Rebels, very properly, did not place a high estimate upon
this class of recruits to their army, and, as we shall see farther
along, violated all obligations of good faith with them, by putting
them among the regular prisoners of war, so as to exchange them for
their own men.

Back we were all marched to a street which ran parallel to the river
and canal, and but one square away from them. It was lined on both
sides by plain brick warehouses and tobacco factories, four and five
stories high, which were now used by the Rebel Government as prisons
and military storehouses.

The first we passed was Castle Thunder, of bloody repute. This occupied
the same place in Confederate history, that, the dungeons beneath the
level of the water did in the annals of the Venetian Council of Ten. It
was believed that if the bricks in its somber, dirt-grimed walls could
speak, each could tell a separate story of a life deemed dangerous to
the State that had gone down in night, at the behest of the ruthless
Confederate authorities. It was confidently asserted that among the
commoner occurrences within its confines was the stationing of a doomed
prisoner against a certain bit of blood-stained, bullet-chipped wall,
and relieving the Confederacy of all farther fear of him by the rifles
of a firing party. How well this dark reputation was deserved, no one
but those inside the inner circle of the Davis Government can say. It
is safe to believe that more tragedies were enacted there than the
archives of the Rebel civil or military judicature give any account of.
The prison was employed for the detention of spies, and those charged
with the convenient allegation of “treason against the Confederate
States of America.” It is probable that many of these were sent out
of the world with as little respect for the formalities of law as was
exhibited with regard to the ‘suspects’ during the French Revolution.

Next we came to Castle Lightning, and here I bade adieu to my Tennessee
companions.

A few squares more and we arrived at a warehouse larger than any of the
others. Over the door was a sign

                    THOMAS LIBBY & SON,
                 SHIP CHANDLERS AND GROCERS.

This was the notorious “Libby Prison,” whose name was painfully
familiar to every Union man in the land. Under the sign was a broad
entrance way, large enough to admit a dray or a small wagon. On one
side of this was the prison office, in which were a number of dapper,
feeble-faced clerks at work on the prison records.

As I entered this space a squad of newly arrived prisoners were being
searched for valuables, and having their names, rank and regiment
recorded in the books. Presently a clerk addressed as “Majah Tunnah,”
the man who was superintending these operations, and I scanned him
with increased interest, as I knew then that he was the ill-famed Dick
Turner, hated all over the North for his brutality to our prisoners.

He looked as if he deserved his reputation. Seen upon the street he
would be taken for a second or third class gambler, one in whom a
certain amount of cunning is pieced out by a readiness to use brute
force. His face, clean-shaved, except a “Bowery-b’hoy” goatee, was
white, fat, and selfishly sensual. Small, pig-like eyes, set close
together, glanced around continually. His legs were short, his body
long, and made to appear longer, by his wearing no vest--a custom
common them with Southerners.

His faculties were at that moment absorbed in seeing that no person
concealed any money from him. His subordinates did not search closely
enough to suit him, and he would run his fat, heavily-ringed fingers
through the prisoner’s hair, feel under their arms and elsewhere where
he thought a stray five dollar greenback might be concealed. But with
all his greedy care he was no match for Yankee cunning. The prisoners
told me afterward that, suspecting they would be searched, they had
taken off the caps of the large, hollow brass buttons of their coats,
carefully folded a bill into each cavity, and replaced the cap. In this
way they brought in several hundred dollars safely.

There was one dirty old Englishman in the party, who, Turner was
convinced, had money concealed about his person. He compelled him to
strip off everything, and stand shivering in the sharp cold, while he
took up one filthy rag after another, felt over each carefully, and
scrutinized each seam and fold. I was delighted to see that after all
his nauseating work he did not find so much as a five cent piece.

It came my turn. I had no desire, in that frigid atmosphere, to strip
down to what Artemus Ward called “the skanderlous costoom of the Greek
Slave;” so I pulled out of my pocket my little store of wealth--ten
dollars in greenbacks, sixty dollars in Confederate graybacks--and
displayed it as Turner came up with, “There’s all I have, sir.” Turner
pocketed it without a word, and did not search me. In after months,
when I was nearly famished, my estimation of “Majah Tunnah” was hardly
enhanced by the reflection that what would have purchased me many good
meals was probably lost by him in betting on a pair of queens, when his
opponent held a “king full.”

I ventured to step into the office to inquire after my comrades.
One of the whey-faced clerks said with the supercilious asperity
characteristic of gnat-brained headquarters attaches:

“Get out of here!” as if I had been a stray cur wandering in in search
of a bone lunch.

I wanted to feed the fellow to a pile-driver. The utmost I could hope
for in the way of revenge was that the delicate creature might some day
make a mistake in parting his hair, and catch his death of cold.

The guard conducted us across the street, and into the third story of
a building standing on the next corner below. Here I found about four
hundred men, mostly belonging to the Army of the Potomac, who crowded
around me with the usual questions to new prisoners: What was my
Regiment, where and when captured, and:

What were the prospects of exchange?

It makes me shudder now to recall how often, during the dreadful months
that followed, this momentous question was eagerly propounded to every
new comer: put with bated breath by men to whom exchange meant all that
they asked of this world, and possibly of the next; meant life, home,
wife or sweet-heart, friends, restoration to manhood, and self-respect
--everything, everything that makes existence in this world worth
having.

I answered as simply and discouragingly as did the tens of thousands
that came after me:

“I did not hear anything about exchange.”

A soldier in the field had many other things of more immediate interest
to think about than the exchange of prisoners. The question only became
a living issue when he or some of his intimate friends fell into the
enemy’s hands.

Thus began my first day in prison.




CHAPTER VIII.

INTRODUCTION TO PRISON LIFE--THE PEMBERTON BUILDING AND ITS
OCCUPANTS --NEAT SAILORS--ROLL CALL--RATIONS AND CLOTHING--CHIVALRIC
“CONFISCATION.”

I began acquainting myself with my new situation and surroundings. The
building into which I had been conducted was an old tobacco factory,
called the “Pemberton building,” possibly from an owner of that name,
and standing on the corner of what I was told were Fifteenth and Carey
streets. In front it was four stories high; behind but three, owing to
the rapid rise of the hill, against which it was built.

It fronted towards the James River and Kanawha Canal, and the James
River--both lying side by side, and only one hundred yards distant,
with no intervening buildings. The front windows afforded a fine view.
To the right front was Libby, with its guards pacing around it on the
sidewalk, watching the fifteen hundred officers confined within its
walls. At intervals during each day squads of fresh prisoners could
be seen entering its dark mouth, to be registered, and searched, and
then marched off to the prison assigned them. We could see up the James
River for a mile or so, to where the long bridges crossing it bounded
the view. Directly in front, across the river, was a flat, sandy plain,
said to be General Winfield Scott’s farm, and now used as a proving
ground for the guns cast at the Tredegar Iron Works.

The view down the river was very fine. It extended about twelve miles,
to where a gap in the woods seemed to indicate a fort, which we
imagined to be Fort Darling, at that time the principal fortification
defending the passage of the James.

Between that point and where we were lay the river, in a long, broad
mirror-like expanse, like a pretty little inland lake. Occasionally
a busy little tug would bustle up or down, a gunboat move along with
noiseless dignity, suggestive of a reserved power, or a schooner
beat lazily from one side to the other. But these were so few as to
make even more pronounced the customary idleness that hung over the
scene. The tug’s activity seemed spasmodic and forced--a sort of
protest against the gradually increasing lethargy that reigned upon
the bosom of the waters --the gunboat floated along as if performing
a perfunctory duty, and the schooners sailed about as if tired of
remaining in one place. That little stretch of water was all that was
left for a cruising ground. Beyond Fort Darling the Union gunboats
lay, and the only vessel that passed the barrier was the occasional
flag-of-truce steamer.

The basement of the building was occupied as a store-house for the
taxes-in-kind which the Confederate Government collected. On the first
floor were about five hundred men. On the second floor--where I was
--were about four hundred men. These were principally from the First
Division, First Corps distinguished by a round red patch on their
caps; First Division, Second Corps, marked by a red clover leaf; and
the First Division, Third Corps, who wore a red diamond. They were
mainly captured at Gettysburg and Mine Run. Besides these there was
a considerable number from the Eighth Corps, captured at Winchester,
and a large infusion of Cavalry-First, Second and Third West
Virginia--taken in Averill’s desperate raid up the Virginia Valley,
with the Wytheville Salt Works as an objective.

On the third floor were about two hundred sailors and marines, taken
in the gallant but luckless assault upon the ruins of Fort Sumter, in
the September previous. They retained the discipline of the ship in
their quarters, kept themselves trim and clean, and their floor as
white as a ship’s deck. They did not court the society of the “sojers”
below, whose camp ideas of neatness differed from theirs. A few old
barnacle-backs always sat on guard around the head of the steps leading
from the lower rooms. They chewed tobacco enormously, and kept their
mouths filled with the extracted juice. Any luckless “sojer” who
attempted to ascend the stairs usually returned in haste, to avoid the
deluge of the filthy liquid.

For convenience in issuing rations we were divided into messes of
twenty, each mess electing a Sergeant as its head, and each floor
electing a Sergeant-of-the-Floor, who drew rations and enforced what
little discipline was observed.

Though we were not so neat as the sailors above us, we tried to keep
our quarters reasonably clean, and we washed the floor every morning;
getting down on our knees and rubbing it clean and dry with rags.
Each mess detailed a man each day to wash up the part of the floor it
occupied, and he had to do this properly or no ration would be given
him. While the washing up was going on each man stripped himself
and made close examination of his garments for the body-lice, which
otherwise would have increased beyond control. Blankets were also
carefully hunted over for these “small deer.”

About eight o’clock a spruce little lisping rebel named Ross would
appear with a book, and a body-guard, consisting of a big Irishman,
who had the air of a Policeman, and carried a musket barrel made
into a cane. Behind him were two or three armed guards. The
Sergeant-of-the-Floor commanded:

“Fall in in four ranks for roll-call.”

We formed along one side of the room; the guards halted at the head of
the stairs; Ross walked down in front and counted the files, closely
followed by his Irish aid, with his gun-barrel cane raised ready for
use upon any one who should arouse his ruffianly ire. Breaking ranks
we returned to our places, and sat around in moody silence for three
hours. We had eaten nothing since the previous noon. Rising hungry, our
hunger seemed to increase in arithmetical ratio with every quarter of
an hour.

