Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons Part 5

This was the first time I had ever heard the word _at_ so used at the end of a sentence; but it expresses the meaning with admirable precision. I had a slight qualm at lying; but I remembered that even George Washington could tell a lie if necessary in war. Pacifying my conscience with the fact that we were _outside_ the house at the time, I said:

"There's no such officer in house four. But I remember an officer of that name at Libby, handsomely dressed, a perfect dandy. I heard that he escaped at the crossing of the Yadkin River two weeks ago. Has he been recaptured, and is he going to be shot or hanged? Or have you a letter for him? What's the good news about Gardner?"

"I only know," he replied, "that he's wanted at Major Gee's office, and he's an officer in house number four."

"Estabrooks," said I to the man at my side, "do you know of a Lieutenant Gardner?"

"I did know slightly such a man at Libby. You have described him well; a fop, a beau, a dandy; just about my size, but he didn't wear rags like I do."

"Come with me," said I to the Confederate. "We'll go into the house and inquire if any one knows of a Lieutenant Gardner." We went in. There were perhaps thirty or forty inside who had got wind of what was going on. As we entered, I asked in a loud voice, "Does any officer in this house know anything of a Lieutenant Gardner?" Several smiled and declared it a very singular name. One wanted to know how it was spelled!

A number were speaking at once. One said he escaped at the Yadkin; he knew he got away, for he "watched him till he got a long distance out of sight." Another knew a Henry J. Gardner, "a Know-Nothing" governor of Ma.s.sachusetts, who knew enough to keep out of the army. Another affirmed that Gardner was dead; he had heard him say "I'm a dead man," and he wouldn't tell a lie! My memory is somewhat indistinct of all that was said; but Gardner is alleged to have whispered the officer thus: "I have been a gardener myself; and if Major Gee will parole me and give me good clothes and something to eat, I wouldn't mind becoming again a gardener in his employ." I recollect distinctly that the officer grew impatient and he finally asked me, "Do you say on your honor, Colonel, that you don't know a Lieut. Wm. O. Gardner in this house?" I answered, "I do"; but I left him to guess whether I meant "I do _know_" or "I do _say_!" I quieted my conscientious scruples by remembering that the lieutenant's true name was not Wm. O. but Wm. C.! The baffled officer left very angry, and "_Where's Gardner at?_" pa.s.sed into a conundrum.

Late that afternoon, as I was engaged in the delightful employment of washing my fall-and-winter shirt, having for the first time since our arrival in Salisbury obtained sufficient water for that purpose, the order came for all officers to fall in and take the cars for Danville, Va. The juxtaposition of three or four hundred Yankee officers with eight thousand of their enlisted comrades-in-arms was getting dangerous.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] He had killed three men with his sword at the time of his capture.

[6] "We run the boy into one of the houses, clipped his hair, shaved him, and placed a new robe on him."--_Letter_ of Capt. Wesley C. Howe to Colonel Sprague, Jan. 30, 1914.

CHAPTER VI

From Salisbury to Danville--The Forlorn Situation--Effort to "Extract Sunshine from Cuc.u.mbers"--The Vermin--The Prison Commandant a Yale Man--Proposed Theatricals--Rules Adopted--Studies--Vote in Prison for Lincoln and McClellan--Killing Time.

At six o'clock, Wednesday evening, October 19, 1864, we officers, about 350 in number, were packed in five freight cars, and the train was started for Danville, Va. The tops of the cars were covered with armed guards, two or three being also stationed within at the side door of each car. In the darkness about half-past nine Lieut. Joseph B. Simpson of the 11th Indiana slyly stole all the food from the haversacks of the guards at the door of our car and pa.s.sed it round to us, while we loudly "cussed and discussed" slavery and secession! About midnight Captain Lockwood, Lieutenant Driscoll, and eight or ten other officers leaped from the cars. The guards opened fire upon them. Lockwood was shot dead.

Several were recaptured, and some probably reached the Union lines in safety. We arrived at Danville at noon October 20th.

The town at this time contained four, formerly six, military prisons, each a tobacco house about eighty to a hundred feet long by forty to fifty wide, three stories high, built of brick, low between joints. The officers were put into the building known as prison number three. We were informed by the guards that it had formerly contained about two hundred negro prisoners; but that some had died, others had been delivered to their masters or set at work on fortifications, and the number remaining just before our arrival was only sixty-four. These were removed to make room for us.

Except about twenty large stout wooden boxes called spittoons, there was no furniture whatever in prison number three. Conjecture was rife as to the purpose of the Confederates in supplying us with spittoons and nothing else. They were too short for coffins, too large for wash bowls, too shallow for bathing tubs, too deep for tureens! To me much meditating on final causes, a vague suspicion at length arose that there was some mysterious relation between those twenty oblong boxes and a score of hogsheads of plug tobacco, said to be stored in the bas.e.m.e.nt. A _tertium_ QUID, a solution of the tobacco, might afford a solution of the spittoon mystery!

