Andersonville, entire
by
John McElroy

Part 1 out of 10








This etext was produced by David Widger





[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
entire meal of them. D.W.]





ANDERSONVILLE
A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS

FIFTEEN MONTHS A GUEST OF THE SO-CALLED
SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY

A PRIVATE SOLDIERS EXPERIENCE
IN
RICHMOND, ANDERSONVILLE, SAVANNAH, MILLEN
BLACKSHEAR AND FLORENCE


BY JOHN McELROY
Late of Co. L. 16th Ill Cav.
1879



TO THE HONORABLE

NOAH H. SWAYNE.

JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES,
A JURIST OF DISTINGUISHED TALENTS AND EXALTED CHARACTER;
ONE OF THE LAST OF THAT
ADMIRABLE ARRAY OF PURE PATRIOTS AND SAGACIOUS COUNSELORS,
WHO, IN
THE YEARS OF THE NATION'S TRIAL,
FAITHFULLY SURROUNDED THE GREAT PRESIDENT,
AND, WITH HIM, BORE THE BURDEN
OF
THOSE MOMENTOUS DAYS;
AND WHOSE WISDOM AND FAIRNESS HAVE DONE SO MUCH SINCE
TO
CONSERVE WHAT WAS THEN WON,
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED WITH RESPECT AND APPRECIATION,

BY THE AUTHOR.



INTRODUCTION.

The fifth part of a century almost has sped with the flight of time since
the outbreak of the Slaveholder's Rebellion against the United States.
The young men of to-day were then babes in their cradles, or, if more
than that, too young to be appalled by the terror of the times. Those
now graduating from our schools of learning to be teachers of youth and
leaders of public thought, if they are ever prepared to teach the history
of the war for the Union so as to render adequate honor to its martyrs
and heroes, and at the same time impress the obvious moral to be drawn
from it, must derive their knowledge from authors who can each one say of
the thrilling story he is spared to tell: "All of which I saw, and part
of which I was."

The writer is honored with the privilege of introducing to the reader a
volume written by an author who was an actor and a sufferer in the scenes
he has so vividly and faithfully described, and sent forth to the public
by a publisher whose literary contributions in support of the loyal cause
entitle him to the highest appreciation. Both author and publisher have
had an honorable and efficient part in the great struggle, and are
therefore worthy to hand down to the future a record of the perils
encountered and the sufferings endured by patriotic soldiers in the
prisons of the enemy. The publisher, at the beginning of the war,
entered, with zeal and ardor upon the work of raising a company of men,
intending to lead them to the field. Prevented from carrying out this
design, his energies were directed to a more effective service. His
famous "Nasby Letters" exposed the absurd and sophistical argumentations
of rebels and their sympathisers, in such broad, attractive and admirable
burlesque, as to direct against them the "loud, long laughter of a
world!" The unique and telling satire of these papers became a power and
inspiration to our armies in the field and to their anxious friends at
home, more than equal to the might of whole battalions poured in upon the
enemy. An athlete in logic may lay an error writhing at his feet, and
after all it may recover to do great mischief. But the sharp wit of the
humorist drives it before the world's derision into shame and everlasting
contempt. These letters were read and shouted over gleefully at every
camp-fire in the Union Army, and eagerly devoured by crowds of listeners
when mails were opened at country post-offices. Other humorists were
content when they simply amused the reader, but "Nasby's" jests were
arguments--they had a meaningthey were suggested by the necessities and
emergencies of the Nation's peril, and written to support, with all
earnestness, a most sacred cause.

The author, when very young, engaged in journalistic work, until the drum
of the recruiting officer called him to join the ranks of his country's
defenders. As the reader is told, he was made a prisoner. He took with
him into the terrible prison enclosure not only a brave, vigorous,
youthful spirit, but invaluable habits of mind and thought for storing up
the incidents and experiences of his prison life. As a journalist he had
acquired the habit of noticing and memorizing every striking or thrilling
incident, and the experiences of his prison life were adapted to enstamp
themselves indelibly on both feeling and memory. He speaks from personal
experience and from the stand-paint of tender and complete sympathy with
those of his comrades who suffered more than he did himself. Of his
qualifications, the writer of these introductory words need not speak.
The sketches themselves testify to his ability with such force that no
commendation is required.

This work is needed. A generation is arising who do not know what the
preservation of our free government cost in blood and suffering. Even
the men of the passing generation begin to be forgetful, if we may judge
from the recklessness or carelessness of their political action. The
soldier is not always remembered nor honored as he should be. But, what
to the future of the great Republic is more important, there is great
danger of our people under-estimating the bitter animus and terrible
malignity to the Union and its defenders cherished by those who made war
upon it. This is a point we can not afford to be mistaken about. And
yet, right at this point this volume will meet its severest criticism,
and at this point its testimony is most vital and necessary.

Many will be slow to believe all that is here told most truthfully of the
tyranny and cruelty of the captors of our brave boys in blue. There are
no parallels to the cruelties and malignities here described in Northern
society. The system of slavery, maintained for over two hundred years at
the South, had performed a most perverting, morally desolating, and we
might say, demonizing work on the dominant race, which people bred under
our free civilization can not at once understand, nor scarcely believe
when it is declared unto them. This reluctance to believe unwelcome
truths has been the snare of our national life. We have not been willing
to believe how hardened, despotic, and cruel the wielders of
irresponsible power may become.

When the anti-slavery reformers of thirty years ago set forth the
cruelties of the slave system, they were met with a storm of indignant
denial, villification and rebuke. When Theodore D. Weld issued his
"Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses," to the cruelty of slavery, he
introduced it with a few words, pregnant with sound philosophy, which can
be applied to the work now introduced, and may help the reader better to
accept and appreciate its statements. Mr. Weld said:

"Suppose I should seize you, rob you of your liberty, drive you into the
field, and make you work without pay as long as you lived. Would that be
justice? Would it be kindness? Or would it be monstrous injustice and
cruelty? Now, is the man who robs you every day too tender-hearted ever
to cuff or kick you? He can empty your pockets without remorse, but if
your stomach is empty, it cuts him to the quick. He can make you work a
life-time without pay, but loves you too well to let you go hungry.
He fleeces you of your rights with a relish, but is shocked if you work
bare-headed in summer, or without warm stockings in winter. He can make
you go without your liberty, but never without a shirt. He can crush in
you all hope of bettering your condition by vowing that you shall die his
slave, but though he can thus cruelly torture your feelings, he will
never lacerate your back--he can break your heart, but is very tender of
your skin. He can strip you of all protection of law, and all comfort in
religion, and thus expose you to all outrages, but if you are exposed to
the weather, half-clad and half-sheltered, how yearn his tender bowels!
What! talk of a man treating you well while robbing you of all you get,
and as fast as you get it? And robbing you of yourself, too, your hands
and feet, your muscles, limbs and senses, your body and mind, your
liberty and earnings, your free speech and rights of conscience, your
right to acquire knowledge, property and reputation, and yet you are
content to believe without question that men who do all this by their
slaves have soft hearts oozing out so lovingly toward their human
chattles that they always keep them well housed and well clad, never push
them too hard in the field, never make their dear backs smart, nor let
their dear stomachs get empty!"

