CLOTHING: ITS RAPID DETERIORATION, AND DEVICES TO REPLENISH
IT--DESPERATE EFFORTS TO COVER NAKEDNESS--“LITTLE RED CAP” AND HIS
LETTER.
Clothing had now become an object of real solicitude to us older
prisoners. The veterans of our crowd--the surviving remnant of those
captured at Gettysburg--had been prisoners over a year. The next in
seniority--the Chickamauga boys--had been in ten months. The Mine Run
fellows were eight months old, and my battalion had had seven months’
incarceration. None of us were models of well-dressed gentlemen when
captured. Our garments told the whole story of the hard campaigning we
had undergone. Now, with months of the wear and tear of prison life,
sleeping on the sand, working in tunnels, digging wells, etc., we were
tattered and torn to an extent that a second-class tramp would have
considered disgraceful.
This is no reflection upon the quality of the clothes furnished by
the Government. We simply reached the limit of the wear of textile
fabrics. I am particular to say this, because I want to contribute my
little mite towards doing justice to a badly abused part of our Army
organization --the Quartermaster’s Department. It is fashionable to
speak of “shoddy,” and utter some stereotyped sneers about “brown paper
shoes,” and “musketo-netting overcoats,” when any discussion of the
Quartermaster service is the subject of conversation, but I have no
hesitation in asking the indorsement of my comrades to the statement
that we have never found anywhere else as durable garments as those
furnished us by the Government during our service in the Army. The
clothes were not as fine in texture, nor so stylish in cut as those we
wore before or since, but when it came to wear they could be relied on
to the last thread. It was always marvelous to me that they lasted so
well, with the rough usage a soldier in the field must necessarily give
them.
But to return to my subject. I can best illustrate the way our
clothes dropped off us, piece by piece, like the petals from the last
rose of Summer, by taking my own case as an example: When I entered
prison I was clad in the ordinary garb of an enlisted man of the
cavalry--stout, comfortable boots, woolen pocks, drawers, pantaloons,
with a “reenforcement,” or “ready-made patches,” as the infantry
called them; vest, warm, snug-fitting jacket, under and over shirts,
heavy overcoat, and a forage-cap. First my boots fell into cureless
ruin, but this was no special hardship, as the weather had become
quite warm, and it was more pleasant than otherwise to go barefooted.
Then part of the underclothing retired from service. The jacket and
vest followed, their end being hastened by having their best portions
taken to patch up the pantaloons, which kept giving out at the most
embarrassing places. Then the cape of the overcoat was called upon to
assist in repairing these continually-recurring breaches in the nether
garments. The same insatiate demand finally consumed the whole coat, in
a vain attempt to prevent an exposure of person greater than consistent
with the usages of society. The pantaloons--or what, by courtesy, I
called such, were a monument of careful and ingenious, but hopeless,
patching, that should have called forth the admiration of a Florentine
artist in mosaic. I have been shown--in later years--many table tops,
ornamented in marquetry, inlaid with thousands of little bits of wood,
cunningly arranged, and patiently joined together. I always look at
them with interest, for I know the work spent upon them: I remember my
Andersonville pantaloons.
The clothing upon the upper part of my body had been reduced to the
remains of a knit undershirt. It had fallen into so many holes that it
looked like the coarse “riddles” through which ashes and gravel are
sifted. Wherever these holes were the sun had burned my back, breast
and shoulders deeply black. The parts covered by the threads and
fragments forming the boundaries of the holes, were still white. When
I pulled my alleged shirt off, to wash or to free it from some of its
teeming population, my skin showed a fine lace pattern in black and
white, that was very interesting to my comrades, and the subject of
countless jokes by them.
They used to descant loudly on the chaste elegance of the design, the
richness of the tracing, etc., and beg me to furnish them with a copy
of it when I got home, for their sisters to work window curtains or
tidies by. They were sure that so striking a novelty in patterns would
be very acceptable. I would reply to their witticisms in the language
of Portia’s Prince of Morocco:
Mislike me not for my complexion-- The shadowed livery of the burning
sun.
One of the stories told me in my childhood by an old negro nurse, was
of a poverty stricken little girl “who slept on the floor and was
covered with the door,” and she once asked--
“Mamma how do poor folks get along who haven’t any door?”