A dozen water buckets were put into each of the two upper rooms to which all the officers were restricted; also a small cylinder coal stove; nothing else until December, when another small stove was placed there.

Winter came early and unusually cold. The river Dan froze thick. It was some weeks before we prevailed upon the prison commandant to replace with wood the broken-out gla.s.s in the upper rooms. The first floor was uninhabitable.

So with no bed nor blanket; no chairs, benches, nor tables; no table-ware nor cooking utensils; not even shovel, poker, or coal-scoop; most of us were in a sorry plight. The little stoves, heated white-hot, would have been entirely inadequate to warm those rooms; but the coal was miserably deficient in quality as well as quant.i.ty. The fire often went out. To rekindle it, there was no other way than to upset the whole, emptying ashes and cinders on the floor. At best, the heat was obstructed by a compact ring of shivering officers, who had preempted positions nearest the stoves. They had taken upon themselves to "run"

the thing; and they did it well. We called them "The Stove Brigade." In spite of their efforts, they like the rest suffered from cold.

Three or four of us, as a sanitary measure, made it a point to see, if possible, the funny, or at least the bright side of everything, turn melancholy to mirth, shadow to sunshine. When every officer complained of cold, we claimed to antic.i.p.ate the philosophers, Tyndall, Huxley, and the other physicists, in declaring that "heat is a mode of _motion_,"

and brisk bodily exercise will infallibly demonstrate the fact! When, as was usually the case, all were hungry, we announced as a sure cure for indigestion, "stop _eating_!" When our prisoner chaplain Emerson on a Sunday afternoon prayed for the dear ones we expected to see no more, and even the roughest and most profane were in tears, we said with old Homer, "_Agathoi aridakrues andres_" ("Gallant men are easily moved to tears"), or with Bayard Taylor, "The bravest are the tenderest, the loving are the daring."

Most humiliating of all was the inevitable plague of vermin. "Hard indeed," one officer was accustomed to say, "must have been Pharaoh's heart, and tougher yet his epidermis, if the lice of the third Egyptian plague were like those of Danville, and yet he would not 'let Israel go.'" Wearing the same clothing night and day, sitting on the bare floors, sleeping there in contact with companions not over-nice, no patient labor, no exterminating unguent, afforded much relief. We lost all squeamishness, all delicacy on the subject, all inclination for concealment. It was not a returned Danville prisoner who was reported to have gone into a drug store in New York stealthily scratching and saying, "I want some unguentum; don't want it for myself; only want it for a friend." But it was reported and believed that in April one of them entered an apothecary shop in Annapolis plying his finger-nails and hurriedly asking, "Have you any bmsquintum?"--"From your manner,"

answered the courteous druggist, "I think what you want is unguentum."--"Yes, _run git 'em_; I guess that _is_ the true name."--"Unguentum, sir"; said the shopkeeper. "How much unguentum do you want?"--"Well, I reckon about two pound!"--"My dear sir, two pounds would kill all the lice in Maryland."--"Well, I vow I believe I've got 'em!"

Lieut.-Col. Robert C. Smith of Baltimore, who took command of the Danville prisons soon after our arrival, appeared to be kind-hearted, compa.s.sionate, but woefully dest.i.tute of what Mrs. Stowe calls "faculty." He was of medium height, spare build, fair complexion, sandy hair, blue eyes, of slightly stooping figure; on the whole rather good-looking. He was slow of speech, with a nasal tw.a.n.g that reminded me of Dr. Horace Bushnell. His face always wore a sad expression. He had been a student at Yale in the forties a few years before me. Once a prisoner himself in our hands and fairly treated, he sympathized with us. He had been wounded, shot through the right shoulder. When I visited on parole the other Danville prisons in February, a Yankee soldier was pointed out to me as wearing Colonel Smith's blood-stained coat, and another was said to be wearing his vest. I had repeated interviews with him, in which he expressed regret at not being able to make us more comfortable. He said more than once to me, "I have no heart for this business. It requires a man without any heart to keep a military prison.

I have several times asked to be relieved and sent to the front." An officer of forceful executive ability might have procured for us lumber for benches, more coal or wood for the stoves, some straw or hay for bedding, blankets or cast-off clothing for the half naked; possibly a little food, certainly a supply of reading matter from the charitably disposed. Single instances of his compa.s.sion I have mentioned. I shall have occasion to speak of another. But the spectacle of the hopeless ma.s.s of misery in the four Danville prisons seemed to render him powerless, if not indifferent. As Mrs. Browning puts it:

A red-haired child, Sick in a fever, if you touch him once, Though but so little as with a finger-tip, Will set you weeping; but a million sick!

You could as soon weep for the rule of three, Or compound fractions!

