DECEMBER--RATIONS OF WOOD AND FOOD GROW LESS DAILY--UNCERTAINTY AS TO
THE MORTALITY AT FLORENCE--EVEN THE GOVERNMENT’S STATISTICS ARE VERY
DEFICIENT--CARE FOB THE SICK.
The rations of wood grew smaller as the weather grew colder,
until at last they settled down to a piece about the size of a
kitchen rolling-pin per day for each man. This had to serve for
all purposes--cooking, as well as warming. We split the rations up
into slips about the size of a carpenter’s lead pencil, and used
them parsimoniously, never building a fire so big that it could
not be covered with a half-peck measure. We hovered closely over
this--covering it, in fact, with our hands and bodies, so that not a
particle of heat was lost. Remembering the Indian’s sage remark, “That
the white man built a big fire and sat away off from it; the Indian
made a little fire and got up close to it,” we let nothing in the
way of caloric be wasted by distance. The pitch-pine produced great
quantities of soot, which, in cold and rainy days, when we hung over
the fires all the time, blackened our faces until we were beyond the
recognition of intimate friends.
There was the same economy of fuel in cooking. Less than half as much
as is contained in a penny bunch of kindling was made to suffice in
preparing our daily meal. If we cooked mush we elevated our little can
an inch from the ground upon a chunk of clay, and piled the little
sticks around it so carefully that none should burn without yielding
all its heat to the vessel, and not one more was burned than absolutely
necessary. If we baked bread we spread the dough upon our chessboard,
and propped it up before the little fire-place, and used every particle
of heat evolved. We had to pinch and starve ourselves thus, while
within five minutes’ walk from the prison-gate stood enough timber to
build a great city.
The stump Andrews and I had the foresight to save now did us excellent
service. It was pitch pine, very fat with resin, and a little piece
split off each day added much to our fires and our comfort.
One morning, upon examining the pockets of an infantryman of my hundred
who had just died, I had the wonderful luck to find a silver quarter.
I hurried off to tell Andrews of our unexpected good fortune. By an
effort he succeeded in calming himself to the point of receiving the
news with philosophic coolness, and we went into Committee of the
Whole Upon the State of Our Stomachs, to consider how the money could
be spent to the best advantage. At the south side of the Stockade on
the outside of the timbers, was a sutler shop, kept by a Rebel, and
communicating with the prison by a hole two or three feet square,
cut through the logs. The Dead Line was broken at this point, so as
to permit prisoners to come up to the hole to trade. The articles
for sale were corn meal and bread, flour and wheat bread, meat,
beaus, molasses, honey, sweet potatos, etc. I went down to the place,
carefully inspected the stock, priced everything there, and studied
the relative food value of each. I came back, reported my observations
and conclusions to Andrews, and then staid at the tent while he went
on a similar errand. The consideration of the matter was continued
during the day and night, and the next morning we determined upon
investing our twenty-five cents in sweet potatos, as we could get
nearly a half-bushel of them, which was “more fillin’ at the price,” to
use the words of Dickens’s Fat Boy, than anything else offered us. We
bought the potatos, carried them home in our blanket, buried them in
the bottom of our tent, to keep them from being stolen, and restricted
ourselves to two per day until we had eaten them all.
The Rebels did something more towards properly caring for the sick than
at Andersonville. A hospital was established in the northwestern corner
of the Stockade, and separated from the rest of the camp by a line of
police, composed of our own men. In this space several large sheds
were erected, of that rude architecture common to the coarser sort of
buildings in the South. There was not a nail or a bolt used in their
entire construction. Forked posts at the ends and sides supported poles
upon which were laid the long “shakes,” or split shingles, forming the
roofs, and which were held in place by other poles laid upon them. The
sides and ends were enclosed by similar “shakes,” and altogether they
formed quite a fair protection against the weather. Beds of pine leaves
were provided for the sick, and some coverlets, which our Sanitary
Commission had been allowed to send through. But nothing was done to
bathe or cleanse them, or to exchange their lice-infested garments
for others less full of torture. The long tangled hair and whiskers
were not cut, nor indeed were any of the commonest suggestions for
the improvement of the condition of the sick put into execution. Men
who had laid in their mud hovels until they had become helpless and
hopeless, were admitted to the hospital, usually only to die.
