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.