Chapter XXXIV: Appendix: NOTE N: Page 196

When the United States Army under Burnside approached Knoxville, September, 1863, Captain S. T. Harris was taken with other prisoners to Columbia, S. C. He was there put in chains that weighed from 12 to 15 pounds, and cruelly imprisoned. His father applied to President Davis, and in consequence, he was transferred from the filthy and almost airless cell where he lay, to a better one.

In the same prison were confined a scaling party of the United States Naval Officers, who had been captured in a night attack on Fort Sumter, September, 1863. One of them was Ensign Porter, of whom the Rev. H. Clay Trumbull says in the Church Magazine, August, 1886; “Apart of the time he was in irons as one of the hostages for two Confederate privateersmen who were held by our (the United States) Government as pirates. He was the life of the party. He was always taking a cheery view of the situation.... In a room of the jail, adjoining that of the naval officers, there was confined in irons a Captain Harris of Tennessee, held as a hostage for some Confederate prisoner under special charges. It was a delight of Ben. Porter to put his mouth to the key-hole of the intervening door and whistle a lively tune, while the Captain danced to it with the accompanying clanking of his chains. After Porter had been himself in irons, he taught Captain Harris how to remove and replace his handcuffs and fetters, without the knowledge of the prison officials. It was through this instruction, that Captain Harris’s life was saved when the Columbia jail was burned, early in 1865.”

Captain Harris relates that he was hurried off with other prisoners under guard from Columbia, that they might not be delivered by Gen. Sherman’s army, and that, having learned while in prison at Knoxville the trick of slipping off his chains at pleasure, he released himself of those with which he had been bound in Columbia and left them in a swamp. He was paroled at Charlotte, N. C., and in exchange for Captain Ellison of the C. S. Army, a prisoner at Nashville held as hostage for him by order of President Lincoln, he was finally transferred from Wilmington, to the United States authorities. On his return to Knoxville, where he had forgiven all his enemies when expecting soon to be executed, he did not fully illustrate the saying of the poet, that young men “soon forget affronts;” but meeting with one who had sought his life when a helpless prisoner, he remembered the wrong, and in a brief interview redressed it to his enemy’s discontent.