These times afforded an illustration of the thorough subjection of
man to the tyrant Stomach. A more irritable lot of individuals could
scarcely be found outside of a menagerie than these men during the
hours waiting for rations. “Crosser than, two sticks” utterly failed
as a comparison. They were crosser than the lines of a check apron.
Many could have given odds to the traditional bear with a sore head,
and run out of the game fifty points ahead of him. It was astonishingly
easy to get up a fight at these times. There was no need of going
a step out of the way to search for it, as one could have a full
fledged article of overwhelming size on his hands at any instant, by
a trifling indiscretion of speech or manner. All the old irritating
flings between the cavalry, the artillery and the infantry, the older
“first-call” men, and the later or “Three-Hundred-Dollar-men,” as
they were derisively dubbed, between the different corps of the Army
of the Potomac, between men of different States, and lastly between
the adherents and opponents of McClellan, came to the lips and were
answered by a blow with the fist, when a ring would be formed around
the combatants by a crowd, which would encourage them with yells to do
their best. In a few minutes one of the parties to the fistic debate,
who found the point raised by him not well taken, would retire to the
sink to wash the blood from his battered face, and the rest would
resume their seats and glower at space until some fresh excitement
roused them. For the last hour or so of these long waits hardly a word
would be spoken. We were too ill-natured to talk for amusement, and
there was nothing else to talk for.

This spell was broken about eleven o’clock by the appearance at the
head of the stairway of the Irishman with the gun-barrel cane, and his
singing out:

“Sargint uv the flure: fourtane min and a bread-box!”

Instantly every man sprang to his feet, and pressed forward to be one
of the favored fourteen. One did not get any more gyrations or obtain
them any sooner by this, but it was a relief, and a change to walk the
half square outside the prison to the cookhouse, and help carry the
rations back.

For a little while after our arrival in Richmond, the rations were
tolerably good. There had been so much said about the privations
of the prisoners that our Government had, after much quibbling and
negotiation, succeeded in getting the privilege of sending food and
clothing through the lines to us. Of course but a small part of that
sent ever reached its destination. There were too many greedy Rebels
along its line of passage to let much of it be received by those for
whom it was intended. We could see from our windows Rebels strutting
about in overcoats, in which the box wrinkles were still plainly
visible, wearing new “U. S.” blankets as cloaks, and walking in
Government shoes, worth fabulous prices in Confederate money.

Fortunately for our Government the rebels decided to out themselves off
from this profitable source of supply. We read one day in the Richmond
papers that “President Davis and his Cabinet had come to the conclusion
that it was incompatible with the dignity of a sovereign power to
permit another power with which it was at war, to feed and clothe
prisoners in its hands.”

I will not stop to argue this point of honor, and show its absurdity by
pointing out that it is not an unusual practice with nations at war. It
is a sufficient commentary upon this assumption of punctiliousness that
the paper went on to say that some five tons of clothing and fifteen
tons of food, which had been sent under a flag of truce to City Point,
would neither be returned nor delivered to us, but “converted to the
use of the Confederate Government.”

               “And surely they are all honorable men!”

Heaven save the mark.




CHAPTER IX.
BRANS OR PEAS--INSUFFICIENCY OF DARKY TESTIMONY--A GUARD KILLS A
PRISONER--PRISONERS TEAZE THE GUARDS--DESPERATE OUTBREAK.

But, to return to the rations--a topic which, with escape or exchange,
were to be the absorbing ones for us for the next fifteen months. There
was now issued to every two men a loaf of coarse bread--made of a
mixture of flour and meal--and about the size and shape of an ordinary
brick. This half loaf was accompanied, while our Government was allowed
to furnish rations, with a small piece of corned beef. Occasionally we
got a sweet potato, or a half-pint or such a matter of soup made from
a coarse, but nutritious, bean or pea, called variously “nigger-pea,”
“stock-pea,” or “cow-pea.”

This, by the way, became a fruitful bone of contention during our stay
in the South. One strong party among us maintained that it was a bean,
because it was shaped like one, and brown, which they claimed no pea
ever was. The other party held that it was a pea because its various
names all agreed in describing it as a pea, and because it was so full
of bugs--none being entirely free from insects, and some having as many
as twelve by actual count--within its shell. This, they declared, was a
distinctive characteristic of the pea family. The contention began with
our first instalment of the leguminous ration, and was still raging
between the survivors who passed into our lines in 1865. It waxed hot
occasionally, and each side continually sought evidence to support
its view of the case. Once an old darky, sent into the prison on some
errand, was summoned to decide a hot dispute that was raging in the
crowd to which I belonged. The champion of the pea side said, producing
one of the objects of dispute:

“Now, boys, keep still, till I put the question fairly. Now, uncle,
what do they call that there?”

The colored gentleman scrutinized the vegetable closely, and replied,

“Well, dey mos’ generally calls ’em stock-peas, round hyar aways.”

“There,” said the pea-champion triumphantly.

“But,” broke in the leader of the bean party, “Uncle, don’t they also
call them beans?”

“Well, yes, chile, I spec dat lots of ’em does.”

And this was about the way the matter usually ended.

I will not attempt to bias the reader’s judgment by saying which side I
believed to be right. As the historic British showman said, in reply to
the question as to whether an animal in his collection was a rhinoceros
or an elephant, “You pays your money and you takes your choice.”

The rations issued to us, as will be seen above, though they appear
scanty, were still sufficient to support life and health, and months
afterward, in Andersonville, we used to look back to them as sumptuous.
We usually had them divided and eaten by noon, and, with the gnawings
of hunger appeased, we spent the afternoon and evening comfortably.
We told stories, paced up and down, the floor for exercise, played
cards, sung, read what few books were available, stood at the windows
and studied the landscape, and watched the Rebels trying their guns
and shells, and so on as long as it was daylight. Occasionally it was
dangerous to be about the windows. This depended wholly on the temper
of the guards. One day a member of a Virginia regiment, on guard on
the pavement in front, deliberately left his beat, walked out into
the center of the street, aimed his gun at a member of the Ninth West
Virginia, who was standing at a window near, and firing, shot him
through the heart, the bullet passing through his body, and through the
floor above. The act was purely malicious, and was done, doubtless,
in revenge for some injury which our men had done the assassin or his
family.

We were not altogether blameless, by any means. There were few
opportunities to say bitterly offensive things to the guards, let pass
unimproved.

The prisoners in the third floor of the Smith building, adjoining us,
had their own way of teasing them. Late at night, when everybody would
be lying down, and out of the way of shots, a window in the third story
would open, a broomstick, with a piece nailed across to represent arms,
and clothed with a cap and blouse, would be protruded, and a voice
coming from a man carefully protected by the wall, would inquire:

“S-a-y, g-uarr-d, what time is it?”

If the guard was of the long suffering kind he would answer:

“Take yo’ head back in, up dah; you kno hits agin all odahs to do dat?”

Then the voice would say, aggravatingly, “Oh, well, go to ---- you ----
Rebel ----, if you can’t answer a civil question.”

Before the speech was ended the guard’s rifle would be at his shoulder
and he would fire. Back would come the blouse and hat in haste, only to
go out again the next instant, with a derisive laugh, and,

“Thought you were going to hurt somebody, didn’t you, you ---- ----
---- ---- ----. But, Lord, you can’t shoot for sour apples; if I
couldn’t shoot no better than you, Mr. Johnny Reb, I would ----”

By this time the guard, having his gun loaded again, would cut short
the remarks with another shot, which, followed up with similar remarks,
would provoke still another, when an alarm sounding, the guards at
Libby and all the other buildings around us would turn out. An officer
of the guard would go up with a squad into the third floor, only
to find everybody up there snoring away as if they were the Seven
Sleepers. After relieving his mind of a quantity of vigorous profanity,
and threats to “buck and gag” and cut off the rations of the whole
room, the officer would return to his quarters in the guard house, but
before he was fairly ensconced there the cap and blouse would go out
again, and the maddened guard be regaled with a spirited and vividly
profane lecture on the depravity of Rebels in general, and his own
unworthiness in particular.

One night in January things took a more serious turn. The boys on the
lower floor of our building had long considered a plan of escape. There
were then about fifteen thousand prisoners in Richmond--ten thousand on
Belle Isle and five thousand in the buildings. Of these one thousand
five hundred were officers in Libby. Besides there were the prisoners
in Castles Thunder and Lightning. The essential features of the plan
were that at a preconcerted signal we at the second and third floors
should appear at the windows with bricks and irons from the tobacco
presses, which a should shower down on the guards and drive them away,
while the men of the first floor would pour out, chase the guards
into the board house in the basement, seize their arms, drive those
away from around Libby and the other prisons, release the officers,
organize into regiments and brigades, seize the armory, set fire to the
public buildings and retreat from the City, by the south side of the
James, where there was but a scanty force of Rebels, and more could be
prevented from coming over by burning the bridges behind us.

It was a magnificent scheme, and might have been carried out, but there
was no one in the building who was generally believed to have the
qualities of a leader.

But while it was being debated a few of the hot heads on the lower
floor undertook to precipitate the crisis. They seized what they
thought was a favorable opportunity, overpowered the guard who stood at
the foot of the stairs, and poured into the street. The other guards
fell back and opened fire on them; other troops hastened up, and soon
drove them back into the building, after killing ten or fifteen. We of
the second and third floors did not anticipate the break at that time,
and were taken as much by surprise as were the Rebels. Nearly all were
lying down and many were asleep. Some hastened to the windows, and
dropped missiles out, but before any concerted action could be taken it
was seen that the case was hopeless, and we remained quiet.

Among those who led in the assault was a drummer-boy of some New York
Regiment, a recklessly brave little rascal. He had somehow smuggled a
small four-shooter in with him, and when they rushed out he fired it
off at the guards.

After the prisoners were driven back, the Rebel officers came in and
vapored around considerably, but confined themselves to big words.
They were particularly anxious to find the revolver, and ordered a
general and rigorous search for it. The prisoners were all ranged on
one side of the room and carefully examined by one party, while another
hunted through the blankets and bundles. It was all in vain; no pistol
could be found. The boy had a loaf of wheat bread, bought from a baker
during the day. It was a round loaf, set together in two pieces like
a biscuit. He pulled these apart, laid the fourshooter between them,
pressed the two halves together, and went on calmly nibbling away at
the loaf while the search was progressing.

Two gunboats were brought up the next morning, and anchored in the
canal near us, with their heavy guns trained upon the building. It was
thought that this would intimidate as from a repetition of the attack,
but our sailors conceived that, as they laid against the shore next to
us, they could be easily captured, and their artillery made to assist
us. A scheme to accomplish this was being wrought out, when we received
notice to move, and it came to naught.




CHAPTER X.

THE EXCHANGE AND THE CAUSE OF ITS INTERRUPTION--BRIEF RESUME OF THE
DIFFERENT CARTELS, AND THE DIFFICULTIES THAT LED TO THEIR SUSPENSION.

Few questions intimately connected with the actual operations of
the Rebellion have been enveloped with such a mass of conflicting
statement as the responsibility for the interruption of the exchange.
Southern writers and politicians, naturally anxious to diminish as
much as possible the great odium resting upon their section for the
treatment of prisoners of war during the last year and a half of the
Confederacy’s existence, have vehemently charged that the Government of
the United States deliberately and pitilessly resigned to their fate
such of its soldiers as fell into the hands of the enemy, and repelled
all advances from the Rebel Government looking toward a resumption
of exchange. It is alleged on our side, on the other hand, that our
Government did all that was possible, consistent with National dignity
and military prudence, to secure a release of its unfortunate men in
the power of the Rebels.