In like manner we may ask, are not the cruelties and oppressions
described in the following pages what we should legitimately expect from
men who, all their lives, have used whip and thumb-screw, shot-gun and
bloodhound, to keep human beings subservient to their will? Are we to
expect nothing but chivalric tenderness and compassion from men who made
war on a tolerant government to make more secure their barbaric system of
oppression?

These things are written because they are true. Duty to the brave dead,
to the heroic living, who have endured the pangs of a hundred deaths for
their country's sake; duty to the government which depends on the wisdom
and constancy of its good citizens for its support and perpetuity, calls
for this "round, unvarnished tale" of suffering endured for freedom's
sake.

The publisher of this work urged his friend and associate in journalism
to write and send forth these sketches because the times demanded just
such an expose of the inner hell of the Southern prisons. The tender
mercies of oppressors are cruel. We must accept the truth and act in
view of it. Acting wisely on the warnings of the past, we shall be able
to prevent treason, with all its fearful concomitants, from being again
the scourge and terror of our beloved land.

ROBERT McCUNE.






AUTHOR'S PREFACE

Fifteen months ago--and one month before it was begun--I had no more idea
of writing this book than I have now of taking up my residence in China.

While I have always been deeply impressed with the idea that the public
should know much more of the history of Andersonville and other Southern
prisons than it does, it had never occurred to me that I was in any way
charged with the duty of increasing that enlightenment.

No affected deprecation of my own abilities had any part is this.
I certainly knew enough of the matter, as did every other boy who had
even a month's experience in those terrible places, but the very
magnitude of that knowledge overpowered me, by showing me the vast
requirements of the subject-requirements that seemed to make it
presumption for any but the greatest pens in our literature to attempt
the work. One day at Andersonville or Florence would be task enough for
the genius of Carlyle or Hugo; lesser than they would fail preposterously
to rise to the level of the theme. No writer ever described such a
deluge of woes as swept over the unfortunates confined in Rebel prisons
in the last year-and-a-half of the Confederacy's life. No man was ever
called upon to describe the spectacle and the process of seventy thousand
young, strong, able-bodied men, starving and rotting to death. Such a
gigantic tragedy as this stuns the mind and benumbs the imagination.

I no more felt myself competent to the task than to accomplish one of
Michael Angelo's grand creations in sculpture or painting.

Study of the subject since confirms me in this view, and my only claim
for this book is that it is a contribution--a record of individual
observation and experience--which will add something to the material
which the historian of the future will find available for his work.

The work was begun at the suggestion of Mr. D. R. Locke, (Petroleum V.
Nasby), the eminent political satirist. At first it was only intended to
write a few short serial sketches of prison life for the columns of the
TOLEDO BLADE. The exceeding favor with which the first of the series was
received induced a great widening of their scope, until finally they took
the range they now have.

I know that what is contained herein will be bitterly denied. I am
prepared for this. In my boyhood I witnessed the savagery of the Slavery
agitation--in my youth I felt the fierceness of the hatred directed
against all those who stood by the Nation. I know that hell hath no fury
like the vindictiveness of those who are hurt by the truth being told of
them. I apprehend being assailed by a sirocco of contradiction and
calumny. But I solemnly affirm in advance the entire and absolute truth
of every material fact, statement and description. I assert that, so far
from there being any exaggeration in any particular, that in no instance
has the half of the truth been told, nor could it be, save by an inspired
pen. I am ready to demonstrate this by any test that the deniers of this
may require, and I am fortified in my position by unsolicited letters
from over 3,000 surviving prisoners, warmly indorsing the account as
thoroughly accurate in every respect.

It has been charged that hatred of the South is the animus of this work.
Nothing can be farther from the truth. No one has a deeper love for
every part of our common country than I, and no one to-day will make more
efforts and sacrifices to bring the South to the same plane of social and
material development with the rest of the Nation than I will. If I could
see that the sufferings at Andersonville and elsewhere contributed in any
considerable degree to that end, and I should not regret that they had
been. Blood and tears mark every, step in the progress of the race, and
human misery seems unavoidable in securing human advancement. But I am
naturally embittered by the fruitlessness, as well as the uselessness of
the misery of Andersonville. There was never the least military or other
reason for inflicting all that wretchedness upon men, and, as far as
mortal eye can discern, no earthly good resulted from the martyrdom of
those tens of thousands. I wish I could see some hope that their
wantonly shed blood has sown seeds that will one day blossom, and bear a
rich fruitage of benefit to mankind, but it saddens me beyond expression
that I can not.

The years 1864-5 were a season of desperate battles, but in that time
many more Union soldiers were slain behind the Rebel armies, by
starvation and exposure, than were killed in front of them by cannon and
rifle. The country has heard much of the heroism and sacrifices of those
loyal youths who fell on the field of battle; but it has heard little of
the still greater number who died in prison pen. It knows full well how
grandly her sons met death in front of the serried ranks of treason, and
but little of the sublime firmness with which they endured unto the
death, all that the ingenious cruelty of their foes could inflict upon
them while in captivity.

It is to help supply this deficiency that this book is written. It is a
mite contributed to the better remembrance by their countrymen of those
who in this way endured and died that the Nation might live. It is an
offering of testimony to future generations of the measureless cost of
the expiation of a national sin, and of the preservation of our national
unity.

This is a11. I know I speak for all those still living comrades who went
with me through the scenes that I have attempted to describe, when I say
that we have no revenges to satisfy, no hatreds to appease. We do not
ask that anyone shall be punished. We only desire that the Nation shall
recognize and remember the grand fidelity of our dead comrades, and take
abundant care that they shall not have died in vain.

For the great mass of Southern people we have only the kindliest feeling.
We but hate a vicious social system, the lingering shadow of a darker
age, to which they yield, and which, by elevating bad men to power, has
proved their own and their country's bane.

The following story does not claim to be in any sense a history of
Southern prisons. It is simply a record of the experience of one
individual--one boy--who staid all the time with his comrades inside the
prison, and had no better opportunities for gaining information than any
other of his 60,000 companions.

