AUGUST--GOOD LUCK IN NOT MEETING CAPTAIN WIRZ--THAT WORTHY’S TREATMENT
OF RECAPTURED PRISONERS--SECRET SOCIETIES IN PRISON--SINGULAR MEETING
AND ITS RESULT--DISCOVERY AND REMOVAL OF THE OFFICERS AMONG THE
ENLISTED MEN.
Harney and I were specially fortunate in being turned back into the
Stockade without being brought before Captain Wirz.
We subsequently learned that we owed this good luck to Wirz’s absence
on sick leave--his place being supplied by Lieutenant Davis, a moderate
brained Baltimorean, and one of that horde of Marylanders in the Rebel
Army, whose principal service to the Confederacy consisted in working
themselves into “bomb-proof” places, and forcing those whom they
displaced into the field. Winder was the illustrious head of this crowd
of bomb-proof Rebels from “Maryland, My Maryland!” whose enthusiasm for
the Southern cause and consistency in serving it only in such places
as were out of range of the Yankee artillery, was the subject of many
bitter jibes by the Rebels--especially by those whose secure berths
they possessed themselves of.
Lieutenant Davis went into the war with great brashness. He was one of
the mob which attacked the Sixth Massachusetts in its passage through
Baltimore, but, like all of that class of roughs, he got his stomach
full of war as soon as the real business of fighting began, and he
retired to where the chances of attaining a ripe old age were better
than in front of the Army of the Potomac’s muskets. We shall hear of
Davis again.
Encountering Captain Wirz was one of the terrors of an abortive attempt
to escape. When recaptured prisoners were brought before him he would
frequently give way to paroxysms of screaming rage, so violent as
to closely verge on insanity. Brandishing the fearful and wonderful
revolver--of which I have spoken in such a manner as to threaten the
luckless captives with instant death, he would shriek out imprecations,
curses; and foul epithets in French, German and English, until he
fairly frothed at the mouth. There were plenty of stories current in
camp of his having several times given away to his rage so far as to
actually shoot men down in these interviews, and still more of his
knocking boys down and jumping upon them, until he inflicted injuries
that soon resulted in death. How true these rumors were I am unable to
say of my own personal knowledge, since I never saw him kill any one,
nor have I talked with any one who did. There were a number of cases
of this kind testified to upon his trial, but they all happened among
“paroles” outside the Stockade, or among the prisoners inside after we
left, so I knew nothing of them.
One of the Old Switzer’s favorite ways of ending these seances was to
inform the boys that he would have them shot in an hour or so, and
bid them prepare for death. After keeping them in fearful suspense
for hours he would order them to be punished with the stocks, the
ball-and-chain, the chain-gang, or--if his fierce mood had burned
itself entirely out --as was quite likely with a man of his shallop’
brain and vacillating temper--to be simply returned to the stockade.
Nothing, I am sure, since the days of the Inquisition--or still later,
since the terrible punishments visited upon the insurgents of 1848 by
the Austrian aristocrats--has been so diabolical as the stocks and
chain-gangs, as used by Wirz. At one time seven men, sitting in the
stocks near the Star Fort--in plain view of the camp--became objects
of interest to everybody inside. They were never relieved from their
painful position, but were kept there until all of them died. I think
it was nearly two weeks before the last one succumbed. What they
endured in that time even imagination cannot conceive--I do not think
that an Indian tribe ever devised keener torture for its captives.
The chain-gang consisted of a number of men--varying from twelve to
twenty-five, all chained to one sixty-four pound ball. They were also
stationed near the Star Fort, standing out in the hot sun, without a
particle of shade over them. When one moved they all had to move. They
were scourged with the dysentery, and the necessities of some one of
their number kept them constantly in motion. I can see them distinctly
yet, tramping laboriously and painfully back and forward over that
burning hillside, every moment of the long, weary Summer days.
