Chapter XXXVI

The miserable have no other medicine, But only hope.--MEASURE
FOR MEASURE.

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the
memory a rooted sorrow?--MACBETH.

Truly saith the Italian proverb, "There are no ugly loves and no handsome prisons." Still we found Salisbury comparatively endurable. Captain Swift Galloway, commanding, though a hearty Confederate, was kind and courteous to the captives. Our sleeping apartment, crowded with uncleanly men, and foul with the vilest exhalations, was filthy and vermin-infested beyond description. No northern farmer, fit to be a northern farmer, would have kept his horse or his ox in it.

[Sidenote: THE OPEN AIR AND PURE WATER.]

But the yard of four acres, like some old college grounds, with great oak trees and a well of sweet, pure water, was open to us during the whole day. There, the first time for nine months, our feet pressed the mother earth, and the blessed open air fanned our cheeks.

Mr. Luke Blackmer, of Salisbury, kindly placed his library of several thousand volumes at our disposal. Whenever we wished for books we had only to address a note to him, through the prison authorities, and, in a few hours, a little negro with a basket of them on his head would come in at the gate. It seemed more like life and less like the tomb than any prison we had inhabited before.

[Sidenote: THE CRUSHING WEIGHT OF IMPRISONMENT.]

And yet those long Summer months were very dreary to bear, for we had upon us the one heavy, crushing weight of captivity. It is not hunger or cold, sickness or death, which makes prison life so hard to bear. But it is the utter idleness, emptiness, aimlessness of such a life. It is being, through all the long hours of each day and night--for weeks, months, years, if one lives so long--absolutely without employment, mental or physical--with nothing to fill the vacant mind, which always becomes morbid and turns inward to prey upon itself.

What exile from his country Can flee himself as well?

It was doubtless this which gave us the look peculiar to the captive--the disturbed, half-wild expression of the eye, the contraction of the wrinkled brow which indicates trouble at the heart.

We were most struck with this in the morning, when, on first going out of our sleeping quarters, we passed down by the hospital and stopped beside the bench where those were laid who had died during the night. As we lifted the cloth, to see who had found release, the one thing which always impressed me was the perfect calm, the sweet, ineffable peace, which those white, thin faces wore. For months I never saw it without a twinge of envy. Until then I never felt the meaning of the words, "where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest." Until then I never realized the wealth of the assurance, "He giveth his beloved sleep."

[Sidenote: BAD NEWS FROM HOME.]

Some prisoners had an additional weight to bear. They were southern Unionists--Tennesseans, North Carolinians, West Virginians, and Mississippians--whose families lived on the border. They knew that they were liable any day to have their houses robbed or burned by the enemy, and their wives and little ones turned out to the mercy of the elements, or the charity of friends. This gnawing anxiety took away their elasticity and power of endurance. They had far less capacity for resisting disease and hardship than the northeners, and died in the proportion of four or five to one. I could hardly wonder at the fervor with which, in their devotional exercises, night after night, they sung the only hymn which they ever attempted:

"There I shall bathe my weary soul
In seas of heavenly rest;
And not a wave of trouble roll
Across this peaceful breast."

The cup of others, yet, had a still bitterer ingredient, which filled it to overflowing. I wonder profoundly that any one drinking of it ever lived to tell his story. They had received bad news from home--news that those nearest and dearest, finding their load of life too heavy, had laid it wearily down. During the long prison hours, such had nothing to think of but the vacant place, the hushed voice, and the desolate hearth. Hope--the one thing which buoys up the prisoner--was gone. That picture of home, which had looked before as heaven looks to the enthusiastic devotee, was forever darkened. The prisoner knew if the otherwise glad hour of his release should ever come, no warmth of welcome, no greeting of friendship, no rejoicing of affection, could ever replace for him the infinite value of the love he had lost.

[Sidenote: THE GREAT LIBBY TUNNEL.]

Early in the Spring we were delighted to learn from Richmond that Colonel Streight had succeeded in escaping from Libby. The officers constructed a long tunnel, which proved a perfect success, liberating one hundred and fourteen of them. Streight, whose proportions tended toward the Falstaffian, was very apprehensive that he could not work his way through it. Narrowly escaping the fate of the greedy fox which "stuck in the hole," he finally squeezed through. The Rebels hated him so bitterly that, by the unanimous wish of his fellow-prisoners, he was the first man to pass out. A Union woman of Richmond concealed him for nearly two weeks. The first officers who reached our lines announced through the New York papers that Streight had arrived at Fortress Monroe. This caused the Richmond authorities to relinquish their search; and finally, under a skillful pilot, having traveled with great caution for eleven nights to accomplish less than a hundred miles, Streight reached the protection of the Stars and Stripes.