The majority of the illustrations in this work are from the skilled
pencil of Captain O. J. Hopkins, of Toledo, who served through the war in
the ranks of the Forty-second Ohio. His army experience has been of
peculiar value to the work, as it has enabled him to furnish a series of
illustrations whose life-like fidelity of action, pose and detail are
admirable.

Some thirty of the pictures, including the frontispiece, and the
allegorical illustrations of War and Peace, are from the atelier of Mr.
O. Reich, Cincinnati, O.

A word as to the spelling: Having always been an ardent believer in the
reformation of our present preposterous system--or rather, no system--of
orthography, I am anxious to do whatever lies in my power to promote it.
In the following pages the spelling is simplified to the last degree
allowed by Webster. I hope that the time is near when even that advanced
spelling reformer will be left far in the rear by the progress of a
people thoroughly weary of longer slavery to the orthographical
absurdities handed down to us from a remote and grossly unlearned
ancestry.

Toledo, O., Dec. 10, 1879.

JOHN McELROY.






We wait beneath the furnace blast
The pangs of transformation;
Not painlessly doth God recast
And mold anew the nation.
Hot burns the fire
Where wrongs expire;
Nor spares the hand
That from the land
Uproots the ancient evil.

The hand-breadth cloud the sages feared
Its bloody rain is dropping;
The poison plant the fathers spared
All else is overtopping.
East, West, South, North,
It curses the earth;
All justice dies,
And fraud and lies
Live only in its shadow.

Then let the selfish lip be dumb
And hushed the breath of sighing;
Before the joy of peace must come
The pains of purifying.
God give us grace
Each in his place
To bear his lot,
And, murmuring not,
Endure and wait and labor!

WHITTIER






ANDERSONVILLE

A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS




CHAPTER I.

A STRANGE LAND--THE HEART OF THE APPALACHIANS--THE GATEWAY OF AN EMPIRE
--A SEQUESTERED VALE, AND A PRIMITIVE, ARCADIAN, NON-PROGRESSIVE PEOPLE.

A low, square, plainly-hewn stone, set near the summit of the eastern
approach to the formidable natural fortress of Cumberland Gap, indicates
the boundaries of--the three great States of Virginia, Kentucky and
Tennessee. It is such a place as, remembering the old Greek and Roman
myths and superstitions, one would recognize as fitting to mark the
confines of the territories of great masses of strong, aggressive, and
frequently conflicting peoples. There the god Terminus should have had
one of his chief temples, where his shrine would be shadowed by barriers
rising above the clouds, and his sacred solitude guarded from the rude
invasion of armed hosts by range on range of battlemented rocks, crowning
almost inaccessible mountains, interposed across every approach from the
usual haunts of men.

Roundabout the land is full of strangeness and mystery. The throes of
some great convulsion of Nature are written on the face of the four
thousand square miles of territory, of which Cumberland Gap is the
central point. Miles of granite mountains are thrust up like giant
walls, hundreds of feet high, and as smooth and regular as the side
of a monument.

Huge, fantastically-shaped rocks abound everywhere--sometimes rising into
pinnacles on lofty summits--sometimes hanging over the verge of beetling
cliffs, as if placed there in waiting for a time when they could be
hurled down upon the path of an advancing army, and sweep it away.

Large streams of water burst out in the most unexpected planes,
frequently far up mountain sides, and fall in silver veils upon stones
beaten round by the ceaseless dash for ages. Caves, rich in quaintly
formed stalactites and stalagmites, and their recesses filled with
metallic salts of the most powerful and diverse natures; break the
mountain sides at frequent intervals. Everywhere one is met by surprises
and anomalies. Even the rank vegetation is eccentric, and as prone to
develop into bizarre forms as are the rocks and mountains.

The dreaded panther ranges through the primeval, rarely trodden forests;
every crevice in the rocks has for tenants rattlesnakes or stealthy
copperheads, while long, wonderfully swift "blue racers" haunt the edges
of the woods, and linger around the fields to chill his blood who catches
a glimpse of their upreared heads, with their great, balefully bright
eyes, and "white-collar" encircled throats.

The human events happening here have been in harmony with the natural
ones. It has always been a land of conflict. In 1540--339 years ago--
De Soto, in that energetic but fruitless search for gold which occupied
his later years, penetrated to this region, and found it the fastness of
the Xualans, a bold, aggressive race, continually warring with its
neighbors. When next the white man reached the country--a century and a
half later--he found the Xualans had been swept away by the conquering
Cherokees, and he witnessed there the most sanguinary contest between
Indians of which our annals give any account--a pitched battle two days
in duration, between the invading Shawnees, who lorded it over what is
now Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana--and the Cherokees, who dominated the
country the southeast of the Cumberland range. Again the Cherokees were
victorious, and the discomfited Shawnees retired north of the Gap.

Then the white man delivered battle for the possession the land, and
bought it with the lives of many gallant adventurers. Half a century
later Boone and his hardy companion followed, and forced their way into
Kentucky.

Another half century saw the Gap the favorite haunt of the greatest of
American bandits--the noted John A. Murrell--and his gang. They
infested the country for years, now waylaying the trader or drover
threading his toilsome way over the lone mountains, now descending upon
some little town, to plunder its stores and houses.

At length Murrell and his band were driven out, and sought a new field of
operations on the Lower Mississippi. They left germs behind them,
however, that developed into horse thieve counterfeiters, and later into
guerrillas and bushwhackers.

When the Rebellion broke out the region at once became the theater of
military operations. Twice Cumberland Gap was seized by the Rebels, and
twice was it wrested away from them. In 1861 it was the point whence
Zollicoffer launched out with his legions to "liberate Kentucky," and it
was whither they fled, beaten and shattered, after the disasters of Wild
Cat and Mill Springs. In 1862 Kirby Smith led his army through the Gap
on his way to overrun Kentucky and invade the North. Three months later
his beaten forces sought refuge from their pursuers behind its
impregnable fortifications. Another year saw Burnside burst through the
Gap with a conquering force and redeem loyal East Tennessee from its
Rebel oppressors.

Had the South ever been able to separate from the North the boundary
would have been established along this line.