In the same spirit I used to wonder how poor fellows got along who
hadn’t any shirt.
One common way of keeping up one’s clothing was by stealing mealsacks.
The meal furnished as rations was brought in in white cotton sacks.
Sergeants of detachments were required to return these when the
rations were issued the next day. I have before alluded to the general
incapacity of the Rebels to deal accurately with even simple numbers.
It was never very difficult for a shrewd Sergeant to make nine sacks
count as ten. After awhile the Rebels began to see through this sleight
of hand manipulation, and to check it. Then the Sergeants resorted to
the device of tearing the sacks in two, and turning each half in as a
whole one. The cotton cloth gained in this way was used for patching,
or, if a boy could succeed in beating the Rebels out of enough of
it, he would fabricate himself a shirt or a pair of pantaloons. We
obtained all our thread in the same way. A half of a sack, carefully
raveled out, would furnish a couple of handfuls of thread. Had it not
been for this resource all our sewing and mending would have come to a
standstill.
Most of our needles were manufactured by ourselves from bones. A piece
of bone, split as near as possible to the required size, was carefully
rubbed down upon a brick, and then had an eye laboriously worked
through it with a bit of wire or something else available for the
purpose. The needles were about the size of ordinary darning needles,
and answered the purpose very well.
These devices gave one some conception of the way savages provide for
the wants of their lives. Time was with them, as with us, of little
importance. It was no loss of time to them, nor to us, to spend a large
portion of the waking hours of a week in fabricating a needle out of a
bone, where a civilized man could purchase a much better one with the
product of three minutes’ labor. I do not think any red Indian of the
plains exceeded us in the patience with which we worked away at these
minutia of life’s needs.
Of course the most common source of clothing was the dead, and no body
was carried out with any clothing on it that could be of service to the
survivors. The Plymouth Pilgrims, who were so well clothed on coming
in, and were now dying off very rapidly, furnished many good suits to
cover the nakedness of older, prisoners. Most of the prisoners from the
Army of the Potomac were well dressed, and as very many died within a
month or six weeks after their entrance, they left their clothes in
pretty good condition for those who constituted themselves their heirs,
administrators and assigns.
For my own part, I had the greatest aversion to wearing dead men’s
clothes, and could only bring myself to it after I had been a year in
prison, and it became a question between doing that and freezing to
death.
Every new batch of prisoners was besieged with anxious inquiries on the
subject which lay closest to all our hearts:
“What are they doing about exchange!”
Nothing in human experience--save the anxious expectancy of a sail by
castaways on a desert island--could equal the intense eagerness with
which this question was asked, and the answer awaited. To thousands now
hanging on the verge of eternity it meant life or death. Between the
first day of July and the first of November over twelve thousand men
died, who would doubtless have lived had they been able to reach our
lines--“get to God’s country,” as we expressed it.
The new comers brought little reliable news of contemplated exchange.
There was none to bring in the first place, and in the next, soldiers
in active service in the field had other things to busy themselves
with than reading up the details of the negotiations between the
Commissioners of Exchange. They had all heard rumors, however, and by
the time they reached Andersonville, they had crystallized these into
actual statements of fact. A half hour after they entered the Stockade,
a report like this would spread like wildfire:
“An Army of the Potomac man has just come in, who was captured in front
of Petersburg. He says that he read in the New York Herald, the day
before he was taken, that an exchange had been agreed upon, and that
our ships had already started for Savannah to take us home.”
Then our hopes would soar up like balloons. We fed ourselves on such
stuff from day to day, and doubtless many lives were greatly prolonged
by the continual encouragement. There was hardly a day when I did not
say to myself that I would much rather die than endure imprisonment
another month, and had I believed that another month would see me
still there, I am pretty certain that I should have ended the matter
by crossing the Dead Line. I was firmly resolved not to die the
disgusting, agonizing death that so many around me were dying.