Over this vexed question there has been waged an acrimonious
war of words, which has apparently led to no decision, nor any
convictions--the disputants, one and all, remaining on the sides of the
controversy occupied by them when the debate began.

I may not be in possession of all the facts bearing upon the case, and
may be warped in judgment by prejudices in favor of my own Government’s
wisdom and humanity, but, however this may be, the following is my firm
belief as to the controlling facts in this lamentable affair:

1. For some time after the beginning of hostilities our Government
refused to exchange prisoners with the Rebels, on the ground that this
might be held by the European powers who were seeking a pretext for
acknowledging the Confederacy, to be admission by us that the war was
no longer an insurrection but a revolution, which had resulted in the
‘de facto’ establishment of a new nation. This difficulty was finally
gotten over by recognizing the Rebels as belligerents, which, while it
placed them on a somewhat different plane from mere insurgents, did not
elevate them to the position of soldiers of a foreign power.

2. Then the following cartel was agreed upon by Generals Dig on our
side and Hill on that of the Rebels:

HAXALL’S LANDING, ON JAMES RIVER, July 22, 1882.

The undersigned, having been commissioned by the authorities they
respectively represent to make arrangements for a general exchange of
prisoners of war, have agreed to the following articles:

ARTICLE I.--It is hereby agreed and stipulated, that all prisoners
of war, held by either party, including those taken on private armed
vessels, known as privateers, shall be exchanged upon the conditions
and terms following:

Prisoners to be exchanged man for man and officer for officer.
Privateers to be placed upon the footing of officers and men of the
navy.

Men and officers of lower grades may be exchanged for officers of
a higher grade, and men and officers of different services may be
exchanged according to the following scale of equivalents:

A General-commanding-in-chief, or an Admiral, shall be exchanged for
officers of equal rank, or for sixty privates or common seamen.

A Commodore, carrying a broad pennant, or a Brigadier General, shall
be exchanged for officers of equal rank, or twenty privates or common
seamen.

A Captain in the Navy, or a Colonel, shall be exchanged for officers of
equal rank, or for fifteen privates or common seamen.

A Lieutenant Colonel, or Commander in the Navy, shall be exchanged for
officers of equal rank, or for ten privates or common seamen.

A Lieutenant, or a Master in the Navy, or a Captain in the Army or
marines shall be exchanged for officers of equal rank, or six privates
or common seamen.

Master’s-mates in the Navy, or Lieutenants or Ensigns in the Army,
shall be exchanged for officers of equal rank, or four privates or
common seamen. Midshipmen, warrant officers in the Navy, masters of
merchant vessels and commanders of privateers, shall be exchanged for
officers of equal rank, or three privates or common seamen; Second
Captains, Lieutenants or mates of merchant vessels or privateers, and
all petty officers in the Navy, and all noncommissioned officers in
the Army or marines, shall be severally exchanged for persons of equal
rank, or for two privates or common seamen; and private soldiers or
common seamen shall be exchanged for each other man for man.

ARTICLE II.--Local, State, civil and militia rank held by persons
not in actual military service will not be recognized; the basis of
exchange being the grade actually held in the naval and military
service of the respective parties.

ARTICLE III.--If citizens held by either party on charges of
disloyalty, or any alleged civil offense, are exchanged, it shall only
be for citizens. Captured sutlers, teamsters, and all civilians in the
actual service of either party, to be exchanged for persons in similar
positions.

ARTICLE IV.--All prisoners of war to be discharged on parole in ten
days after their capture; and the prisoners now held, and those
hereafter taken, to be transported to the points mutually agreed
upon, at the expense of the capturing party. The surplus prisoners
not exchanged shall not be permitted to take up arms again, nor to
serve as military police or constabulary force in any fort, garrison
or field-work, held by either of the respective parties, nor as guards
of prisoners, deposits or stores, nor to discharge any duty usually
performed by soldiers, until exchanged under the provisions of this
cartel. The exchange is not to be considered complete until the officer
or soldier exchanged for has been actually restored to the lines to
which he belongs.

ARTICLE V.--Each party upon the discharge of prisoners of the other
party is authorized to discharge an equal number of their own officers
or men from parole, furnishing, at the same time, to the other party a
list of their prisoners discharged, and of their own officers and men
relieved from parole; thus enabling each party to relieve from parole
such of their officers and men as the party may choose. The lists
thus mutually furnished, will keep both parties advised of the true
condition of the exchange of prisoners.

ARTICLE VI.--The stipulations and provisions above mentioned to be of
binding obligation during the continuance of the war, it matters not
which party may have the surplus of prisoners; the great principles
involved being, First, An equitable exchange of prisoners, man for
man, or officer for officer, or officers of higher grade exchanged
for officers of lower grade, or for privates, according to scale of
equivalents. Second, That privates and officers and men of different
services may be exchanged according to the same scale of equivalents.
Third, That all prisoners, of whatever arm of service, are to be
exchanged or paroled in ten days from the time of their capture, if it
be practicable to transfer them to their own lines in that time; if
not, so soon thereafter as practicable. Fourth, That no officer, or
soldier, employed in the service of either party, is to be considered
as exchanged and absolved from his parole until his equivalent has
actually reached the lines of his friends. Fifth, That parole forbids
the performance of field, garrison, police, or guard or constabulary
duty.

                                   JOHN A. DIX, Major General.

                                   D. H. HILL, Major General, C. S. A.

SUPPLEMENTARY ARTICLES.

ARTICLE VII.--All prisoners of war now held on either side, and all
prisoners hereafter taken, shall be sent with all reasonable dispatch
to A. M. Aiken’s, below Dutch Gap, on the James River, in Virginia, or
to Vicksburg, on the Mississippi River, in the State of Mississippi,
and there exchanged of paroled until such exchange can be effected,
notice being previously given by each party of the number of prisoners
it will send, and the time when they will be delivered at those points
respectively; and in case the vicissitudes of war shall change the
military relations of the places designated in this article to the
contending parties, so as to render the same inconvenient for the
delivery and exchange of prisoners, other places bearing as nearly as
may be the present local relations of said places to the lines of said
parties, shall be, by mutual agreement, substituted. But nothing in
this article contained shall prevent the commanders of the two opposing
armies from exchanging prisoners or releasing them on parole, at other
points mutually agreed on by said commanders.

ARTICLE VIII.--For the purpose of carrying into effect the foregoing
articles of agreement, each party will appoint two agents for the
exchange of prisoners of war, whose duty it shall be to communicate
with each other by correspondence and otherwise; to prepare the lists
of prisoners; to attend to the delivery of the prisoners at the places
agreed on, and to carry out promptly, effectually, and in good faith,
all the details and provisions of the said articles of agreement.

ARTICLE IX.--And, in case any misunderstanding shall arise in regard
to any clause or stipulation in the foregoing articles, it is mutually
agreed that such misunderstanding shall not affect the release of
prisoners on parole, as herein provided, but shall be made the subject
of friendly explanation, in order that the object of this agreement may
neither be defeated nor postponed.

                              JOHN A. DIX, Major General.
                              D. H. HILL, Major General. C. S. A.


This plan did not work well. Men on both sides, who wanted a little
rest from soldiering, could obtain it by so straggling in the vicinity
of the enemy. Their parole--following close upon their capture,
frequently upon the spot--allowed them to visit home, and sojourn
awhile where were pleasanter pastures than at the front. Then the
Rebels grew into the habit of paroling everybody that they could
constrain into being a prisoner of war. Peaceable, unwarlike and
decrepit citizens of Kentucky, East Tennessee, West Virginia, Missouri
and Maryland were “captured” and paroled, and setoff against regular
Rebel soldiers taken by us.

3. After some months of trial of this scheme, a modification of
the cartel was agreed upon, the main feature of which was that all
prisoners must be reduced to possession, and delivered to the exchange
officers either at City Point, Va., or Vicksburg, Miss. This worked
very well for some months, until our Government began organizing negro
troops. The Rebels then issued an order that neither these troops nor
their officers should be held as amenable to the laws of war, but that,
when captured, the men should be returned to slavery, and the officers
turned over to the Governors of the States in which they were taken, to
be dealt with according to the stringent law punishing the incitement
of servile insurrection. Our Government could not permit this for a
day. It was bound by every consideration of National honor to protect
those who wore its uniform and bore its flag. The Rebel Government was
promptly informed that rebel officers and men would be held as hostages
for the proper treatment of such members of colored regiments as might
be taken.

4. This discussion did not put a stop to the exchange, but while it
was going on Vicksburg was captured, and the battle of Gettysburg was
fought. The first placed one of the exchange points in our hands. At
the opening of the fight at Gettysburg Lee captured some six thousand
Pennsylvania militia. He sent to Meade to have these exchanged on
the field of battle. Meade declined to do so for two reasons: first,
because it was against the cartel, which prescribed that prisoners must
be reduced to possession; and second, because he was anxious to have
Lee hampered with such a body of prisoners, since it was very doubtful
if he could get his beaten army back across the Potomac, let alone his
prisoners. Lee then sent a communication to General Couch, commanding
the Pennsylvania militia, asking him to receive prisoners on parole,
and Couch, not knowing what Meade had done, acceded to the request.
Our Government disavowed Couch’s action instantly, and ordered the
paroles to be treated as of no force, whereupon the Rebel Government
ordered back into the field twelve thousand of the prisoners captured
by Grant’s army at Vicksburg.

5. The paroling now stopped abruptly, leaving in the hands of both
sides the prisoners captured at Gettysburg, except the militia above
mentioned. The Rebels added considerably to those in their hands by
their captures at Chickamauga, while we gained a great many at Mission
Ridge, Cumberland Gap and elsewhere, so that at the time we arrived in
Richmond the Rebels had about fifteen thousand prisoners in their hands
and our Government had about twenty-five thousand.

6. The rebels now began demanding that the prisoners on both sides be
exchanged--man for man--as far as they went, and the remainder paroled.
Our Government offered to exchange man for man, but declined--on
account of the previous bad faith of the Rebels--to release the balance
on parole. The Rebels also refused to make any concessions in regard to
the treatment of officers and men of colored regiments.

7. At this juncture General B. F. Butler was appointed to the command
of the Department of the Blackwater, which made him an ex-officio
Commissioner of Exchange. The Rebels instantly refused to treat
with him, on the ground that he was outlawed by the proclamation of
Jefferson Davis. General Butler very pertinently replied that this only
placed him nearer their level, as Jefferson Davis and all associated
with him in the Rebel Government had been outlawed by the proclamation
of President Lincoln. The Rebels scorned to notice this home thrust by
the Union General.