Between the main ridge upon which Cumberland Gap is situated, and the
next range on the southeast which runs parallel with it, is a narrow,
long, very fruitful valley, walled in on either side for a hundred miles
by tall mountains as a City street is by high buildings. It is called
Powell's Valley. In it dwell a simple, primitive people, shut out from
the world almost as much as if they lived in New Zealand, and with the
speech, manners and ideas that their fathers brought into the Valley when
they settled it a century ago. There has been but little change since
then. The young men who have annually driven cattle to the distant
markets in Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia, have brought back occasional
stray bits of finery for the "women folks," and the latest improved fire-
arms for themselves, but this is about all the innovations the progress
of the world has been allowed to make. Wheeled vehicles are almost
unknown; men and women travel on horseback as they did a century ago,
the clothing is the product of the farm and the busy looms of the women,
and life is as rural and Arcadian as any ever described in a pastoral.
The people are rich in cattle, hogs, horses, sheep and the products of
the field. The fat soil brings forth the substantials of life in opulent
plenty. Having this there seems to be little care for more. Ambition
nor avarice, nor yet craving after luxury, disturb their contented souls
or drag them away from the non-progressive round of simple life
bequeathed them by their fathers.




CHAPTER II.

SCARCITY OF FOOD FOR THE ARMY--RAID FOR FORAGE--ENCOUNTER WIT THE REBELS
--SHARP CAVALRY FIGHT--DEFEAT OF THE "JOHNNIES"--POWELL'S VALLEY OPENED
UP.

As the Autumn of 1863 advanced towards Winter the difficulty of supplying
the forces concentrated around Cumberland Gap--as well as the rest of
Burnside's army in East Tennessee--became greater and greater. The base
of supplies was at Camp Nelson, near Lexington, Ky., one hundred and
eighty miles from the Gap, and all that the Army used had to be hauled
that distance by mule teams over roads that, in their best state were
wretched, and which the copious rains and heavy traffic had rendered
well-nigh impassable. All the country to our possession had been drained
of its stock of whatever would contribute to the support of man or beast.
That portion of Powell's Valley extending from the Gap into Virginia was
still in the hands of the Rebels; its stock of products was as yet almost
exempt from military contributions. Consequently a raid was projected to
reduce the Valley to our possession, and secure its much needed stores.
It was guarded by the Sixty-fourth Virginia, a mounted regiment, made up
of the young men of the locality, who had then been in the service about
two years.

Maj. C. H. Beer's third Battalion, Sixteenth Illinois Cavalry--four
companies, each about 75 strong--was sent on the errand of driving out
the Rebels and opening up the Valley for our foraging teams. The writer
was invited to attend the excursion. As he held the honorable, but not
very lucrative position of "high, private" in Company L, of the
Battalion, and the invitation came from his Captain, he did not feel at
liberty to decline. He went, as private soldiers have been in the habit
of doing ever since the days of the old Centurion, who said with the
characteristic boastfulness of one of the lower grades of commissioned
officers when he happens to be a snob:

For I am also a man set under authority, having under me soldiers,
and I say unto one, Go; and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he
cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it.

Rather "airy" talk that for a man who nowadays would take rank with
Captains of infantry.

Three hundred of us responded to the signal of "boots and saddles,"
buckled on three hundred more or less trusty sabers and revolvers,
saddled three hundred more or less gallant steeds, came into line "as
companies" with the automatic listlessness of the old soldiers, "counted
off by fours" in that queer gamut-running style that makes a company of
men "counting off"--each shouting a number in a different voice from his
neighbor--sound like running the scales on some great organ badly out of
tune; something like this:

One. Two. Three. Four. One. Two. Three. Four. One. Two. Three.
Four.

Then, as the bugle sounded "Right forward! fours right!" we moved off at
a walk through the melancholy mist that soaked through the very fiber of
man and horse, and reduced the minds of both to a condition of limp
indifference as to things past, present and future.

Whither we were going we knew not, nor cared. Such matters had long
since ceased to excite any interest. A cavalryman soon recognizes as the
least astonishing thing in his existence the signal to "Fall in!" and
start somewhere. He feels that he is the "Poor Joe" of the Army--under
perpetual orders to "move on."

Down we wound over the road that zig-tagged through the forts, batteries
and rifle-pits covering the eastern ascent to the Flap-past the wonderful
Murrell Spring--so-called because the robber chief had killed, as he
stooped to drink of its crystal waters, a rich drover, whom he was
pretending to pilot through the mountains--down to where the "Virginia
road" turned off sharply to the left and entered Powell's Valley. The
mist had become a chill, dreary rain, through, which we plodded silently,
until night closed in around us some ten miles from the Gap. As we
halted to go into camp, an indignant Virginian resented the invasion of
the sacred soil by firing at one of the guards moving out to his place.
The guard looked at the fellow contemptuously, as if he hated to waste
powder on a man who had no better sense than to stay out in such a rain,
when he could go in-doors, and the bushwhacker escaped, without even a
return shot.

Fires were built, coffee made, horses rubbed, and we laid down with feet
to the fire to get what sleep we could.

Before morning we were awakened by the bitter cold. It had cleared off
during the night and turned so cold that everything was frozen stiff.
This was better than the rain, at all events. A good fire and a hot cup
of coffee would make the cold quite endurable.

At daylight the bugle sounded "Right forward! fours right!" again, and
the 300 of us resumed our onward plod over the rocky, cedar-crowned
hills.

In the meantime, other things were taking place elsewhere. Our esteemed
friends of the Sixty-fourth Virginia, who were in camp at the little town
of Jonesville, about 40 miles from the Gap, had learned of our starting
up the Valley to drive them out, and they showed that warm reciprocity
characteristic of the Southern soldier, by mounting and starting down the
Valley to drive us out. Nothing could be more harmonious, it will be
perceived. Barring the trifling divergence of yews as to who was to
drive and who be driven, there was perfect accord in our ideas.

Our numbers were about equal. If I were to say that they considerably
outnumbered us, I would be following the universal precedent.
No soldier-high or low-ever admitted engaging an equal or inferior force
of the enemy.

About 9 o'clock in the morning--Sunday--they rode through the streets of
Jonesville on their way to give us battle. It was here that most of the
members of the Regiment lived. Every man, woman and child in the town
was related in some way to nearly every one of the soldiers.

The women turned out to wave their fathers, husbands, brothers and lovers
on to victory. The old men gathered to give parting counsel and
encouragement to their sons and kindred. The Sixty-fourth rode away to
what hope told them would be a glorious victory.

At noon we are still straggling along without much attempt at soldierly
order, over the rough, frozen hill-sides. It is yet bitterly cold, and
men and horses draw themselves together, as if to expose as little
surface as possible to the unkind elements. Not a word had been spoken
by any one for hours.

The head of the column has just reached the top of the hill, and the rest
of us are strung along for a quarter of a mile or so back.

