----Give me to drink mandragora, That I may sleep out this
great gap of time.--ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA.
[Sidenote: ARRIVAL IN RICHMOND.]
At 5 o'clock on the morning of Saturday, May 16th, we reached Richmond.
At that early hour, the clothing-dépôt of the Confederate government
was surrounded by a crowd of poor, ill-clad women, seeking work.
We were marched to the Libby Prison. Up to this time we had never been
searched. I had even kept my revolver in my pocket until reaching
Jackson, Mississippi, where, knowing I could not much longer conceal
it, I gave it to a friend. Now a Rebel sergeant carefully examined
our clothing. All money, except a few dollars, was taken from us, and
the flippant little prison clerk, named Ross, with some inquiries not
altogether affectionate concerning the health of Mr. Greeley, gave us
receipts.
As we passed through the guarded iron gateway, I glanced instinctively
above the portal in search of its fitting legend:--
"Abandon all hope who enter here."
Up three flights of stairs, we were escorted into a room, fifty feet
by one hundred and twenty-five, filled with officers lying in blankets
upon the floor and upon rude bunks. Some shouted, "More Yankees!--more
Yankees!" while many crowded about us to hear our story, and learn the
news from the West.
[Sidenote: INCARCERATED IN LIBBY PRISON.]
We soon found friends, and became domesticated in our novel quarters.
With the American tendency toward organization, the prisoners divided
into companies of four each. Our journalistic trio and Captain Ward
ceased to be individuals, becoming merely "Mess Number Twenty-one."
The provisions, at this time consisting of good flour, bread, and salt
pork, were brought into the room in bulk. A commissary, elected by the
captives from their own number, divided them, delivering its quota to
each mess.
Picking up two or three rusty tin plates and rheumatic knives and
forks, we commenced housekeeping. The labor of preparation was not
arduous. It consisted in making little sacks of cotton cloth for
salt, sugar, pepper, and rice, fitting up a shelf for our dishes, and
spreading upon the floor blankets, obtained from our new comrades, and
originally sent to Richmond by the United States Government for the
benefit of prisoners.
The Libby authorities, and white and negro _attachés_, were always
hungry for "greenbacks," and glad to give Confederate currency in
exchange. The rates varied greatly. The lowest was two dollars for one.
During my imprisonment, I bought fourteen for one, and, a few weeks
after our escape, thirty were given for one.
A prison sergeant went out every morning to purchase supplies. He
seemed honest, and through him we could obtain, at extravagant prices,
dried apples, sugar, eggs, molasses, meal, flour, and corn burnt and
ground as a substitute for coffee. Without these additions, our rations
would hardly have supported life.
In our mess, each man, in turn, did the cooking for an entire day. In
that hot, stifling room, frying pork, baking griddle-cakes, and boiling
coffee, over the crazy, smoking, broken stove, around which there was a
constant crowd, were disagreeable in the extreme. The prison hours were
long, but the cooking-days recurred with unpleasant frequency.
We scrubbed our room two or three times a week, and it was fumigated
every morning. At one end stood a huge wooden tank, with an abundant
supply of cold water, in which we could bathe at pleasure.
[Sidenote: SUFFERINGS FROM VERMIN.]
The vermin were the most revolting feature of the prison, and the one
to which it was the most difficult to become resigned. No amount of
personal cleanliness could guard our bodies against the insatiate lice.
Only by examining under-clothing and destroying them once or twice a
day, could they be kept from swarming upon us. For the first week, I
could not think of them without shuddering and faintness: but in time I
learned to make my daily entomological researches with calm complacency.
In Nashville, two weeks before my capture, I met Colonel A. D.
Streight, of Indiana. At the head of a provisional brigade from
Rosecrans's army, he was about starting on a raid through northern
Alabama and Georgia. The expedition promising more romance and novelty
than ordinary army experiences, now grown a little monotonous, I
desired to accompany him; but other duties prevented. I had been
in Libby just four hours, when in walked Streight, followed by the
officers of his entire brigade. We had taken very different routes, but
they brought us to the same terminus.
Streight's command had been furnished with mules, averaging about two
years old, and quite unused to the saddle. Utterly worthless, they soon
broke down, and with much difficulty, he remounted his men upon horses,
pressed from the citizens; but the delay proved fatal.
The Rebel General Forrest overtook him with a largely superior
force. Streight was an enterprising, brave officer, and his exhausted
men behaved admirably in four or five fights; but at last, near
Rome, Georgia, after losing one third of his command, the colonel
was compelled to surrender. The Rebels were very exultant, and
Forrest--originally a slave-dealer in Memphis, and a greater falsifier
than Beauregard himself--telegraphed that, with four hundred men, he
had captured twenty-eight hundred.
Lieutenant Charles Pavie, of the Eightieth Illinois, who commanded
Streight's artillery, came in with his coat torn to shreds; a piece of
shell had struck him in the back, inflicting only a flesh wound. Upon
feeling the shock, he instinctively clapped his hands to his stomach,
to ascertain if there was a hole there, under the impression that the
entire shell had passed through his body!
[Sidenote: PRISONERS DENOUNCED AS BLASPHEMOUS.]
The prisoners bore their confinement with good-humor and hilarity.
During the long evenings, they joined in the "Star-Spangled Banner,"
"Old Hundred," "Old John Brown," and other patriotic and religious
airs. _The Richmond Whig_, shocked that the profane and ungodly Yankees
should presume to sing "Old Hundred," denounced it as a piece of
blasphemy.