8. On February 12, 1864, General Butler addressed a letter to the Rebel
Commissioner Ould, in which be asked, for the sake of humanity, that
the questions interrupting the exchange be left temporarily in abeyance
while an informal exchange was put in operation. He would send five
hundred prisoners to City Point; let them be met by a similar number
of Union prisoners. This could go on from day to day until all in each
other’s hands should be transferred to their respective flags.

The five hundred sent with the General’s letter were received, and
five hundred Union prisoners returned for them. Another five hundred,
sent the next day, were refused, and so this reasonable and humane
proposition ended in nothing.

This was the condition of affairs in February, 1864, when the Rebel
authorities concluded to send us to Andersonville. If the reader will
fix these facts in his minds I will explain other phases as they
develop.




CHAPTER XI.

PUTTING IN THE TIME--RATIONS--COOKING UTENSILS--“FIAT” SOUP--“SPOONING”
--AFRICAN NEWSPAPER VENDERS--TRADING GREENBACKS FOR CONFEDERATE MONEY
--VISIT FROM JOHN MORGAN.

The Winter days passed on, one by one, after the manner described in
a former chapter,--the mornings in ill-nature hunger; the afternoons
and evenings in tolerable comfort. The rations kept growing lighter
and lighter; the quantity of bread remained the same, but the meat
diminished, and occasional days would pass without any being issued.
Then we receive a pint or less of soup made from the beans or peas
before mentioned, but this, too, suffered continued change, in the
gradually increasing proportion of James River water, and decreasing of
that of the beans.

The water of the James River is doubtless excellent: it looks well--at
a distance--and is said to serve the purposes of ablution and
navigation admirably. There seems to be a limit however, to the extent
of its advantageous combination with the bean (or pea) for nutritive
purposes. This, though, was or view of the case, merely, and not
shared in to any appreciably extent by the gentlemen who were managing
our boarding house. We seemed to view the matter through allopathic
spectacles, they through homoeopathic lenses. We thought that the
atomic weight of peas (or beans) and the James River fluid were about
equal, which would indicate that the proper combining proportions would
be, say a bucket of beans (or peas) to a bucket of water. They held
that the nutritive potency was increased by the dilution, and the best
results were obtainable when the symptoms of hunger were combated by
the trituration of a bucketful of the peas-beans with a barrel of ‘aqua
jamesiana.’

My first experience with this “flat” soup was very instructive, if
not agreeable. I had come into prison, as did most other prisoners,
absolutely destitute of dishes, or cooking utensils. The well-used,
half-canteen frying-pan, the blackened quart cup, and the spoon, which
formed the usual kitchen outfit of the cavalryman in the field, were
in the haversack on my saddle, and were lost to me when I separated
from my horse. Now, when we were told that we were to draw soup, I was
in great danger of losing my ration from having no vessel in which to
receive it. There were but few tin cups in the prison, and these were,
of course, wanted by their owners. By great good fortune I found an
empty fruit can, holding about a quart. I was also lucky enough to find
a piece from which to make a bail. I next manufactured a spoon and
knife combined from a bit of hoop-iron.

These two humble utensils at once placed myself and my immediate
chums on another plane, as far as worldly goods were concerned. We
were better off than the mass, and as well off as the most fortunate.
It was a curious illustration of that law of political economy which
teaches that so-called intrinsic value is largely adventitious. Their
possession gave us infinitely more consideration among our fellows than
would the possession of a brown-stone front in an eligible location,
furnished with hot and cold water throughout, and all the modern
improvements. It was a place where cooking utensils were in demand,
and title-deeds to brown-stone fronts were not. We were in possession
of something which every one needed every day, and, therefore, were
persons of consequence and consideration to those around us who were
present or prospective borrowers.

On our side we obeyed another law of political economy: We clung to
our property with unrelaxing tenacity, made the best use of it in our
intercourse with our fellows, and only gave it up after our release and
entry into a land where the plenitude of cooking utensils of superior
construction made ours valueless. Then we flung them into the sea, with
little gratitude for the great benefit they had been to us. We were
more anxious to get rid of the many hateful recollections clustering
around them.

But, to return to the alleged soup: As I started to drink my first
ration it seemed to me that there was a superfluity of bugs upon its
surface. Much as I wanted animal food, I did not care for fresh meat
in that form. I skimmed them off carefully, so as to lose as little
soup as possible. But the top layer seemed to be underlaid with another
equally dense. This was also skimmed off as deftly as possible. But
beneath this appeared another layer, which, when removed, showed still
another; and so on, until I had scraped to the bottom of the can, and
the last of the bugs went with the last of my soup. I have before
spoken of the remarkable bug fecundity of the beans (or peas). This was
a demonstration of it. Every scouped out pea (or bean) which found its
way into the soup bore inside of its shell from ten to twenty of these
hard-crusted little weevil. Afterward I drank my soup without skimming.
It was not that I hated the weevil less, but that I loved the soup
more. It was only another step toward a closer conformity to that grand
rule which I have made the guiding maxim of my life:

‘When I must, I had better.’

I recommend this to other young men starting on their career.

The room in which we were was barely large enough for all of us to lie
down at once. Even then it required pretty close “spooning” together
--so close in fact that all sleeping along one side would have to turn
at once. It was funny to watch this operation. All, for instance, would
be lying on their right sides. They would begin to get tired, and one
of the wearied ones would sing out to the Sergeant who was in command
of the row--

“Sergeant: let’s spoon the other way.”

That individual would reply:

“All right. Attention! LEFT SPOON!!” and the whole line would at once
flop over on their left sides.

The feet of the row that slept along the east wall on the floor below
us were in a line with the edge of the outer door, and a chalk line
drawn from the crack between the door and the frame to the opposite
wall would touch, say 150 pairs of feet. They were a noisy crowd down
there, and one night their noise so provoked the guard in front of the
door that he called out to them to keep quiet or he would fire in upon
them. They greeted this threat with a chorus profanely uncomplimentary
to the purity of the guard’s ancestry; they did not imply his descent
a la Darwin, from the remote monkey, but more immediate generation
by a common domestic animal. The incensed Rebel opened the door wide
enough to thrust his gun in, and he fired directly down the line of
toes. His piece was apparently loaded with buckshot, and the little
balls must have struck the legs, nipped off the toes, pierced the feet,
and otherwise slightly wounded the lower extremities of fifty men. The
simultaneous shriek that went up was deafening. It was soon found out
that nobody had been hurt seriously, and there was not a little fun
over the occurrence.

One of the prisoners in Libby was Brigadier General Neal Dow, of Maine,
who had then a National reputation as a Temperance advocate, and the
author of the famous Maine Liquor Law. We, whose places were near the
front window, used to see him frequently on the street, accompanied
by a guard. He was allowed, we understood, to visit our sick in the
hospital. His long, snowy beard and hair gave him a venerable and
commanding appearance.

Newsboys seemed to be a thing unknown in Richmond. The papers were
sold on the streets by negro men. The one who frequented our section
with the morning journals had a mellow; rich baritone for which we
would be glad to exchange the shrill cries of our street Arabs. We long
remembered him as one of the peculiar features of Richmond. He had one
unvarying formula for proclaiming his wares. It ran in this wise:

“Great Nooze in de papahs!

“Great Nooze from Orange Coaht House, Virginny!

“Great Nooze from Alexandry, Virginny!

“Great Nooze from Washington City!

“Great Nooze from Chattanoogy, Tennessee!

“Great Nooze from Chahlston, Sou’ Cahlina!

“Great Nooze in depapahs!”

It did not matter to him that the Rebels had not been at some of these
places for months. He would not change for such mere trifles as the
entire evaporation of all possible interest connected with Chattanooga
and Alexandria. He was a true Bourbon Southerner--he learned nothing
and forgot nothing.

There was a considerable trade driven between the prisoners and the
guard at the door. This was a very lucrative position for the latter,
and men of a commercial turn of mind generally managed to get stationed
there. The blockade had cut off the Confederacy’s supplies from the
outer world, and the many trinkets about a man’s person were in good
demand at high prices. The men of the Army of the Potomac, who were
paid regularly, and were always near their supplies, had their pockets
filled with combs, silk handkerchiefs, knives, neckties, gold pens,
pencils, silver watches, playing cards, dice, etc. Such of these as
escaped appropriation by their captors and Dick Turner, were eagerly
bought by the guards, who paid fair prices in Confederate money, or
traded wheat bread, tobacco, daily papers, etc., for them.

There was also considerable brokerage in money, and the manner of doing
this was an admirable exemplification of the folly of the “fiat” money
idea. The Rebels exhausted their ingenuity in framing laws to sustain
the purchasing power of their paper money. It was made legal tender for
all debts public and private; it was decreed that the man who refused
to take it was a public enemy; all the considerations of patriotism
were rallied to its support, and the law provided that any citizens
found trafficking in the money of the enemy--i.e., greenbacks, should
suffer imprisonment in the Penitentiary, and any soldier so offending
should suffer death.

Notwithstanding all this, in Richmond, the head and heart of the
Confederacy, in January, 1864--long before the Rebel cause began to
look at all desperate--it took a dollar to buy such a loaf of bread as
now sells for ten cents; a newspaper was a half dollar, and everything
else in proportion. And still worse: There was not a day during our
stay in Richmond but what one could go to the hole in the door before
which the guard was pacing and call out in a loud whisper:

“Say, Guard: do you want to buy some greenbacks?”

And be sure that the reply would be, after a furtive glance around to
see that no officer was watching:

“Yes; how much do you want for them?”

The reply was then: “Ten for one.”

“All right; how much have you got?”

The Yankee would reply; the Rebel would walk to the farther end of his
beat, count out the necessary amount, and, returning, put up one hand
with it, while with the other he caught hold of one end of the Yankee’s
greenback. At the word, both would release their holds simultaneously,
the exchange was complete, and the Rebel would pace industriously
up and down his beat with the air of the school boy who “ain’t been
a-doin’ nothing.”

There was never any risk in approaching any guard with a proposition of
this kind. I never heard of one refusing to trade for greenbacks, and
if the men on guard could not be restrained by these stringent laws,
what hope could there be of restraining anybody else?

One day we were favored with a visit from the redoubtable General
John H. Morgan, next to J. E. B. Stuart the greatest of Rebel cavalry
leaders. He had lately escaped from the Ohio Penitentiary. He was
invited to Richmond to be made a Major General, and was given a grand
ovation by the citizens and civic Government. He came into our building
to visit a number of the First Kentucky Cavalry (loyal)--captured at
New Philadelphia, East Tennessee--whom he was anxious to have exchanged
for men of his own regiment--the First Kentucky Cavalry (Rebel)--who
were captured at the same time he was. I happened to get very close to
him while he was standing there talking to his old acquaintances, and I
made a mental photograph of him, which still retains all its original
distinctness. He was a tall, heavy man, with a full, coarse, and
somewhat dull face, and lazy, sluggish gray eyes. His long black hair
was carefully oiled, and turned under at the ends, as was the custom
with the rural beaux some years ago. His face was clean shaved, except
a large, sandy goatee. He wore a high silk hat, a black broadcloth
coat, Kentucky jeans pantaloons, neatly fitting boots, and no vest.
There was nothing remotely suggestive of unusual ability or force of
character, and I thought as I studied him that the sting of George D.
Prentice’s bon mot about him was in its acrid truth. Said Mr. Prentice:

“Why don’t somebody put a pistol to Basil Duke’s head, and blow John
Morgan’s brains out!” [Basil Duke was John Morgan’s right hand man.]