Suddenly a few shots ring out upon the frosty air from the carbines of
the advance. The general apathy is instantly, replaced by keen
attention, and the boys instinctively range themselves into fours--the
cavalry unit of action. The Major, who is riding about the middle of the
first Company--I--dashes to the front. A glance seems to satisfy him,
for he turns in his saddle and his voice rings out:

"Company I! FOURS LEFT INTO LINE!--MARCH!!"

The Company swings around on the hill-top like a great, jointed toy
snake. As the fours come into line on a trot, we see every man draw his
saber and revolver. The Company raises a mighty cheer and dashes
forward.

Company K presses forward to the ground Company I has just left, the
fours sweep around into line, the sabers and revolvers come out
spontaneously, the men cheer and the Company flings itself forward.

All this time we of Company L can see nothing except what the companies
ahead of us are doing. We are wrought up to the highest pitch. As
Company K clears its ground, we press forward eagerly. Now we go into
line just as we raise the hill, and as my four comes around, I catch a
hurried glimpse through a rift in the smoke of a line of butternut and
gray clad men a hundred yards or so away. Their guns are at their faces,
and I see the smoke and fire spurt from the muzzles. At the same instant
our sabers and revolvers are drawn. We shout in a frenzy of excitement,
and the horses spring forward as if shot from a bow.

I see nothing more until I reach the place where the Rebel line stood.
Then I find it is gone. Looking beyond toward the bottom of the hill, I
see the woods filled with Rebels, flying in disorder and our men yelling
in pursuit. This is the portion of the line which Companies I and K
struck. Here and there are men in butternut clothing, prone on the
frozen ground, wounded and dying. I have just time to notice closely one
middle-aged man lying almost under my horse's feet. He has received a
carbine bullet through his head and his blood colors a great space around
him.

One brave man, riding a roan horse, attempts to rally his companions.
He halts on a little knoll, wheels his horse to face us, and waves his
hat to draw his companions to him. A tall, lank fellow in the next four
to me--who goes by the nickname of "'Leven Yards"--aims his carbine at
him, and, without checking his horse's pace, fires. The heavy Sharpe's
bullet tears a gaping hole through the Rebel's heart. He drops from his
saddle, his life-blood runs down in little rills on either side of the
knoll, and his riderless horse dashes away in a panic.

At this instant comes an order for the Company to break up into fours and
press on through the forest in pursuit. My four trots off to the road at
the right. A Rebel bugler, who hag been cut off, leaps his horse into
the road in front of us. We all fire at him on the impulse of the
moment. He falls from his horse with a bullet through his back. Company
M, which has remained in column as a reserve, is now thundering up close
behind at a gallop. Its seventy-five powerful horses are spurning the
solid earth with steel-clad hoofs. The man will be ground into a
shapeless mass if left where he has fallen. We spring from our horses
and drag him into a fence corner; then remount and join in the pursuit.

This happened on the summit of Chestnut Ridge, fifteen miles from
Jonesville.

Late in the afternoon the anxious watchers at Jonesville saw a single
fugitive urging his well-nigh spent horse down the slope of the hill
toward town. In an agony of anxiety they hurried forward to meet him and
learn his news.

The first messenger who rushed into Job's presence to announce the
beginning of the series of misfortunes which were to afflict the upright
man of Uz is a type of all the cowards who, before or since then, have
been the first to speed away from the field of battle to spread the news
of disaster. He said:

"And the Sabeans fell upon them, and took them away; yea, they have
slain the servants with the edge of the sword; and I only am escaped
alone to tell thee."

So this fleeing Virginian shouted to his expectant friends:

"The boys are all cut to pieces; I'm the only one that got away."

The terrible extent of his words was belied a little later, by the
appearance on the distant summit of the hill of a considerable mob of
fugitives, flying at the utmost speed of their nearly exhausted horses.
As they came on down the hill as almost equally disorganized crowd of
pursuers appeared on the summit, yelling in voices hoarse with continued
shouting, and pouring an incessant fire of carbine and revolver bullets
upon the hapless men of the Sixty-fourth Virginia.

The two masses of men swept on through the town. Beyond it, the road
branched in several directions, the pursued scattered on each of these,
and the worn-out pursuers gave up the chase.

Returning to Jonesville, we took an account of stock, and found that we
were "ahead" one hundred and fifteen prisoners, nearly that many horses,
and a considerable quantity of small arms. How many of the enemy had
been killed and wounded could not be told, as they were scattered over
the whole fifteen miles between where the fight occurred and the pursuit
ended. Our loss was trifling.

Comparing notes around the camp-fires in the evening, we found that our
success had been owing to the Major's instinct, his grasp of the
situation, and the soldierly way in which he took advantage of it. When
he reached the summit of the hill he found the Rebel line nearly formed
and ready for action. A moment's hesitation might have been fatal to us.
At his command Company I went into line with the thought-like celerity of
trained cavalry, and instantly dashed through the right of the Rebel
line. Company K followed and plunged through the Rebel center, and when
we of Company L arrived on the ground, and charged the left, the last
vestige of resistance was swept away. The whole affair did not probably
occupy more than fifteen minutes.

This was the way Powell's Valley was opened to our foragers.




CHAPTER III.

LIVING OFF THE ENEMY--REVELING IN THE FATNESS OF THE COUNTRY--SOLDIERLY
PURVEYING AND CAMP COOKERY--SUSCEPTIBLE TEAMSTERS AND THEIR TENDENCY TO
FLIGHTINESS--MAKING SOLDIER'S BED.

For weeks we rode up and down--hither and thither--along the length of
the narrow, granite-walled Valley; between mountains so lofty that the
sun labored slowly over them in the morning, occupying half the forenoon
in getting to where his rays would reach the stream that ran through the
Valley's center. Perpetual shadow reigned on the northern and western
faces of these towering Nights--not enough warmth and sunshine reaching
them in the cold months to check the growth of the ever-lengthening
icicles hanging from the jutting cliffs, or melt the arabesque frost-
forms with which the many dashing cascades decorated the adjacent rocks
and shrubbery. Occasionally we would see where some little stream ran
down over the face of the bare, black rocks for many hundred feet, and
then its course would be a long band of sheeny white, like a great rich,
spotless scarf of satin, festooning the war-grimed walls of some old
castle.

Our duty now was to break up any nuclei of concentration that the Rebels
might attempt to form, and to guard our foragers--that is, the teamsters
and employee of the Quartermaster's Department--who were loading grain
into wagons and hauling it away.