Like too many officers both Union and Confederate, he was often in liquor; liquor was always in him. This "knight of the rueful countenance," of the sad heart, the mourning voice, the disabled right arm, and the weakness for apple-jack!--his only hope was to have an exchange of prisoners; but Lincoln and Stanton and Grant would not consent to that. The last I heard of him was when a letter of his was shown me by Lieutenant Washington, a Confederate, a distant relative of the great George. In it Smith, who had been absent a week from Danville, complained that he had had "no liquor for three days," and that he was "painfully sober"!

"Necessity," says the old apothegm, "is the mother of invention." It was surprising, how much we accomplished in a few weeks towards making ourselves comfortable. Bone or wood was carved into knives, forks, spoons, b.u.t.tons, finger-rings, masonic or army badges, tooth-picks, bosom pins, and other ornaments; corn-cobs were made into smoking pipes; sc.r.a.ps of tin or sheet-iron were fashioned into plates for eating or dishes for cooking; shelves were made by tying long wood splinters together; and many "spittoons," which were soon rendered superfluous, because the two entire rooms were transformed into vast spittoons, were inverted, and made useful as seats which we called sofas.

Many ingeniously wrought specimens of Yankee ingenuity were sold clandestinely to the rebel guards, who ventured to disobey strict orders. No skinflint vender of wooden nutmegs, leather pumpkin-seeds, horn gunflints, shoe-peg oats, huckleberry-leaf tea, ba.s.s-wood cheeses, or white-oak hams, ever hankered more for a trade. Besides the products of our prison industry, they craved watches, rings, gold chains, silver spurs, gilt b.u.t.tons, genuine breast-pins, epaulets; anything that was not manufactured in the Confederacy. Most of all, they longed for greenbacks in exchange for rebel currency. So in one way or another many of us contrived to get a little money of some sort. With it we could buy of the sutler, who visited us from time to time, rice, flour, beans, bacon, onions, dried apple, red peppers, sorghum syrup, vinegar, etc.

Perhaps the best result of our engaging in handicraft work was the relief from unspeakable depression of spirits. Some of us saw the importance of making diversion on a large scale. To this end we planned to start a theatre. Major Wm. H. Fry, of the 16th Pa. Cavalry, who knew all about vaudeville in Philadelphia, was a wise adviser. Young Gardner, who had been an actor, heartily joined in the movement. I procured a worn-out copy of Shakespeare. It seemed best to begin with the presentation of the first act in _Hamlet_. Colonel Smith and other rebel officers promised to aid us. We a.s.signed the parts and commenced studying and rehearsing. Gardner was to be Hamlet; Lieut.-Col. Theodore Gregg, 45th Pa., was to be Claudius, the usurping king; the smooth-faced Capt. William Cook was to be the queen-mother Gertrude; Capt. W. F.

Tiemann, 159th N. Y., was to personate Marcellus; Lieut. C. H. Morton of Fairhaven, Ma.s.s., I think, was Horatio; and I, having lost about forty pounds of flesh since my capture--it was thought most appropriate that I should be the Ghost! Every morning for some weeks on the empty first floor we read and rehea.r.s.ed, and really made fine progress. But when we got ready to produce in theatric style, with slight omissions, the first act, the rebels seemed suspicious of some ulterior design. They refused to furnish a sword for Hamlet, a halberd for Marcellus, muskets for Bernardo and Francisco, a calico gown for the queen, or even a white shirt for the Ghost. This was discouraging. When the lovely queen-mother Gertrude appealed to her son--

Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off,--

he answered, "I swear I can't do it!" One November morning, as we were rehearsing and shivering on the windy first floor, he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed with some emphasis, and with ungentle expletives not found in the original text,

The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold;

"I move, Colonel, that we 'bust up' this theatre." So the "legitimate drama" vanished from Danville.

About this time my copy of the Greek New Testament was stolen from me, an instance, perhaps, of piety run mad.

A week or two before this, the lower room, in which I then lodged, containing about a hundred and seventy officers, was getting into such a condition that I felt it my duty to call a meeting to see what measures could be adopted to promote comfort and decency. I was not the senior in rank, but Colonel Carle did not feel himself authorized to issue orders. Some sort of government must be inst.i.tuted at once. Nearly all recognized the necessity of prompt action and strict discipline. A committee was appointed consisting of myself, Major John W. Byron, 88th N. Y., and another officer whose name escapes me, to draw up rules and regulations. We presented the following:

RULES UNANIMOUSLY ADOPTED IN THE LOWER ROOM, DANVILLE, VA., PRISON, OCT. 26, 1864:

1. The room shall be thoroughly policed (swept, etc.) four times each day by the messes in succession; viz., at sunrise and sunset, and immediately after breakfast and dinner.

2. There shall be no washing in this room.

3. No emptying slops into spittoons.

4. No washing in the soup buckets or water buckets.

5. No shaking of clothes or blankets in this room.

6. No cooking inside the stoves.

7. No loitering in the yard to the inconvenience of others.

8. No person shall be evidently filthy or infested with vermin.

9. No indecent, profane, or ungentlemanly language in this room.

10. No conduct unbecoming an officer and gentleman about these premises.