Captain Brown and his officers, of the United States gunboat
Indianola, were pointed out to me as men who had actually been in
prison for three months. I regarded them with pity and wonder. It
seemed utterly impossible that I could endure confinement for half that
time. After-experiences inclined me to patronize new-comers, and regard
with lofty condescension, men who had been prisoners only twelve or
fifteen months! "The Father of the Marshalsea" became an intelligible
and sympathetic personage, with whom we should have hobnobbed
delightfully.
[Sidenote: THIEVERY OF A "VIRGINIA GENTLEMAN."]
Simultaneously with our arrival in Richmond, a Rebel officer of the
exchange bureau received a request from the editor of _The World_, for
the release of Mr. Colburn. It proved as efficient as if it had been
an order from Jefferson Davis. After ten days' confinement in Libby,
Colburn was sent home by the first truce-boat. A thoroughly loyal
gentleman, and an unselfish, devoted friend, he was induced to go, only
by the assurance that while he could do no good by remaining, he might
be of service to us in the North.
At his departure, he left for me, with Captain Thomas P. Turner,
commandant of the prison, fifty dollars in United States currency. A
day or two afterward, Turner handed the sum to me in Confederate rags,
dollar for dollar, asserting that this was the identical money he had
received. The perpetrator of this petty knavery was educated at West
Point, and claimed to be a Virginia gentleman.
"Junius" suffered greatly from intermittent fever. The weather was
torrid. In the roof was a little scuttle, to which we ascended by a
ladder. The column of air rushing up through that narrow aperture was
foul, suffocating, and hot as if coming from an oven. At night we
went out on the roof for two or three hours to breathe the out-door
atmosphere. When the authorities discovered it, they informed us,
through Richard Turner--an ex-Baltimorean, half black-leg and half
gambler, who was inspector of the prison--that if we persisted, they
would close the scuttle. It was a refined and elaborate method of
torture.
On one occasion, this same Turner struck a New York captain in the
face for courteously protesting against being deprived of a little
fragment of shell which he had brought from the field as a relic. A
Rebel sergeant inflicted a blow upon another Union captain who chanced
to be jostled against him by the crowd.
For slight offenses, officers were placed in an underground cell so
dark and foul, that I saw a Pennsylvania lieutenant come out, after
five weeks' confinement there, his beard so covered with mold that one
could pluck a double handful from it!
[Sidenote: PRISONERS MURDERED BY THE GUARDS.]
Prisoners putting their heads for a moment between the bars of the
windows, and often for only approaching the apertures, were liable
to be shot. One officer, standing near a window, was ordered by
the sentinel to move back. The rattling carriages made the command
inaudible. The guard instantly shot him through the head, and he never
spoke again.
Colonel Streight was the most prominent prisoner. He talked to the
Rebel authorities with imprudent, but delightful frankness. More than
once I heard him say to them:--
"You dare not carry out that threat! You know our Government will never
permit it, but will promptly retaliate upon your own officers, whom it
holds."
When our rations of heavy corn-bread and tainted meat grew very short,
he addressed a letter to James A. Seddon, Confederate Secretary of War,
protesting in behalf of his brigade, and inquiring whether he designed
starving prisoners to death! The Rebels hated him with peculiar
bitterness.
The five Richmond dailies helped us greatly in filling up the long
hours. At daylight an old slave, named Ben, would arouse us from our
slumbers, shouting:--
"Great news in de papers! Great news from de Army of Virginny! Great
tallygraphic news from the Soufwest!"
[Sidenote: FOURTH-OF-JULY CELEBRATION INTERRUPTED.]
He disbursed his sheets at twenty-five cents per copy, but they
afterward went up to fifty.
A lieutenant in Grant's army, while charging one of the batteries in
the rear of Vicksburg, received a shot in the face which entered one
eye, destroying it altogether. Ten days after, he arrived in Libby. He
walked about our room with a handkerchief tied around his head, smoking
complacently, apparently considering a bullet in the brain a very
slight annoyance.
We attempted to celebrate the Fourth of July. Captain Driscoll, of
Cincinnati, with other ingenious officers, had manufactured from shirts
a National flag, which was hung above the head of Colonel Streight, who
occupied the chair, or rather the bed, which necessity substituted.
Two or three speeches had been made, and several hours of oratory were
expected, when a sergeant came up and said:--
"Captain Turner orders that you stop this furse!"
Observing the flag, he called upon several officers to assist him in
taking it down. Of course, none did so. He finally reached it himself,
tore it down, and bore it to the prison office. A long discussion
ensued about obeying Turner's order. After nearly as much time had
been consumed in debate as it would have required to carry out the
programme, and speak to all the toasts--dry toasts--it was voted to
comply. So the meeting, first adopting a number of intensely patriotic
resolutions, incontinently adjourned.
[Sidenote: THE HORRORS OF BELLE ISLE.]
The Rebel authorities confiscated large sums of money sent from home
to the prisoners, and sometimes stopped the purchase of supplies,
asserting that it was done in retaliation for similar treatment of
their own soldiers confined in the North. Still our officers fared
incomparably better than the Union privates who were half starved upon
Belle Isle, in sight of our prison. We did not fully accredit the
reports which reached us touching the sufferings of these prisoners,
though the engravings of their emaciation and tortures in the New
York illustrated papers, which sometimes drifted to us, so enraged
the Rebels, that we often called their attention to them. But our
own paroled officers, who were permitted to distribute among the
privates clothing sent by our Government, assured us that they were
substantially true.