This last was an arduous task. There is no man in the world that needs
as much protection as an Army teamster. He is worse in this respect than
a New England manufacturer, or an old maid on her travels. He is given
to sudden fears and causeless panics. Very innocent cedars have a
fashion of assuming in his eyes the appearance of desperate Rebels armed
with murderous guns, and there is no telling what moment a rock may take
such a form as to freeze his young blood, and make each particular hair
stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine. One has to be
particular about snapping caps in his neighborhood, and give to him
careful warning before discharging a carbine to clean it. His first
impulse, when anything occurs to jar upon his delicate nerves, is to cut
his wheel-mule loose and retire with the precipitation of a man having an
appointment to keep and being behind time. There is no man who can get
as much speed out of a mule as a teamster falling back from the
neighborhood of heavy firing.

This nervous tremor was not peculiar to the engineers of our
transportation department. It was noticeable in the gentry who carted
the scanty provisions of the Rebels. One of Wheeler's cavalrymen told me
that the brigade to which he belonged was one evening ordered to move at
daybreak. The night was rainy, and it was thought best to discharge the
guns and reload before starting. Unfortunately, it was neglected to
inform the teamsters of this, and at the first discharge they varnished
from the scene with such energy that it was over a week before the
brigade succeeded in getting them back again.

Why association with the mule should thus demoralize a man, has always
been a puzzle to me, for while the mule, as Col. Ingersoll has remarked,
is an animal without pride of ancestry or hope of posterity, he is still
not a coward by any means. It is beyond dispute that a full-grown and
active lioness once attacked a mule in the grounds of the Cincinnati
Zoological Garden, and was ignominiously beaten, receiving injuries from
which she died shortly afterward.

The apparition of a badly-scared teamster urging one of his wheel mules
at break-neck speed over the rough ground, yelling for protection against
"them Johnnies," who had appeared on some hilltop in sight of where he
was gathering corn, was an almost hourly occurrence. Of course the squad
dispatched to his assistance found nobody.

Still, there were plenty of Rebels in the country, and they hung around
our front, exchanging shots with us at long taw, and occasionally
treating us to a volley at close range, from some favorable point.
But we had the decided advantage of them at this game. Our Sharpe's
carbines were much superior in every way to their Enfields. They would
shoot much farther, and a great deal more rapidly, so that the Virginians
were not long in discovering that they were losing more than they gained
in this useless warfare.

Once they played a sharp practical joke upon us. Copper River is a deep,
exceedingly rapid mountain stream, with a very slippery rocky bottom.
The Rebels blockaded a ford in such a way that it was almost impossible
for a horse to keep his feet. Then they tolled us off in pursuit of a
small party to this ford. When we came to it there was a light line of
skirmishers on the opposite bank, who popped away at us industriously.
Our boys formed in line, gave the customary, cheer, and dashed in to
carry the ford at a charge. As they did so at least one-half of the
horses went down as if they were shot, and rolled over their riders in
the swift running, ice-cold waters. The Rebels yelled a triumphant
laugh, as they galloped away, and the laugh was re-echoed by our fellows,
who were as quick to see the joke as the other side. We tried to get
even with them by a sharp chase, but we gave it up after a few miles,
without having taken any prisoners.

But, after all, there was much to make our sojourn in the Valley
endurable. Though we did not wear fine linen, we fared sumptuously--for
soldiers--every day. The cavalryman is always charged by the infantry
and artillery with having a finer and surer scent for the good things in
the country than any other man in the service. He is believed to have an
instinct that will unfailingly lead him, in the dankest night, to the
roosting place of the most desirable poultry, and after he has camped in
a neighborhood for awhile it would require a close chemical analysis to
find a trace of ham.

We did our best to sustain the reputation of our arm of the service.
We found the most delicious hams packed away in the ash-houses.
They were small, and had that; exquisite nutty flavor, peculiar to mast-
fed bacon. Then there was an abundance of the delightful little apple
known as "romanites." There were turnips, pumpkins, cabbages, potatoes,
and the usual products of the field in plenty, even profusion. The corn
in the fields furnished an ample supply of breadstuff. We carried it to
and ground it in the quaintest, rudest little mills that can be imagined
outside of the primitive affairs by which the women of Arabia coarsely
powder the grain for the family meal. Sometimes the mill would consist
only of four stout posts thrust into the ground at the edge of some
stream. A line of boulders reaching diagonally across the stream
answered for a dam, by diverting a portion of the volume of water to a
channel at the side, where it moved a clumsily constructed wheel, that
turned two small stones, not larger than good-sized grindstones. Over
this would be a shed made by resting poles in forked posts stuck into the
ground, and covering these with clapboards held in place by large flat
stones. They resembled the mills of the gods--in grinding slowly.
It used to seem that a healthy man could eat the meal faster than they
ground it.

But what savory meals we used to concoct around the campfires, out of the
rich materials collected during the day's ride! Such stews, such soups,
such broils, such wonderful commixtures of things diverse in nature and
antagonistic in properties such daring culinary experiments in combining
materials never before attempted to be combined. The French say of
untasteful arrangement of hues in dress "that the colors swear at each
other." I have often thought the same thing of the heterogeneities that
go to make up a soldier's pot-a feu.

But for all that they never failed to taste deliciously after a long
day's ride. They were washed down by a tincupful of coffee strong enough
to tan leather, then came a brier-wood pipeful of fragrant kinnikinnic,
and a seat by the ruddy, sparkling fire of aromatic cedar logs, that
diffused at once warmth, and spicy, pleasing incense. A chat over the
events of the day, and the prospect of the morrow, the wonderful merits
of each man's horse, and the disgusting irregularities of the mails from
home, lasted until the silver-voiced bugle rang out the sweet, mournful
tattoo of the Regulations, to the flowing cadences of which the boys had
arranged the absurdly incongruous words:

"S-a-y--D-e-u-t-c-h-e-r-will-you fight-mit Sigel!
Zwei-glass of lager-bier, ja! ja! JA!"

Words were fitted to all the calls, which generally bore some
relativeness to the sigmal, but these were as, destitute of congruity as
of sense.

Tattoo always produces an impression of extreme loneliness. As its
weird, half-availing notes ring out and are answered back from the
distant rocks shrouded in night, and perhaps concealing the lurking foe,
the soldier remembers that he is far away from home and friends--deep in
the enemy's country, encompassed on every hand by those in deadly
hostility to him, who are perhaps even then maturing the preparations for
his destruction.

As the tattoo sounds, the boys arise from around the fire, visit the
horse line, see that their horses are securely tied, rub off from the
fetlocks and legs such specks of mud as may have escaped the cleaning in
the early evening, and if possible, smuggle their faithful four-footed
friends a few ears of corn, or another bunch of hay.