Our prison rations of corn bread and beef were tolerable, in quantity and quality. The Salisbury market also afforded a few articles, of which eggs were the great staple. We indulged extravagantly in that mild form of dissipation--our mess of five at one time having on hand seventy-two dozen, which represented, in Confederate currency, about two hundred dollars.

We soon made the acquaintance of several loyal North Carolinians. Citizens of respectability were permitted to visit the prison. Those of Union proclivities invariably found opportunity to converse with us. Like all Loyalists of the South, white and black, they trusted northern prisoners implicitly. The reign of terror was so great that they often feared to repose confidence in each other, and cautioned us against repeating their expressions of loyalty to their neighbors and friends, whose Union sympathies were just as strong as theirs.

[Sidenote: HORRIBLE SUFFERINGS OF UNION OFFICERS.]

Captains Julius L. Litchfield, of the Fourth Maine Infantry, Charles Kendall, of the Signal Corps, and Edward E. Chase, of the First Rhode Island Cavalry, were imprisoned in the upper room of the factory. Held as hostages for certain Rebel officers in the Alton, Illinois, penitentiary, they were sentenced to confinement and hard labor during the war. In one instance only was the hard labor imposed. In the prison yard they were ordered to remove several heavy stones a few yards and then carry them back. For some minutes they stood beside the Rebel sergeant, silently and with folded arms. Then Chase thus instructed the guard:

"Go to Captain Galloway, and tell him, with my compliments, that perhaps I was just as delicately nurtured as he--that, if he were in my place, he would hardly do this work, and that I will see the whole Confederacy in the Bottomless Pit before I lift a single stone!"

Chase and his comrades were never afterward ordered to labor. Other Union officers, held as hostages, arrived from time to time. Eight, who came from Richmond, had been confined one hundred and forty-five days in that horrible Libby cell where the mold accumulated on the beard of the Pennsylvania lieutenant. While there they suffered intensely from cold, ate daily all their scanty ration the moment it was issued, and were compelled to fast for the rest of the twenty-four hours, save when they could catch rats, which they eagerly devoured. Some came out with broken constitutions, and all were frightfully pallid and emaciated. Starving and freezing are words easily said, but these gentlemen learned their actual significance.

Four of them were held for Kentucky bushwhackers, whom one of our military courts had sentenced to death, which they clearly deserved under well-defined laws of war. Had they been promptly executed, the Rebels would never have dared, in retaliation, to hurt the hair of a prisoners head. But Mr. Lincoln's kindness of heart induced him to commute their sentence to imprisonment, and made him unwittingly the cause of this barbarity toward our own officers.

The hostages were plucky and enterprising, frequently attempting to escape. One night they suspended from their fourth-story window a rope which they had constructed of blankets. Captain Ives, of the Tenth Massachusetts Infantry, descended in safety. A daring and loyal Rebel deserter, from East Tennessee, named Carroll, who designed to pilot them to our lines, attempted to follow; but the rope broke, and he fell the whole distance, striking upon his head. It would have killed most men; but Carroll, after spending the night in the guard-house, bathed his swollen head and troubled himself no further about the matter.

Captain B. C. G. Reed, from Zanesville, Ohio, was constantly trying to secure his own release. It always seemed to make him unhappy when he passed two or three weeks without making attempts to escape. They usually resulted in his being hand-cuffed and ballasted by a ball and chain, or confined in a filthy cell.

[Sidenote: A COOL METHOD OF ESCAPE.]

But, sooner or later, perseverance achieves. Once, while so weak from inflammatory rheumatism, contracted in a Richmond dungeon, that he could hardly walk, he made a successful endeavor, in company with Captain Litchfield. At nine o'clock, on a rainy March night, with their blankets wrapped about them, they coolly walked up to the gate. They rebuked the guard who halted them, indignantly asking him if he did not know that they belonged at head-quarters! Impudence won the day. The innocent sentinel permitted them to pass. They went directly through Captain Galloway's office, which fortunately happened to be empty; reached the outer fence; Litchfield helped over his weak companion, and the world was all before them, where to choose. They traveled one hundred and twenty miles, but, in the mountains of East Tennessee, were recaptured and brought back.

Nothing daunted, Reed repeated the attempt again and again. Finally, he jumped from a train of cars in the city of Charleston, found a negro who secreted him, and by night conveyed him in a skiff to our forces at Battery Wagner. Reed returned to his command in Thomas's Army, and was subsequently killed in one of the battles before Nashville. Entering the service as a private, and fairly winning promotion, he was an excellent type of the thinking bayonets, of the young men who freely gave their lives "for our dear country's sake."

[Sidenote: CAPTURED THROUGH AN OBSTINATE MULE.]