One of our best purveyors of information was a bright, blue-eyed,
fair-haired little drummer boy, as handsome as a girl, well-bred as
a lady, and evidently the darling of some refined loving mother. He
belonged, I think, to some loyal Virginia regiment, was captured in
one of the actions in the Shenandoa Valley, and had been with us
in Richmond. We called him “Red Cap,” from his wearing a jaunty,
gold-laced, crimson cap. Ordinarily, the smaller a drummer boy is
the harder he is, but no amount of attrition with rough men could
coarse the ingrained refinement of Red Cap’s manners. He was between
thirteen and fourteen, and it seemed utterly shameful that men, calling
themselves soldier should make war on such a tender boy and drag him
off to prison.
But no six-footer had a more soldierly heart than little Red Cap, and
none were more loyal to the cause. It was a pleasure to hear him tell
the story of the fights and movements his regiment had been engaged
in. He was a good observer and told his tale with boyish fervor.
Shortly after Wirz assumed command he took Red Cap into his office as
an Orderly. His bright face and winning manner; fascinated the women
visitors at headquarters, and numbers of them tried to adopt him,
but with poor success. Like the rest of us, he could see few charms
in an existence under the Rebel flag, and turned a deaf ear to their
blandishments. He kept his ears open to the conversation of the Rebel
officers around him, and frequently secured permission to visit the
interior of the Stockade, when he would communicate to us all that he
has heard. He received a flattering reception every time he cams in,
and no orator ever secured a more attentive audience than would gather
around him to listen to what he had to say. He was, beyond a doubt, the
best known and most popular person in the prison, and I know all the
survivors of his old admirer; share my great interest in him, and my
curiosity as to whether he yet lives, and whether his subsequent career
has justified the sanguine hopes we all had as to his future. I hope
that if he sees this, or any one who knows anything about him, he will
communicate with me. There are thousands who will be glad to hear from
him.
A most remarkable coincidence occurred in regard to this comrade.
Several days after the above had been written, and “set up,” but before
it had yet appeared in the paper, I received the following letter:
ECKHART MINES,
Alleghany County, Md., March 24.
To the Editor of the BLADE:
Last evening I saw a copy of your paper, in which was a chapter or
two of a prison life of a soldier during the late war. I was forcibly
struck with the correctness of what he wrote, and the names of several
of my old comrades which he quoted: Hill, Limber Jim, etc., etc. I
was a drummer boy of Company I, Tenth West Virginia Infantry, and was
fifteen years of age a day or two after arriving in Andersonville,
which was in the last of February, 1884. Nineteen of my comrades were
there with me, and, poor fellows, they are there yet. I have no doubt
that I would have remained there, too, had I not been more fortunate.
I do not know who your soldier correspondent is, but assume to say
that from the following description he will remember having seen me
in Andersonville: I was the little boy that for three or four months
officiated as orderly for Captain Wirz. I wore a red cap, and every
day could be seen riding Wirz’s gray mare, either at headquarters,
or about the Stockade. I was acting in this capacity when the six
raiders --“Mosby,” (proper name Collins) Delaney, Curtis, and--I forget
the other names--were executed. I believe that I was the first that
conveyed the intelligence to them that Confederate General Winder had
approved their sentence. As soon as Wirz received the dispatch to that
effect, I ran down to the stocks and told them.
I visited Hill, of Wauseon, Fulton County, O., since the war, and found
him hale and hearty. I have not heard from him for a number of years
until reading your correspondent’s letter last evening. It is the only
letter of the series that I have seen, but after reading that one, I
feel called upon to certify that I have no doubts of the truthfulness
of your correspondent’s story. The world will never know or believe the
horrors of Andersonville and other prisons in the South. No living,
human being, in my judgment, will ever be able to properly paint the
horrors of those infernal dens.
I formed the acquaintance of several Ohio soldiers whilst in
prison. Among these were O. D. Streeter, of Cleveland, who went to
Andersonville about the same time that I did, and escaped, and was the
only man that I ever knew that escaped and reached our lines. After an
absence of several months he was retaken in one of Sherman’s battles
before Atlanta, and brought back. I also knew John L. Richards, of
Fostoria, Seneca County, O. or Eaglesville, Wood County. Also, a man
by the name of Beverly, who was a partner of Charley Aucklebv, of
Tennessee. I would like to hear from all of these parties. They all
know me.
Mr. Editor, I will close by wishing all my comrades who shared in the
sufferings and dangers of Confederate prisons, a long and useful life.
Yours truly,
RANSOM T. POWELL