If not too tired, and everything else is favorable, the cavalryman has
prepared himself a comfortable couch for the night. He always sleeps
with a chum. The two have gathered enough small tufts of pine or cedar
to make a comfortable, springy, mattress-like foundation. On this is
laid the poncho or rubber blanket. Next comes one of their overcoats,
and upon this they lie, covering themselves with the two blankets and the
other overcoat, their feet towards the fire, their boots at the foot, and
their belts, with revolver, saber and carbine, at the sides of the bed.
It is surprising what an amount of comfort a man can get out of such a
couch, and how, at an alarm, he springs from it, almost instantly dressed
and armed.

Half an hour after tattoo the bugle rings out another sadly sweet strain,
that hath a dying sound.




CHAPTER IV.

A BITTER COLD MORNING AND A WARM AWAKENING--TROUBLE ALL ALONG THE LINE--
FIERCE CONFLICTS, ASSAULTS AND DEFENSE--PROLONGED AND DESPERATE STRUGGLE
ENDING WITH A SURRENDER.

The night had been the most intensely cold that the country had known for
many years. Peach and other tender trees had been killed by the frosty
rigor, and sentinels had been frozen to death in our neighborhood. The
deep snow on which we made our beds, the icy covering of the streams near
us, the limbs of the trees above us, had been cracking with loud noises
all night, from the bitter cold.

We were camped around Jonesville, each of the four companies lying on one
of the roads leading from the town. Company L lay about a mile from the
Court House. On a knoll at the end of the village toward us, and at a
point where two roads separated,--one of which led to us,--stood a three-
inch Rodman rifle, belonging to the Twenty-second Ohio Battery. It and
its squad of eighteen men, under command of Lieutenant Alger and Sergeant
Davis, had been sent up to us a few days before from the Gap.

The comfortless gray dawn was crawling sluggishly over the mountain-tops,
as if numb as the animal and vegetable life which had been shrinking all
the long hours under the fierce chill.

The Major's bugler had saluted the morn with the lively, ringing tarr-r-
r-a-ta-ara of the Regulation reveille, and the company buglers, as fast
as they could thaw out their mouth-pieces, were answering him.

I lay on my bed, dreading to get up, and yet not anxious to lie still.
It was a question which would be the more uncomfortable. I turned over,
to see if there was not another position in which it would be warmer,
and began wishing for the thousandth time that the efforts for the
amelioration of the horrors of warfare would progress to such a point as
to put a stop to all Winter soldiering, so that a fellow could go home as
soon as cold weather began, sit around a comfortable stove in a country
store; and tell camp stories until the Spring was far enough advanced to
let him go back to the front wearing a straw hat and a linen duster.

Then I began wondering how much longer I would dare lie there, before the
Orderly Sergeant would draw me out by the heels, and accompany the
operation with numerous unkind and sulphurous remarks.

This cogitation, was abruptly terminated by hearing an excited shout from
the Captain:

"Turn Out!--COMPANY L!! TURNOUT ! ! !"

Almost at the same instant rose that shrill, piercing Rebel yell, which
one who has once heard it rarely forgets, and this was followed by a
crashing volley from apparently a regiment of rifles.

I arose-promptly.

There was evidently something of more interest on hand than the weather.

Cap, overcoat, boots and revolver belt went on, and eyes opened at about
the same instant.

As I snatched up my carbine, I looked out in front, and the whole woods
appeared to be full of Rebels, rushing toward us, all yelling and some
firing. My Captain and First Lieutenant had taken up position on the
right front of the tents, and part of the boys were running up to form a
line alongside them. The Second Lieutenant had stationed himself on a
knoll on the left front, and about a third of the company was rallying
around him.

My chum was a silent, sententious sort of a chap, and as we ran forward
to the Captain's line, he remarked earnestly:

"Well: this beats hell!"

I thought he had a clear idea of the situation.

All this occupied an inappreciably short space of time. The Rebels had
not stopped to reload, but were rushing impetuously toward us. We gave
them a hot, rolling volley from our carbines. Many fell, more stopped to
load and reply, but the mass surged straight forward at us. Then our
fire grew so deadly that they showed a disposition to cover themselves
behind the rocks and trees. Again they were urged forward; and a body of
them headed by their Colonel, mounted on a white horse, pushed forward
through the gap between us and the Second Lieutenant. The Rebel Colonel
dashed up to the Second Lieutenant, and ordered him to surrender. The
latter-a gallant old graybeard--cursed the Rebel bitterly and snapped his
now empty revolver in his face. The Colonel fired and killed him,
whereupon his squad, with two of its Sergeants killed and half its
numbers on the ground, surrendered.

The Rebels in our front and flank pressed us with equal closeness.
It seemed as if it was absolutely impossible to check their rush for an
instant, and as we saw the fate of our companions the Captain gave the
word for every man to look out for himself. We ran back a little
distance, sprang over the fence into the fields, and rushed toward Town,
the Rebels encouraging us to make good time by a sharp fire into our
backs from the fence.

While we were vainly attempting to stem the onset of the column dashed
against us, better success was secured elsewhere. Another column swept
down the other road, upon which there was only an outlying picket. This
had to come back on the run before the overwhelming numbers, and the
Rebels galloped straight for the three-inch Rodman. Company M was the
first to get saddled and mounted, and now came up at a steady, swinging
gallop, in two platoons, saber and revolver in hand, and led by two
Sergeants-Key and McWright,--printer boys from Bloomington, Illinois.
They divined the object of the Rebel dash, and strained every nerve to
reach the gun first. The Rebels were too near, and got the gun and
turned it. Before they could fire it, Company M struck them headlong,
but they took the terrible impact without flinching, and for a few
minutes there was fierce hand-to-hand work, with sword and pistol.
The Rebel leader sank under a half-dozen simultaneous wounds, and fell
dead almost under the gun. Men dropped from their horses each instant,
and the riderless steeds fled away. The scale of victory was turned by
the Major dashing against the Rebel left flank at the head of Company I,
and a portion of the artillery squad. The Rebels gave ground slowly,
and were packed into a dense mass in the lane up which they had charged.
After they had been crowded back, say fifty yards, word was passed
through our men to open to the right and left on the sides of the road.
The artillerymen had turned the gun and loaded it with a solid shot.
Instantly a wide lane opened through our ranks; the man with the lanyard
drew the fatal cord, fire burst from the primer and the muzzle, the long
gun sprang up and recoiled, and there seemed to be a demoniac yell in its
ear-splitting crash, as the heavy ball left the mouth, and tore its
bloody way through the bodies of the struggling mass of men and horses.