CHAPTER XII.

REMARKS AS TO NOMENCLATURE--VACCINATION AND ITS EFFECTS--“N’YAARKER’S”
--THEIR CHARACTERISTICS AND THEIR METHODS OF OPERATING.

Before going any further in this narrative it may be well to state that
the nomenclature employed is not used in any odious or disparaging
sense. It is simply the adoption of the usual terms employed by the
soldiers of both sides in speaking to or of each other. We habitually
spoke of them and to them, as “Rebels,” and “Johnnies;” they of
and to us, as “Yanks,” and “Yankees.” To have said “Confederates,”
“Southerners,” “Secessionists,” or “Federalists,” “Unionists,”
“Northerners” or “Nationalists,” would have seemed useless euphemism.
The plainer terms suited better, and it was a day when things were more
important than names.

For some inscrutable reason the Rebels decided to vaccinate us all.
Why they did this has been one of the unsolved problems of my life. It
is true that there was small pox in the City, and among the prisoners
at Danville; but that any consideration for our safety should have
led them to order general inoculation is not among the reasonable
inferences. But, be that as it may, vaccination was ordered, and
performed. By great good luck I was absent from the building with the
squad drawing rations, when our room was inoculated, so I escaped what
was an infliction to all, and fatal to many. The direst consequences
followed the operation. Foul ulcers appeared on various parts of the
bodies of the vaccinated. In many instances the arms literally rotted
off; and death followed from a corruption of the blood. Frequently the
faces, and other parts of those who recovered, were disfigured by the
ghastly cicatrices of healed ulcers. A special friend of mine, Sergeant
Frank Beverstock--then a member of the Third Virginia Cavalry, (loyal),
and after the war a banker in Bowling Green, O.,--bore upon his temple
to his dying day, (which occurred a year ago), a fearful scar, where
the flesh had sloughed off from the effects of the virus that had
tainted his blood.

This I do not pretend to account for. We thought at the time that the
Rebels had deliberately poisoned the vaccine matter with syphilitic
virus, and it was so charged upon them. I do not now believe that this
was so; I can hardly think that members of the humane profession of
medicine would be guilty of such subtle diabolism--worse even than
poisoning the wells from which an enemy must drink. The explanation
with which I have satisfied myself is that some careless or stupid
practitioner took the vaccinating lymph from diseased human bodies, and
thus infected all with the blood venom, without any conception of what
he was doing. The low standard of medical education in the South makes
this theory quite plausible.

We now formed the acquaintance of a species of human vermin that united
with the Rebels, cold, hunger, lice and the oppression of distraint, to
leave nothing undone that could add to the miseries of our prison life.

These were the fledglings of the slums and dives of New York--graduates
of that metropolitan sink of iniquity where the rogues and criminals of
the whole world meet for mutual instruction in vice.

They were men who, as a rule, had never known, a day of honesty and
cleanliness in their misspent lives; whose fathers, brothers and
constant companions were roughs, malefactors and, felons; whose
mothers, wives and sisters were prostitutes, procuresses and thieves;
men who had from infancy lived in an atmosphere of sin, until it
saturated every fiber of their being as a dweller in a jungle imbibes
malaria by every one of his, millions of pores, until his very marrow
is surcharged with it.

They included representatives from all nationalities, and their
descendants, but the English and Irish elements predominated. They
had an argot peculiar to themselves. It was partly made up of the
“flash” language of the London thieves, amplified and enriched by the
cant vocabulary and the jargon of crime of every European tongue.
They spoke it with a peculiar accent and intonation that made them
instantly recognizable from the roughs of all other Cities. They called
themselves “N’Yaarkers;” we came to know them as “Raiders.”

If everything in the animal world has its counterpart among men, then
these were the wolves, jackals and hyenas of the race at once cowardly
and fierce--audaciously bold when the power of numbers was on their
side, and cowardly when confronted with resolution by anything like an
equality of strength.

Like all other roughs and rascals of whatever degree, they were utterly
worthless as soldiers. There may have been in the Army some habitual
corner loafer, some fistic champion of the bar-room and brothel, some
Terror of Plug Uglyville, who was worth the salt in the hard tack he
consumed, but if there were, I did not form his acquaintance, and I
never heard of any one else who did. It was the rule that the man who
was the readiest in the use of fist and slungshot at home had the
greatest diffidence about forming a close acquaintance with cold lead
in the neighborhood of the front. Thousands of the so-called “dangerous
classes” were recruited, from whom the Government did not receive so
much service as would pay for the buttons on their uniforms. People
expected that they would make themselves as troublesome to the Rebels
as they were to good citizens and the Police, but they were only
pugnacious to the provost guard, and terrible to the people in the rear
of the Army who had anything that could be stolen.

The highest type of soldier which the world has yet produced is the
intelligent, self-respecting American boy, with home, and father and
mother and friends behind him, and duty in front beckoning him on. In
the sixty centuries that war has been a profession no man has entered
its ranks so calmly resolute in confronting danger, so shrewd and
energetic in his aggressiveness, so tenacious of the defense and the
assault, so certain to rise swiftly to the level of every emergency,
as the boy who, in the good old phrase, had been “well-raised” in a
Godfearing home, and went to the field in obedience to a conviction
of duty. His unfailing courage and good sense won fights that the
incompetency or cankering jealousy of commanders had lost. High
officers were occasionally disloyal, or willing to sacrifice their
country to personal pique; still more frequently they were ignorant
and inefficient; but the enlisted man had more than enough innate
soldiership to make amends for these deficiencies, and his superb
conduct often brought honors and promotions to those only who deserved
shame and disaster.

Our “N’Yaarkers,” swift to see any opportunity for dishonest gain, had
taken to bounty-jumping, or, as they termed it, “leppin’ the bounty,”
for a livelihood. Those who were thrust in upon us had followed this
until it had become dangerous, and then deserted to the Rebels. The
latter kept them at Castle Lightning for awhile, and then, rightly
estimating their character, and considering that it was best to trade
them off for a genuine Rebel soldier, sent them in among us, to be
exchanged regularly with us. There was not so much good faith as good
policy shown by this. It was a matter of indifference to the Rebels
how soon our Government shot these deserters after getting them in its
hands again. They were only anxious to use them to get their own men
back.

The moment they came into contact with us our troubles began. They
stole whenever opportunities offered, and they were indefatigable in
making these offer; they robbed by actual force, whenever force would
avail; and more obsequious lick-spittles to power never existed--they
were perpetually on the look-out for a chance to curry favor by
betraying some plan or scheme to those who guarded us.

I saw one day a queer illustration of the audacious side of these
fellows’ characters, and it shows at the same time how brazen
effrontery will sometimes get the better of courage. In a room in an
adjacent building were a number of these fellows, and a still greater
number of East Tennesseeans. These latter were simple, ignorant
folks, but reasonably courageous. About fifty of them were sitting in
a group in one corner of the room, and near them a couple or three
“N’Yaarkers.” Suddenly one of the latter said with an oath:

“I was robbed last night; I lost two silver watches, a couple of rings,
and about fifty dollars in greenbacks. I believe some of you fellers
went through me.”

This was all pure invention; he no more had the things mentioned than
he had purity of heart and a Christian spirit, but the unsophisticated
Tennesseeans did not dream of disputing his statement, and answered in
chorus:

“Oh, no, mister; we didn’t take your things; we ain’t that kind.”

This was like the reply of the lamb to the wolf, in the fable, and the
N’Yaarker retorted with a simulated storm of passion, and a torrent of
oaths:

“---- ---- I know ye did; I know some uv yez has got them; stand up
agin the wall there till I search yez!”

And that whole fifty men, any one of whom was physically equal to the
N’Yaarker, and his superior in point of real courage, actually stood
against the wall, and submitted to being searched and having taken
from them the few Confederate bills they had, and such trinkets as the
searcher took a fancy to.

I was thoroughly disgusted.




CHAPTER XIII.

BELLE ISLE--TERRIBLE SUFFERING FROM COLD AND HUNGER--FATE OF LIEUTENANT
BOISSEUX’S DOG--OUR COMPANY MYSTERY--TERMINATION OF ALL HOPES OF ITS
SOLUTION.

In February my chum--B. B. Andrews, now a physician in Astoria,
Illinois --was brought into our building, greatly to my delight and
astonishment, and from him I obtained the much desired news as to the
fate of my comrades. He told me they had been sent to Belle Isle,
whither he had gone, but succumbing to the rigors of that dreadful
place, he had been taken to the hospital, and, upon his convalesence,
placed in our prison.

Our men were suffering terribly on the island. It was low, damp, and
swept by the bleak, piercing winds that howled up and down the surface
of the James. The first prisoners placed on the island had been given
tents that afforded them some shelter, but these were all occupied when
our battalion came in, so that they were compelled to lie on the snow
and frozen ground, without shelter, covering of any kind, or fire.
During this time the cold had been so intense that the James had frozen
over three times.

The rations had been much worse than ours. The so-called soup had been
diluted to a ridiculous thinness, and meat had wholly disappeared.
So intense became the craving for animal food, that one day when
Lieutenant Boisseux--the Commandant--strolled into the camp with his
beloved white bull-terrier, which was as fat as a Cheshire pig, the
latter was decoyed into a tent, a blanket thrown over him, his throat
cut within a rod of where his master was standing, and he was then
skinned, cut up, cooked, and furnished a savory meal to many hungry men.

When Boisseux learned of the fate of his four-footed friend he was, of
course, intensely enraged, but that was all the good it did him. The
only revenge possible was to sentence more prisoners to ride the cruel
wooden horse which he used as a means of punishment.

Four of our company were already dead. Jacob Lowry and John Beach were
standing near the gate one day when some one snatched the guard’s
blanket from the post where he had hung it, and ran. The enraged
sentry leveled his gun and fired into the crowd. The balls passed
through Lowry’s and Beach’s breasts. Then Charley Osgood, son of our
Lieutenant, a quiet, fair-haired, pleasant-spoken boy, but as brave and
earnest as his gallant father, sank under the combination of hunger and
cold. One stinging morning he was found stiff and stark, on the hard
ground, his bright, frank blue eyes glazed over in death.

