Chapter XXXI

----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.