The diseases were different in character from those which swept off the
prisoners at Andersonville. There they were mostly of the digestive
organs; here of the respiratory. The filthy, putrid, speedily fatal
gangrene of Andersonville became here a dry, slow wasting away of
the parts, which continued for weeks, even months, without being
necessarily fatal. Men’s feet and legs, and less frequently their hands
and arms, decayed and sloughed off. The parts became so dead that a
knife could be run through them without causing a particle of pain. The
dead flesh hung on to the bones and tendons long after the nerves and
veins had ceased to perform their functions, and sometimes startled one
by dropping off in a lump, without causing pain or hemorrhage.
The appearance of these was, of course, frightful, or would have been,
had we not become accustomed to them. The spectacle of men with their
feet and legs a mass of dry ulceration, which had reduced the flesh
to putrescent deadness, and left the tendons standing out like cords,
was too common to excite remark or even attention. Unless the victim
was a comrade, no one specially heeded his condition. Lung diseases
and low fevers ravaged the camp, existing all the time in a more or
less virulent condition, according to the changes of the weather,
and occasionally ragging in destructive epidemics. I am unable to
speak with any degree of definiteness as to the death rate, since I
had ceased to interest myself about the number dying each day. I had
now been a prisoner a year, and had become so torpid and stupefied,
mentally and physically, that I cared comparatively little for anything
save the rations of food and of fuel. The difference of a few spoonfuls
of meal, or a large splinter of wood in the daily issues to me, were
of more actual importance than the increase or decrease of the death
rate by a half a score or more. At Andersonville I frequently took the
trouble to count the number of dead and living, but all curiosity of
this kind had now died out.
Nor can I find that anybody else is in possession of much more than
my own information on the subject. Inquiry at the War Department has
elicited the following letters:
I.
The prison records of Florence, S. C., have never come to light,
and therefore the number of prisoners confined there could not be
ascertained from the records on file in this office; nor do I think
that any statement purporting to show that number has ever been made.
In the report to Congress of March 1, 1869, it was shown from records
as follows:
Escaped, fifty-eight; paroled, one; died, two thousand seven hundred
and ninety-three. Total, two thousand eight hundred and fifty-two.
Since date of said report there have been added to the records as
follows:
Died, two hundred and twelve; enlisted in Rebel army, three hundred and
twenty-six. Total, five hundred and thirty-eight.
Making a total disposed of from there, as shown by records on file, of
three thousand three hundred and ninety.
This, no doubt, is a small proportion of the number actually confined
there.
The hospital register on file contains that part only of the alphabet
subsequent to, and including part of the letter S, but from this
register, it is shown that the prisoners were arranged in hundreds
and thousands, and the hundred and thousand to which he belonged is
recorded opposite each man’s name on said register. Thus:
“John Jones, 11th thousand, 10th hundred.”
Eleven thousand being the highest number thus recorded, it is fair to
presume that not less than that number were confined there on a certain
date, and that more than that number were confined there during the
time it was continued as a prison.
II
Statement showing the whole number of Federals and Confederates
captured, (less the number paroled on the field), the number who died
while prisoners, and the percentage of deaths, 1861-1865
FEDERALS
Captured .................................................. 187,818
Died, (as shown by prison and hospital records on file).... 30,674
Percentage of deaths ...................................... 16.375
CONFEDERATES
Captured .................................................. 227,570
Died ...................................................... 26,774
Percentage of deaths ...................................... 11.768
In the detailed statement prepared for Congress dated March 1, 1869,
the whole number of deaths given as shown by Prisoner of War records
was twenty-six thousand three hundred and twenty-eight, but since that
date evidence of three thousand six hundred and twenty-eight additional
deaths has been obtained from the captured Confederate records, making
a total of twenty-nine thousand nine hundred and fifty-six as above
shown. This is believed to be many thousands less than the actual
number of Federal prisoners who died in Confederate prisons, as we have
no records from those at Montgomery Ala., Mobile, Ala., Millen, Ga.,
Marietta, Ga., Atlanta, Ga., Charleston, S. C., and others. The records
of Florence, S. C., and Salisbury, N. C., are very incomplete. It also
appears from Confederate inspection reports of Confederate prisons,
that large percentage of the deaths occurred in prison quarter without
the care or knowledge of the Surgeon. For the month of December, 1864
alone, the Confederate “burial report”; Salisbury, N. C., show that
out, of eleven hundred and fifty deaths, two hundred and twenty-three,
or twenty per cent., died in prison quarters and are not accounted
for in the report of the Surgeon, and therefore not taken into
consideration in the above report, as the only records of said prisons
on file (with one exception) are the Hospital records. Calculating the
percentage of deaths on this basis would give the number of deaths at
thirty-seven thousand four hundred and forty-five and percentage of
deaths at 20.023.