One of the mysteries of our company was a tall, slender, elderly
Scotchman, who appeared on the rolls as William Bradford. What his
past life had been, where he had lived, what his profession, whether
married or single, no one ever knew. He came to us while in Camp of
Instruction near Springfield, Illinois, and seemed to have left all his
past behind him as he crossed the line of sentries around the camp.
He never received any letters, and never wrote any; never asked for a
furlough or pass, and never expressed a wish to be elsewhere than in
camp. He was courteous and pleasant, but very reserved. He interfered
with no one, obeyed orders promptly and without remark, and was always
present for duty. Scrupulously neat in dress, always as clean-shaved as
an old-fashioned gentleman of the world, with manners and conversation
that showed him to have belonged to a refined and polished circle,
he was evidently out of place as a private soldier in a company of
reckless and none-too-refined young Illinois troopers, but he never
availed himself of any of the numerous opportunities offered to change
his associations. His elegant penmanship would have secured him an easy
berth and better society at headquarters, but he declined to accept a
detail. He became an exciting mystery to a knot of us imaginative young
cubs, who sorted up out of the reminiscential rag-bag of high colors
and strong contrasts with which the sensational literature that we
most affected had plentifully stored our minds, a half-dozen intensely
emotional careers for him. We spent much time in mentally trying these
on, and discussing which fitted him best. We were always expecting
a denouement that would come like a lightning flash and reveal his
whole mysterious past, showing him to have been the disinherited scion
of some noble house, a man of high station, who was expiating some
fearful crime; an accomplished villain eluding his pursuers--in short,
a Somebody who would be a fitting hero for Miss Braddon’s or Wilkie
Collins’s literary purposes. We never got but two clues of his past,
and they were faint ones. One day, he left lying near me a small copy
of “Paradise Lost,” that he always carried with him. Turning over its
leaves I found all of Milton’s bitter invectives against women heavily
underscored. Another time, while on guard with him, he spent much of
his time in writing some Latin verses in very elegant chirography
upon the white painted boards of a fence along which his beat ran. We
pressed in all the available knowledge of Latin about camp, and found
that the tenor of the verses was very uncomplimentary to that charming
sex which does us the honor of being our mothers and sweethearts.
These evidences we accepted as sufficient demonstration that there was
a woman at the bottom of the mystery, and made us more impatient for
further developments. These were never to come. Bradford pined away an
Belle Isle, and grew weaker, but no less reserved, each day. At length,
one bitter cold night ended it all. He was found in the morning stone
dead, with his iron-gray hair frozen fast to the ground, upon which he
lay. Our mystery had to remain unsolved. There was nothing about his
person to give any hint as to his past.




CHAPTER XIV.

HOPING FOR EXCHANGE--AN EXPOSITION OF THE DOCTRINE OF CHANCES --OFF
FOR ANDERSONVILLE--UNCERTAINTY AS TO OUR DESTINATION--ARRIVAL AT
ANDERSONVILLE.

As each lagging day closed, we confidently expected that the next would
bring some news of the eagerly-desired exchange. We hopefully assured
each other that the thing could not be delayed much longer; that the
Spring was near, the campaign would soon open, and each government
would make an effort to get all its men into the field, and this would
bring about a transfer of prisoners. A Sergeant of the Seventh Indiana
Infantry stated his theory to me this way:

“You know I’m just old lightnin’ on chuck-a-luck. Now the way I bet is
this: I lay down, say on the ace, an’ it don’t come up; I just double
my bet on the ace, an’ keep on doublin’ every time it loses, until at
last it comes up an’ then I win a bushel o’ money, and mebbe bust the
bank. You see the thing’s got to come up some time; an’ every time it
don’t come up makes it more likely to come up the next time. It’s just
the same way with this ’ere exchange. The thing’s got to happen some
day, an’ every day that it don’t happen increases the chances that it
will happen the next day.”

Some months later I folded the sanguine Sergeant’s stiffening hands
together across his fleshless ribs, and helped carry his body out to
the dead-house at Andersonville, in order to get a piece of wood to
cook my ration of meal with.

On the evening of the 17th of February, 1864, we were ordered to get
ready to move at daybreak the next morning. We were certain this could
mean nothing else than exchange, and our exaltation was such that we
did little sleeping that night. The morning was very cold, but we
sang and joked as we marched over the creaking bridge, on our way to
the cars. We were packed so tightly in these that it was impossible
to even sit down, and we rolled slow ly away after a wheezing engine
to Petersburg, whence we expected to march to the exchange post. We
reached Petersburg before noon, and the cars halted there along time,
we momentarily expecting an order to get out. Then the train started up
and moved out of the City toward the southeast. This was inexplicable,
but after we had proceeded this way for several hours some one
conceived the idea that the Rebels, to avoid treating with Butler, were
taking us into the Department of some other commander to exchange us.
This explanation satisfied us, and our spirits rose again.

Night found us at Gaston, N. C., where we received a few crackers for
rations, and changed cars. It was dark, and we resorted to a little
strategy to secure more room. About thirty of us got into a tight
box car, and immediately announced that it was too full to admit any
more. When an officer came along with another squad to stow away, we
would yell out to him to take some of the men out, as we were crowded
unbearably. In the mean time everybody in the car would pack closely
around the door, so as to give the impression that the car was densely
crowded. The Rebel would look convinced, and demand:

“Why, how many men have you got in de cah?”

Then one of us would order the imaginary host in the invisible recesses
to--

“Stand still there, and be counted,” while he would gravely count up to
one hundred or one hundred and twenty, which was the utmost limit of
the car, and the Rebel would hurry off to put his prisoners somewhere
else. We managed to play this successfully during the whole journey,
and not only obtained room to lie down in the car, but also drew three
or four times as many rations as were intended for us, so that while we
at no time had enough, we were farther from starvation than our less
strategic companions.

The second afternoon we arrived at Raleigh, the capitol of North
Carolina, and were camped in a piece of timber, and shortly after dark
orders were issued to us all to lie flat on the ground and not rise up
till daylight. About the middle of the night a man belonging to a New
Jersey regiment, who had apparently forgotten the order, stood up, and
was immediately shot dead by the guard.

For four or five days more the decrepit little locomotive strained
along, dragging after it the rattling’ old cars. The scenery was
intensely monotonous. It was a flat, almost unending, stretch of pine
barrens and the land so poor that a disgusted Illinoisan, used to the
fertility of the great American Bottom, said rather strongly, that,

“By George, they’d have to manure this ground before they could even
make brick out of it.”

It was a surprise to all of us who had heard so much of the wealth of
Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to find the soil
a sterile sand bank, interspersed with swamps.

We had still no idea of where we were going. We only knew that our
general course was southward, and that we had passed through the
Carolinas, and were in Georgia. We furbished up our school knowledge
of geography and endeavored to recall something of the location of
Raleigh, Charlotte, Columbia and Augusta, through which we passed, but
the attempt was not a success.

Late on the afternoon of the 25th of February the Seventh Indiana
Sergeant approached me with the inquiry:

“Do you know where Macon is?”

The place had not then become as well known as it was afterward.

It seemed to me that I had read something of Macon in Revolutionary
history, and that it was a fort on the sea coast. He said that the
guard had told him that we were to be taken to a point near that place,
and we agreed that it was probably a new place of exchange. A little
later we passed through the town of Macon, Ga, and turned upon a road
that led almost due south.

About midnight the train stopped, and we were ordered off. We were in
the midst of a forest of tall trees that loaded the air with the heavy
balsamic odor peculiar to pine trees. A few small rude houses were
scattered around near.

Stretching out into the darkness was a double row of great heaps of
burning pitch pine, that smoked and flamed fiercely, and lit up a
little space around in the somber forest with a ruddy glare. Between
these two rows lay a road, which we were ordered to take.

The scene was weird and uncanny. I had recently read the “Iliad,” and
the long lines of huge fires reminded me of that scene in the first
book, where the Greeks burn on the sea shore the bodies of those
smitten by Apollo’s pestilential-arrows

          For nine long nights, through all the dusky air,
          The pyres, thick flaming shot a dismal glare.

Five hundred weary men moved along slowly through double lines of
guards. Five hundred men marched silently towards the gates that were
to shut out life and hope from most of them forever. A quarter of a
mile from the railroad we came to a massive palisade of great squared
logs standing upright in the ground. The fires blazed up and showed
us a section of these, and two massive wooden gates, with heavy iron
hinges and bolts. They swung open as we stood there and we passed
through into the space beyond.

We were in Andersonville.




CHAPTER XV.

GEORGIA--A LEAN AND HUNGRY LAND--DIFFERENCE BETWEEN UPPER AND LOWER
GEORGIA--THE PILLAGE OF ANDERSONVILLE.

As the next nine months of the existence of those of us who survived
were spent in intimate connection with the soil of Georgia, and, as it
exercised a potential influence upon our comfort and well-being, or
rather lack of these--a mention of some of its peculiar characteristics
may help the reader to a fuller comprehension of the conditions
surrounding us--our environment, as Darwin would say.

Georgia, which, next to Texas, is the largest State in the South, and
has nearly twenty-five per cent. more area than the great State of New
York, is divided into two distinct and widely differing sections, by a
geological line extending directly across the State from Augusta, on
the Savannah River, through Macon, on the Ocmulgee, to Columbus, on the
Chattahoochie. That part lying to the north and west of this line is
usually spoken of as “Upper Georgia;” while that lying to the south and
east, extending to the Atlantic Ocean and the Florida line, is called
“Lower Georgia.” In this part of the State--though far removed from
each other--were the prisons of Andersonville, Savannah, Millen and
Blackshear, in which we were incarcerated one after the other.

Upper Georgia--the capital of which is Atlanta--is a fruitful,
productive, metalliferous region, that will in time become quite
wealthy. Lower Georgia, which has an extent about equal to that of
Indiana, is not only poorer now than a worn-out province of Asia Minor,
but in all probability will ever remain so.

It is a starved, sterile land, impressing one as a desert in the first
stages of reclamation into productive soil, or a productive soil in
the last steps of deterioration into a desert. It is a vast expanse
of arid, yellow sand, broken at intervals by foul swamps, with a
jungle-life growth of unwholesome vegetation, and teeming With venomous
snakes, and all manner of hideous crawling thing.

The original forest still stands almost unbroken on this wide stretch
of thirty thousand square miles, but it does not cover it as we say
of forests in more favored lands. The tall, solemn pines, upright and
symmetrical as huge masts, and wholly destitute of limbs, except the
little, umbrella-like crest at the very top, stand far apart from each
other in an unfriendly isolation. There is no fraternal interlacing of
branches to form a kindly, umbrageous shadow. Between them is no genial
undergrowth of vines, shrubs, and demi-trees, generous in fruits,
berries and nuts, such as make one of the charms of Northern forests.
On the ground is no rich, springing sod of emerald green, fragrant
with the elusive sweetness of white clover, and dainty flowers, but
a sparse, wiry, famished grass, scattered thinly over the surface in
tufts and patches, like the hair on a mangy cur.