Early in the summer, our mess was agreeably enlarged by the arrival of Mr. William E. Davis, Correspondent of _The Cincinnati Gazette_ and Clerk of the Ohio Senate. Davis owed his capture to the stupidity of a mule. Riding leisurely along a road within the lines of General Sherman's army, more than a mile from the front, he was compelled to pass through a little gap left between two corps, which had not quite connected. He was suddenly confronted by a double-barreled shot-gun, presented by a Rebel standing behind a tree, who commanded him to halt. Not easily intimidated, Davis attempted to turn his mule and ride for a life and liberty. With the true instinct of his race, the animal resisted the rein, seeming to require a ten-acre lot and three days for turning around--wherefore the rider fell into the hands of the Philistines.

Books whiled away many weary hours. As Edmond Dantes, in the Count of Monte Christo, came out from his twelve years of imprisonment "a very well-read man," we ought to have acquired limitless lore; but reading at last palled upon our tastes, and we would none of it.

[Sidenote: CONCEALING MONEY WHEN SEARCHED.]

Our Salisbury friends supplied us liberally with money. The editors of the migratory _Memphis Appeal_ frequently offered to me any amount which I might desire, and made many attempts to secure my exchange.

The prison authorities sometimes searched us; but friendly guards, or officers of Union proclivities, would always give us timely notice, enabling us to secrete our money. One (nominally) Rebel lieutenant, after we were drawn up in line and the searching had begun, would sometimes receive bank-notes from us, and hand them back when we were returned to our own quarters.

Once, as we were being examined, I had forty dollars, in United States currency, concealed in my hat. That was an article of dress which had never been examined. But now, looking down the line, I saw the guard suddenly commence taking off the prisoners' hats, carefully scrutinizing them. Removing the money from mine, I handed it to Lieutenant Holman, of Vermont; but, turning around, I observed that two Rebel officers immediately behind us had witnessed the movement. Holman promptly passed the notes to "Junius," who stood near, reading a ponderous volume, and who placed them between the leaves of his book. Holman was at once taken from the line and searched rigorously from head to foot, but the Rebels were unable to find the coveted "greenbacks."

The prison officers, under rigid orders from the Richmond authorities, would sometimes retain money received by mail. Two hundred dollars in Confederate notes were thus withheld from me for more than a year. Determined that the Rebel officials should not enjoy much peace of mind, I addressed them letter after letter, reciting their various subterfuges. At last, upon my demanding that they should either give me the money, or refuse positively over their own signatures, the amount was forthcoming. Thousands of dollars belonging to prisoners were confiscated upon frivolous pretexts, or no pretext whatever.

[Sidenote: ATTEMPTS TO ESCAPE FRUSTRATED.]

Persistent ill-fortune still followed all our attempts to escape. Once we perfected an arrangement with a friendly guard, by which, at midnight, he was to pass us over the fence upon his beat. Before our quarters were locked for the night, "Junius" and myself hid under the hospital, where, through the faithful sentinel, escape would be certain. But just then, we chanced to be nearly without money, and Davis waited for a Union _attaché_ of the prison to bring him four hundred dollars from a friend outside. The messenger, for the first and last time in eleven months, becoming intoxicated that afternoon, arrived with the money five minutes too late. Davis was unable to join us; we determined not to leave him, expecting to repeat the attempt on the following night; but the next day the guard was conscribed and sent to Lee's army.

These constant failures subjected us to many jests from our fellow-prisoners. Once, in a dog-day freak, "Junius" had every hair shaved from his head, leaving his pallid face diversified only by a great German mustache. He replied to all _badinage_ that he was not the correspondent for whom his interlocutors mistook him, but the venerable and famous Chinaman "No-Go."

[Sidenote: YANKEE DESERTERS WHIPPED AND HANGED.]

The Yankee deserters, having no friends to protect them, were treated with great harshness. During a single day six were tied up to a post and received, in the aggregate, one hundred and twenty-seven lashes with the cat-o'nine-tails upon their bare backs, as punishment for digging a tunnel. Many of them were "bounty-jumpers" and desperadoes. They robbed each newly-arriving deserter of all his money, beating him unmercifully if he resisted. After being thus whipped, at their own request their _status_ was changed, and they were sent as prisoners of war to Andersonville, Georgia. There the Union prisoners, detecting them in several robberies and murders, organized a court-martial, tried them, and hung six of them upon trees within the garrison, with ropes furnished by the Rebel commandant.

For seven months no letters, even from our own families, were permitted to reach us. This added much to our weariness. I never knew the pathos of Sterne's simple story until I heard "Junius" read it one sad Summer night in our prison quarters. For weeks afterward rung in my ears the cry of the poor starling: "I can't get out! I can't get out!"