[End of the Letters from the War Department.]
If we assume that the Government’s records of Florence as correct, it
will be apparent that one man in every three die there, since, while
there might have been as high as fifty thousand at one time in the
prison, during the last three months of its existence I am quite sure
that the number did not exceed seven thousand. This would make the
mortality much greater than at Andersonville, which it undoubtedly
was, since the physical condition of the prisoners confined there
had been greatly depressed by their long confinement, while the bulk
c the prisoners at Andersonville were those who had been brought
thither directly from the field. I think also that all who experienced
confinement in the two places are united in pronouncing Florence to be,
on the whole, much the worse place and more fatal to life.
The medicines furnished the sick were quite simple in nature and
mainly composed of indigenous substances. For diarrhea red pepper and
decoctions of blackberry root and of pine leave were given. For coughs
and lung diseases, a decoction of wild cherry bark was administered.
Chills and fever were treated with decoctions of dogwood bark, and
fever patients who craved something sour, were given a weak acid drink,
made by fermenting a small quantity of meal in a barrel of water. All
these remedies were quite good in their way, and would have benefitted
the patients had they been accompanied by proper shelter, food and
clothing. But it was idle to attempt to arrest with blackberry root the
diarrhea, or with wild cherry bark the consumption of a man lying in a
cold, damp, mud hovel, devoured by vermin, and struggling to maintain
life upon less than a pint of unsalted corn meal per diem.
Finding that the doctors issued red pepper for diarrhea, and an
imitation of sweet oil made from peanuts, for the gangrenous sores
above described, I reported to them an imaginary comrade in my tent,
whose symptoms indicated those remedies, and succeeded in drawing a
small quantity of each, two or three times a week. The red pepper I
used to warm up our bread and mush, and give some different taste to
the corn meal, which had now become so loathsome to us. The peanut
oil served to give a hint of the animal food we hungered for. It was
greasy, and as we did not have any meat for three months, even this
flimsy substitute was inexpressibly grateful to palate and stomach. But
one morning the Hospital Steward made a mistake, and gave me castor oil
instead, and the consequences were unpleasant.
A more agreeable remembrance is that of two small apples, about the
size of walnuts, given me by a boy named Henry Clay Montague Porter, of
the Sixteenth Connecticut. He had relatives living in North Carolina,
who sent him a small packs of eatables, out of which, in the fulness
of his generous heart he gave me this share--enough to make me always
remember him with kindness.
Speaking of eatables reminds me of an incident. Joe Darling, of the
First Maine, our Chief of Police, had a sister living at Augusta,
Ga., who occasionally came to Florence with basket of food and other
necessaries for her brother. On one of these journeys, while sitting
in Colonel Iverson’s tent, waiting for her brother to be brought out
of prison, she picked out of her basket a nicely browned doughnut and
handed it to the guard pacing in front of the tent, with:
“Here, guard, wouldn’t you like a genuine Yankee doughnut?”
The guard-a lank, loose-jointed Georgia cracker--who in all his life
seen very little more inviting food than the his hominy and molasses,
upon which he had been raised, took the cake, turned it over and
inspected it curiously for some time without apparently getting the
least idea of what it was for, and then handed it back to the donor,
saying:
“Really, mum, I don’t believe I’ve got any use for it”