The giant pines seem to have sucked up into their immense boles all the
nutriment in the earth, and starved out every minor growth. So wide and
clean is the space between them, that one can look through the forest
in any direction for miles, with almost as little interference with the
view as on a prairie. In the swampier parts the trees are lower, and
their limbs are hung with heavy festoons of the gloomy Spanish moss, or
“death moss,” as it is more frequently called, because where it grows
rankest the malaria is the deadliest. Everywhere Nature seems sad,
subdued and somber.

I have long entertained a peculiar theory to account for the decadence
and ruin of countries. My reading of the world’s history seems to teach
me that when a strong people take possession of a fertile land, they
reduce it to cultivation, thrive upon its bountifulness, multiply into
millions the mouths to be fed from it, tax it to the last limit of
production of the necessities of life, take from it continually, and
give nothing back, starve and overwork it as cruel, grasping men do a
servant or a beast, and when at last it breaks down under the strain,
it revenges itself by starving many of them with great famines, while
the others go off in search of new countries to put through the same
process of exhaustion. We have seen one country after another undergo
this process as the seat of empire took its westward way, from the
cradle of the race on the banks of the Oxus to the fertile plains in
the Valley of the Euphrates. Impoverishing these, men next sought the
Valley of the Nile, then the Grecian Peninsula; next Syracuse and the
Italian Peninsula, then the Iberian Peninsula, and the African shores
of the Mediterranean. Exhausting all these, they were deserted for the
French, German and English portions of Europe. The turn of the latter
is now come; famines are becoming terribly frequent, and mankind is
pouring into the virgin fields of America.

Lower Georgia, the Carolinas and Eastern Virginia have all the
characteristics of these starved and worn-out lands. It would seem as
if, away back in the distance of ages, some numerous and civilized race
had drained from the soil the last atom of food-producing constituents,
and that it is now slowly gathering back, as the centuries pass, the
elements that have been wrung from the land.

Lower Georgia is very thinly settled. Much of the land is still in
the hands of the Government. The three or four railroads which pass
through it have little reference to local traffic. There are no towns
along them as a rule; stations are made every ten miles, and not named,
but numbered, as “Station No. 4”--“No. 10”, etc. The roads were built
as through lines, to bring to the seaboard the rich products of the
interior.

Andersonville is one of the few stations dignified with a same,
probably because it contained some half dozen of shabby houses, whereas
at the others there was usually nothing more than a mere open shed, to
shelter goods and travelers. It is on a rudely constructed, rickety
railroad, that runs from Macon to Albany, the head of navigation on
the Flint River, which is, one hundred and six miles from Macon, and
two hundred and fifty from the Gulf of Mexico. Andersonville is about
sixty miles from Macon, and, consequently, about three hundred miles
from the Gulf. The camp was merely a hole cut in the wilderness. It was
as remote a point from, our armies, as they then lay, as the Southern
Confederacy could give. The nearest was Sherman, at Chattanooga, four
hundred miles away, and on the other side of a range of mountains
hundreds of miles wide.

To us it seemed beyond the last forlorn limits of civilization. We felt
that we were more completely at the mercy of our foes than ever. While
in Richmond we were in the heart of the Confederacy; we were in the
midst of the Rebel military and, civil force, and were surrounded on
every hand by visible evidences of the great magnitude of that power,
but this, while it enforced our ready submission, did not overawe us
depressingly, We knew that though the Rebels were all about us in great
force, our own men were also near, and in still greater force--that
while they were very strong our army was still stronger, and there was
no telling what day this superiority of strength, might be demonstrated
in such a way as to decisively benefit us.

But here we felt as did the Ancient Mariner:

               Alone on a wide, wide sea,
               So lonely ’twas that God himself
               Scarce seemed there to be.




CHAPTER XVI.

WAKING UP IN ANDERSONVILLE--SOME DESCRIPTION OF THE PLACE--OUR FIRST
MAIL--BUILDING SHELTER--GEN. WINDER--HIMSELF AND LINEAGE.

We roused up promptly with the dawn to take a survey of our new abiding
place. We found ourselves in an immense pen, about one thousand feet
long by eight hundred wide, as a young surveyor--a member of the
Thirty-fourth Ohio--informed us after he had paced it off. He estimated
that it contained about sixteen acres. The walls were formed by pine
logs twenty-five feet long, from two to three feet in diameter, hewn
square, set into the ground to a depth of five feet, and placed so
close together as to leave no crack through which the country outside
could be seen. There being five feet of the logs in the ground, the
wall was, of course, twenty feet high. This manner of enclosure was in
some respects superior to a wall of masonry. It was equally unscalable,
and much more difficult to undermine or batter down.

The pen was longest due north and south. It was divided in the center
by a creek about a yard wide and ten inches deep, running from west to
east. On each side of this was a quaking bog of slimy ooze one hundred
and fifty feet wide, and so yielding that one attempting to walk upon
it would sink to the waist. From this swamp the sand-hills sloped north
and south to the stockade. All the trees inside the stockade, save two,
had been cut down and used in its construction. All the rank vegetation
of the swamp had also been cut off.

There were two entrances to the stockade, one on each side of the
creek, midway between it and the ends, and called respectively the
“North Gate” and the “South Gate.” These were constructed double, by
building smaller stockades around them on the outside, with another
set of gates. When prisoners or wagons with rations were brought in,
they were first brought inside the outer gates, which were carefully
secured, before the inner gates were opened. This was done to prevent
the gates being carried by a rush by those confined inside.

At regular intervals along the palisades were little perches, upon
which stood guards, who overlooked the whole inside of the prison.

The only view we had of the outside was that obtained by looking from
the highest points of the North or South Sides across the depression
where the stockade crossed the swamp. In this way we could see about
forty acres at a time of the adjoining woodland, or say one hundred and
sixty acres altogether, and this meager landscape had to content us for
the next half year.

Before our inspection was finished, a wagon drove in with rations, and
a quart of meal, a sweet potato and a few ounces of salt beef were
issued to each one of us.

In a few minutes we were all hard at work preparing our first meal in
Andersonville. The debris of the forest left a temporary abundance
of fuel, and we had already a cheerful fire blazing for every little
squad. There were a number of tobacco presses in the rooms we occupied
in Richmond, and to each of these was a quantity of sheets of tin,
evidently used to put between the layers of tobacco. The deft hands of
the mechanics among us bent these up into square pans, which were real
handy cooking utensils, holding about--a quart. Water was carried in
them from the creek; the meal mixed in them to a dough, or else boiled
as mush in the same vessels; the potatoes were boiled; and their final
service was to hold a little meal to be carefully browned, and then
water boiled upon it, so as to form a feeble imitation of coffee. I
found my education at Jonesville in the art of baking a hoe-cake now
came in good play, both for myself and companions. Taking one of the
pieces of tin which had not yet been made into a pan, we spread upon
it a layer of dough about a half-inch thick. Propping this up nearly
upright before the fire, it was soon nicely browned over. This process
made it sweat itself loose from the tin, when it was turned over and
the bottom browned also. Save that it was destitute of salt, it was
quite a toothsome bit of nutriment for a hungry man, and I recommend my
readers to try making a “pone” of this kind once, just to see what it
was like.

The supreme indifference with which the Rebels always treated the
matter of cooking utensils for us, excited my wonder. It never seemed
to occur to them that we could have any more need of vessels for our
food than cattle or swine. Never, during my whole prison life, did I
see so much as a tin cup or a bucket issued to a prisoner. Starving men
were driven to all sorts of shifts for want of these. Pantaloons or
coats were pulled off and their sleeves or legs used to draw a mess’s
meal in. Boots were common vessels for carrying water, and when the
feet of these gave way the legs were ingeniously closed up with pine
pegs, so as to form rude leathern buckets. Men whose pocket knives had
escaped the search at the gates made very ingenious little tubs and
buckets, and these devices enabled us to get along after a fashion.

After our meal was disposed of, we held a council on the situation.
Though we had been sadly disappointed in not being exchanged, it
seemed that on the whole our condition had been bettered. This first
ration was a decided improvement on those of the Pemberton building;
we had left the snow and ice behind at Richmond--or rather at some
place between Raleigh, N. C., and Columbia, S. C.--and the air here,
though chill, was not nipping, but bracing. It looked as if we would
have a plenty of wood for shelter and fuel, it was certainly better
to have sixteen acres to roam over than the stiffing confines of a
building; and, still better, it seemed as if there would be plenty of
opportunities to get beyond the stockade, and attempt a journey through
the woods to that blissful land --“Our lines.”

We settled down to make the best of things. A Rebel Sergeant came
in presently and arranged us in hundreds. We subdivided these into
messes of twenty-five, and began devising means for shelter. Nothing
showed the inborn capacity of the Northern soldier to take care of
himself better than the way in which we accomplished this with the
rude materials at our command. No ax, spade nor mattock was allowed
us by the Rebels, who treated us in regard to these the same as in
respect to culinary vessels. The only tools were a few pocket-knives,
and perhaps half-a-dozen hatchets which some infantrymen-principally
members of the Third Michigan--were allowed to retain. Yet, despite
all these drawbacks, we had quite a village of huts erected in a few
days,--nearly enough, in fact, to afford tolerable shelter for the
whole five hundred of us first-comers.

The wither and poles that grew in the swamp were bent into the shape
of the semi-circular bows that support the canvas covers of army
wagons, and both ends thrust in the ground. These formed the timbers
of our dwellings. They were held in place by weaving in, basket-wise,
a network of briers and vines. Tufts of the long leaves which are the
distinguishing characteristic of the Georgia pine (popularly known as
the “long-leaved pine”) were wrought into this network until a thatch
was formed, that was a fair protection against the rain--it was like
the Irishman’s unglazed window-sash, which “kep’ out the coarsest uv
the cold.”

The results accomplished were as astonishing to us as to the Rebels,
who would have lain unsheltered upon the sand until bleached out like
field-rotted flax, before thinking to protect themselves in this
way. As our village was approaching completion, the Rebel Sergeant
who called the roll entered. He was very odd-looking. The cervical
muscles were distorted in such a way as to suggest to us the name of
“Wry-necked Smith,” by which we always designated him. Pete Bates, of
the Third Michigan, who was the wag of our squad, accounted for Smith’s
condition by saying that while on dress parade once the Colonel of
Smith’s regiment had commanded “eyes right,” and then forgot to give
the order “front.” Smith, being a good soldier, had kept his eyes in
the position of gazing at the buttons of the third man to the right,
waiting for the order to restore them to their natural direction,
until they had become permanently fixed in their obliquity and he was
compelled to go through life taking a biased view of all things.

Smith walked in, made a diagonal survey of the encampment, which, if
he had ever seen “Mitchell’s Geography,” probably reminded him of the
picture of a Kaffir village, in that instructive but awfully dull book,
and then expressed the opinion that usually welled up to every Rebel’s
lips:

“Well, I’ll be durned, if you Yanks don’t just beat the devil.”

Of course, we replied with the well-worn prison joke, that we supposed
we did, as we beat the Rebels, who were worse than the devil.