A comrade writes to remind me of the beneficent work of the Masonic
Order. I mention it most gladly, as it was the sole recognition on
the part of any of our foes of our claims to human kinship. The
churches of all denominations--except the solitary Catholic priest,
Father Hamilton, --ignored us as wholly as if we were dumb beasts.
Lay humanitarians were equally indifferent, and the only interest
manifested by any Rebel in the welfare of any prisoner was by the
Masonic brotherhood. The Rebel Masons interested themselves in securing
details outside the Stockade in the cookhouse, the commissary, and
elsewhere, for the brethren among the prisoners who would accept such
favors. Such as did not feel inclined to go outside on parole received
frequent presents in the way of food, and especially of vegetables,
which were literally beyond price. Materials were sent inside to build
tents for the Masons, and I think such as made themselves known before
death, received burial according to the rites of the Order. Doctor
White, and perhaps other Surgeons, belonged to the fraternity, and the
wearing of a Masonic emblem by a new prisoner was pretty sure to catch
their eyes, and be the means of securing for the wearer the tender
of their good offices, such as a detail into the Hospital as nurse,
ward-master, etc.
I was not fortunate enough to be one of the mystic brethren, and
so missed all share in any of these benefits, as well as in any
others, and I take special pride in one thing: that during my whole
imprisonment I was not beholden to a Rebel for a single favor of any
kind. The Rebel does not live who can say that he ever gave me so much
as a handful of meal, a spoonful of salt, an inch of thread, or a
stick of wood. From first to last I received nothing but my rations,
except occasional trifles that I succeeded in stealing from the stupid
officers charged with issuing rations. I owe no man in the Southern
Confederacy gratitude for anything--not even for a kind word.
Speaking of secret society pins recalls a noteworthy story which has
been told me since the war, of boys whom I knew. At the breaking
out of hostilities there existed in Toledo a festive little secret
society, such as lurking boys frequently organize, with no other
object than fun and the usual adolescent love of mystery. There were a
dozen or so members in it who called themselves “The Royal Reubens,”
and were headed by a bookbinder named Ned Hopkins. Some one started
a branch of the Order in Napoleon, O., and among the members was
Charles E. Reynolds, of that town. The badge of the society was a
peculiarly shaped gold pin. Reynolds and Hopkins never met, and had no
acquaintance with each other. When the war broke out, Hopkins enlisted
in Battery H, First Ohio Artillery, and was sent to the Army of the
Potomac, where he was captured, in the Fall of 1863, while scouting,
in the neighborhood of Richmond. Reynolds entered the Sixty-Eighth
Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and was taken in the neighborhood of Jackson,
Miss.,--two thousand miles from the place of Hopkins’s capture.
At Andersonville Hopkins became one of the officers in charge of
the Hospital. One day a Rebel Sergeant, who called the roll in the
Stockade, after studying Hopkins’s pin a minute, said:
“I seed a Yank in the Stockade to-day a-wearing a pin egzackly like
that ere.”
This aroused Hopkins’s interest, and he went inside in search of the
other “feller.” Having his squad and detachment there was little
difficulty in finding him. He recognized the pin, spoke to its wearer,
gave him the “grand hailing sign” of the “Royal Reubens,” and it was
duly responded to. The upshot of the matter was that he took Reynolds
out with him as clerk, and saved his life, as the latter was going down
hill very rapidly. Reynolds, in turn, secured the detail of a comrade
of the Sixty-Eighth who was failing fast, and succeeded in saving his
life--all of which happy results were directly attributable to that
insignificant boyish society, and its equally unimportant badge of
membership.
Along in the last of August the Rebels learned that there were between
two and three hundred Captains and Lieutenants in the Stockade, passing
themselves off as enlisted men. The motive of these officers was
two-fold: first, a chivalrous wish to share the fortunes and fate of
their boys, and second, disinclination to gratify the Rebels by the
knowledge of the rank of their captives. The secret was so well kept
that none of us suspected it until the fact was announced by the Rebels
themselves. They were taken out immediately, and sent to Macon, where
the commissioned officers’ prison was. It would not do to trust such
possible leaders with us another day.