There rode in among us, a few days after our arrival, an old man whose
collar bore the wreathed stars of a Major General. Heavy white locks
fell from beneath his slouched hat, nearly to his shoulders. Sunken
gray eyes, too dull and cold to light up, marked a hard, stony face,
the salient feature of which was a thin-upped, compressed mouth, with
corners drawn down deeply--the mouth which seems the world over to be
the index of selfish, cruel, sulky malignance. It is such a mouth as
has the school-boy--the coward of the play ground, who delights in
pulling off the wings of flies. It is such a mouth as we can imagine
some remorseless inquisitor to have had--that is, not an inquisitor
filled with holy zeal for what he mistakenly thought the cause of
Christ demanded, but a spleeny, envious, rancorous shaveling, who
tortured men from hatred of their superiority to him, and sheer love of
inflicting pain.

The rider was John H. Winder, Commissary General of Prisoners,
Baltimorean renegade and the malign genius to whose account should be
charged the deaths of more gallant men than all the inquisitors of the
world ever slew by the less dreadful rack and wheel. It was he who in
August could point to the three thousand and eighty-one new made graves
for that month, and exultingly tell his hearer that he was “doing more
for the Confederacy than twenty regiments.”

His lineage was in accordance with his character. His father was that
General William H. Winder, whose poltroonery at Bladensburg, in 1814,
nullified the resistance of the gallant Commodore Barney, and gave
Washington to the British.

The father was a coward and an incompetent; the son, always cautiously
distant from the scene of hostilities, was the tormentor of those whom
the fortunes of war, and the arms of brave men threw into his hands.

Winder gazed at us stonily for a few minutes without speaking, and,
turning, rode out again.

Our troubles, from that hour, rapidly increased.




CHAPTER XVII.

THE PLANTATION NEGROS--NOT STUPID TO BE LOYAL--THEIR DITHYRAMBIC MUSIC
--COPPERHEAD OPINION OF LONGFELLOW.

The stockade was not quite finished at the time of our arrival--a gap
of several hundred feet appearing at the southwest corner. A gang of
about two hundred negros were at work felling trees, hewing legs, and
placing them upright in the trenches. We had an opportunity--soon
to disappear forever--of studying the workings of the “peculiar
institution” in its very home. The negros were of the lowest field-hand
class, strong, dull, ox-like, but each having in our eyes an admixture
of cunning and secretiveness that their masters pretended was not in
them. Their demeanor toward us illustrated this. We were the objects
of the most supreme interest to them, but when near us and in the
presence of a white Rebel, this interest took the shape of stupid,
open-eyed, open-mouthed wonder, something akin to the look on the face
of the rustic lout, gazing for the first time upon a locomotive or a
steam threshing machine. But if chance threw one of them near us when
he thought himself unobserved by the Rebels, the blank, vacant face
lighted up with an entirely different expression. He was no longer the
credulous yokel who believed the Yankees were only slightly modified
devils, ready at any instant to return to their original horn-and-tail
condition and snatch him away to the bluest kind of perdition; he knew,
apparently quite as well as his master, that they were in some way his
friends and allies, and he lost no opportunity in communicating his
appreciation of that fact, and of offering his services in any possible
way. And these offers were sincere. It is the testimony of every Union
prisoner in the South that he was never betrayed by or disappointed in
a field-negro, but could always approach any one of them with perfect
confidence in his extending all the aid in his power, whether as a
guide to escape, as sentinel to signal danger, or a purveyor of food.
These services were frequently attended with the greatest personal
risk, but they were none the less readily undertaken. This applies only
to the field-hands; the house servants were treacherous and wholly
unreliable. Very many of our men who managed to get away from the
prisons were recaptured through their betrayal by house servants, but
none were retaken where a field hand could prevent it.

We were much interested in watching the negro work. They wove in a
great deal of their peculiar, wild, mournful music, whenever the
character of the labor permitted. They seemed to sing the music for
the music’s sake alone, and were as heedless of the fitness of the
accompanying words, as the composer of a modern opera is of his
libretto. One middle aged man, with a powerful, mellow baritone, like
the round, full notes of a French horn, played by a virtuoso, was the
musical leader of the party. He never seemed to bother himself about
air, notes or words, but improvised all as he went along, and he sang
as the spirit moved him. He would suddenly break out with--

     “Oh, he’s gone up dah, nevah to come back agin,”

At this every darkey within hearing would roll out, in admirable
consonance with the pitch, air and time started by the leader--

     “O-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!”

Then would ring out from the leader as from the throbbing lips of a
silver trumpet,

     “Lord bress him soul; I done hope he is happy now!”

And the antiphonal two hundred would chant back

     “O-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!”

And so on for hours. They never seemed to weary of singing, and we
certainly did not of listening to them. The absolute independence
of the conventionalities of tune and sentiment, gave them freedom
to wander through a kaleideoscopic variety of harmonic effects, as
spontaneous and changeful as the song of a bird.

I sat one evening, long after the shadows of night had fallen upon the
hillside, with one of my chums--a Frank Berkstresser, of the Ninth
Maryland Infantry, who before enlisting was a mathematical tutor in
college at Hancock, Maryland. As we listened to the unwearying flow of
melody from the camp of the laborers, I thought of and repeated to him
Longfellow’s fine lines:

THE SLAVE SINGING AT MIDNIGHT.

And the voice of his devotion
Filled my soul with strong emotion;
For its tones by turns were glad
Sweetly solemn, wildly sad.

          Paul and Silas, in their prison,
          Sang of Christ, the Lord arisen,
          And an earthquake’s arm of might
          Broke their dungeon gates at night.

          But, alas, what holy angel
          Brings the slave this glad evangel
          And what earthquake’s arm of might.
          Breaks his prison gags at night.

Said I: “Now, isn’t that fine, Berkstresser?”

He was a Democrat, of fearfully pro-slavery ideas, and he replied,
sententiously:

“O, the poetry’s tolerable, but the sentiment’s damnable.”




CHAPTER XVIII.

SCHEMES AND PLANS TO ESCAPE--SCALING THE STOCKADE--ESTABLISHING THE
DEAD LINE--THE FIRST MAN KILLED.

The official designation of our prison was “Camp Sumpter,” but this
was scarcely known outside of the Rebel documents, reports and orders.
It was the same way with the prison five miles from Millen, to which
we were afterward transferred. The Rebels styled it officially “Camp
Lawton,” but we called it always “Millen.”

Having our huts finished, the next solicitude was about escape,
and this was the burden of our thoughts, day and night. We held
conferences, at which every man was required to contribute all the
geographical knowledge of that section of Georgia that he might have
left over from his schoolboy days, and also that gained by persistent
questioning of such guards and other Rebels as he had come in contact
with. When first landed in the prison we were as ignorant of our
whereabouts as if we had been dropped into the center of Africa. But
one of the prisoners was found to have a fragment of a school atlas,
in which was an outline map of Georgia, that had Macon, Atlanta,
Milledgeville, and Savannah laid down upon it. As we knew we had
come southward from Macon, we felt pretty certain we were in the
southwestern corner of the State. Conversations with guards and others
gave us the information that the Chattahooche flowed some two score of
miles to the westward, and that the Flint lay a little nearer on the
east. Our map showed that these two united and flowed together into
Appalachicola Bay, where, some of us remembered, a newspaper item had
said that we had gunboats stationed. The creek that ran through the
stockade flowed to the east, and we reasoned that if we followed its
course we would be led to the Flint, down which we could float on a log
or raft to the Appalachicola. This was the favorite scheme of the party
with which I sided. Another party believed the most feasible plan was
to go northward, and endeavor to gain the mountains, and thence get
into East Tennessee.

But the main thing was to get away from the stockade; this, as the
French say of all first steps, was what would cost.

Our first attempt was made about a week after our arrival. We found two
logs on the east side that were a couple of feet shorter than the rest,
and it seemed as if they could be successfully scaled. About fifty of
us resolved to make the attempt. We made a rope twenty-five or thirty
feet long, and strong enough to bear a man, out of strings and strips
of cloth. A stout stick was fastened to the end, so that it would catch
on the logs on either side of the gap. On a night dark enough to favor
our scheme, we gathered together, drew cuts to determine each boy’s
place in the line, fell in single rank, according to this arrangement,
and marched to the place. The line was thrown skillfully, the stick
caught fairly in the notch, and the boy who had drawn number one
climbed up amid a suspense so keen that I could hear my heart beating.
It seemed ages before he reached the top, and that the noise he made
must certainly attract the attention of the guard. It did not. We saw
our comrade’s. figure outlined against the sky as he slid, over the
top, and then heard the dull thump as he sprang to the ground on the
other side. “Number two,” was whispered by our leader, and he performed
the feat as successfully as his predecessor. “Number, three,” and he
followed noiselessly and quickly. Thus it went on, until, just as we
heard number fifteen drop, we also heard a Rebel voice say in a vicious
undertone:

“Halt! halt, there, d--n you!”

This was enough. The game was up; we were discovered, and the remaining
thirty-five of us left that locality with all the speed in our heels,
getting away just in time to escape a volley which a squad of guards,
posted in the lookouts, poured upon the spot where we had been standing.

The next morning the fifteen who had got over the Stockade were brought
in, each chained to a sixty-four pound ball. Their story was that one
of the N’Yaarkers, who had become cognizant of our scheme, had sought
to obtain favor in the Rebel eyes by betraying us. The Rebels stationed
a squad at the crossing place, and as each man dropped down from the
Stockade he was caught by the shoulder, the muzzle of a revolver thrust
into his face, and an order to surrender whispered into his ear. It was
expected that the guards in the sentry-boxes would do such execution
among those of us still inside as would prove a warning to other
would-be escapes. They were defeated in this benevolent intention by
the readiness with which we divined the meaning of that incautiously
loud halt, and our alacrity in leaving the unhealthy locality.

The traitorous N’Yaarker was rewarded with a detail into the commissary
department, where he fed and fattened like a rat that had secured
undisturbed homestead rights in the center of a cheese. When the
miserable remnant of us were leaving Andersonville months afterward,
I saw him, sleek, rotund, and well-clothed, lounging leisurely in the
door of a tent. He regarded us a moment contemptuously, and then went
on conversing with a fellow N’Yaarker, in the foul slang that none but
such as he were low enough to use.

I have always imagined that the fellow returned home, at the close of
the war, and became a prominent member of Tweed’s gang.

We protested against the barbarity of compelling men to wear irons
for exercising their natural right of attempting to escape, but no
attention was paid to our protest.

Another result of this abortive effort was the establishment of the
notorious “Dead Line.” A few days later a gang of negros came in and
drove a line of stakes down at a distance of twenty feet from the
stockade. They nailed upon this a strip of stuff four inches wide, and
then an order was issued that if this was crossed, or even touched, the
guards would fire upon the offender without warning.

Our surveyor figured up this new contraction of our space, and came to
the conclusion that the Dead Line and the Swamp took up about three
acres, and we were left now only thirteen acres. This was not of much
conse

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