This ended it. The Rebels gave way in disorder, and our men fell back to
give the gun an opportunity to throw shell and canister.

The Rebels now saw that we were not to be run over like a field of
cornstalks, and they fell back to devise further tactics, giving us a
breathing spell to get ourselves in shape for defense.

The dullest could see that we were in a desperate situation. Critical
positions were no new experience to us, as they never are to a cavalry
command after a few months in the field, but, though the pitcher goes
often to the well, it is broken at last, and our time was evidently at
hand. The narrow throat of the Valley, through which lay the road back
to the Gap, was held by a force of Rebels evidently much superior to our
own, and strongly posted. The road was a slender, tortuous one, winding
through rocks and gorges. Nowhere was there room enough to move with
even a platoon front against the enemy, and this precluded all chances of
cutting out. The best we could do was a slow, difficult movement, in
column of fours, and this would have been suicide. On the other side of
the Town the Rebels were massed stronger, while to the right and left
rose the steep mountain sides. We were caught-trapped as surely as a rat
ever was in a wire trap.

As we learned afterwards, a whole division of cavalry, under command of
the noted Rebel, Major General Sam Jones, had been sent to effect our
capture, to offset in a measure Longstreet's repulse at Knoxville.
A gross overestimate of our numbers had caused the sending of so large
a force on this errand, and the rough treatment we gave the two columns
that attacked us first confirmed the Rebel General's ideas of our
strength, and led him to adopt cautious tactics, instead of crushing us
out speedily, by a determined advance of all parts of his encircling
lines.

The lull in the fight did not last long. A portion of the Rebel line on
the east rushed forward to gain a more commanding position.

We concentrated in that direction and drove it back, the Rodman assisting
with a couple of well-aimed shells.--This was followed by a similar but
more successful attempt by another part of the Rebel line, and so it went
on all day--the Rebels rushing up first on this side, and then on that,
and we, hastily collecting at the exposed points, seeking to drive them
back. We were frequently successful; we were on the inside, and had the
advantage of the short interior lines, so that our few men and our
breech-loaders told to a good purpose.

There were frequent crises in the struggle, that at some times gave
encouragement, but never hope. Once a determined onset was made from the
East, and was met by the equally determined resistance of nearly our
whole force. Our fire was so galling that a large number of our foes
crowded into a house on a knoll, and making loopholes in its walls, began
replying to us pretty sharply. We sent word to our faithful
artillerists, who trained the gun upon the house. The first shell
screamed over the roof, and burst harmlessly beyond. We suspended fire
to watch the next. It crashed through the side; for an instant all was
deathly still; we thought it had gone on through. Then came a roar and a
crash; the clapboards flew off the roof, and smoke poured out; panic-
stricken Rebels rushed from the doors and sprang from the windows-like
bees from a disturbed hive; the shell had burst among the confined mass
of men inside! We afterwards heard that twenty-five were killed there.

At another time a considerable force of rebels gained the cover of a
fence in easy range of our main force. Companies L and K were ordered to
charge forward on foot and dislodge them. Away we went, under a fire
that seemed to drop a man at every step. A hundred yards in front of the
Rebels was a little cover, and behind this our men lay down as if by one
impulse. Then came a close, desperate duel at short range. It was a
question between Northern pluck and Southern courage, as to which could
stand the most punishment. Lying as flat as possible on the crusted
snow, only raising the head or body enough to load and aim, the men on
both sides, with their teeth set, their glaring eyes fastened on the foe,
their nerves as tense as tightly-drawn steel wires, rained shot on each
other as fast as excited hands could crowd cartridges into the guns and
discharge them.

Not a word was said.

The shallower enthusiasm that expresses itself in oaths and shouts had
given way to the deep, voiceless rage of men in a death grapple. The
Rebel line was a rolling torrent of flame, their bullets shrieked angrily
as they flew past, they struck the snow in front of us, and threw its
cold flakes in faces that were white with the fires of consuming hate;
they buried themselves with a dull thud in the quivering bodies of the
enraged combatants.

Minutes passed; they seemed hours.

Would the villains, scoundrels, hell-hounds, sons of vipers never go?

At length a few Rebels sprang up and tried to fly. They were shot down
instantly.

Then the whole line rose and ran!

The relief was so great that we jumped to our feet and cheered wildly,
forgetting in our excitement to make use of our victory by shooting down
our flying enemies.

Nor was an element of fun lacking. A Second Lieutenant was ordered to
take a party of skirmishers to the top of a hill and engage those of the
Rebels stationed on another hill-top across a ravine. He had but lately
joined us from the Regular Army, where he was a Drill Sergeant.
Naturally, he was very methodical in his way, and scorned to do otherwise
under fire than he would upon the parade ground. He moved his little
command to the hill-top, in close order, and faced them to the front.
The Johnnies received them with a yell and a volley, whereat the boys
winced a little, much to the Lieutenant's disgust, who swore at them;
then had them count off with great deliberation, and deployed them as
coolly as if them was not an enemy within a hundred miles. After the
line deployed, he "dressed" it, commanded "Front!" and "Begin, firing!"
his attention was called another way for an instant, and when he looked
back again, there was not a man of his nicely formed skirmish line
visible. The logs and stones had evidently been put there for the use of
skirmishers, the boys thought, and in an instant they availed themselves
of their shelter.

Never was there an angrier man than that Second Lieutenant; he brandished
his saber and swore; he seemed to feel that all his soldierly reputation
was gone, but the boys stuck to their shelter for all that, informing him
that when the Rebels would stand out in the open field and take their
fire, they would d likewise.

Despite all our efforts, the Rebel line crawled up closer an closer to
us; we were driven back from knoll to knoll, and from one fence after
another. We had maintained the unequal struggle for eight hours; over
one-fourth of our number were stretched upon the snow, killed or badly
wounded. Our cartridges were nearly all gone; the cannon had fired its
last shot long ago, and having a blank cartridge left, had shot the
rammer at a gathering party of the enemy.

Just as the Winter sun was going down upon a day of gloom the bugle
called us all up on the hillside. Then the Rebels saw for the first time
how few there were, and began an almost simultaneous charge all along the
line. The Major raised piece of a shelter tent upon a pole. The line
halted. An officer rode out from it, followed by two privates.

Approaching the Major, he said, "Who is in command this force?"

The Major replied: "I am."

"Then, Sir, I demand your sword."

"What is your rank, Sir!"

"I am Adjutant of the Sixty-fourth Virginia."

The punctillious soul of the old "Regular"--for such the Major was
swelled up instantly, and he answered:

"By ---, sir, I will never surrender to my inferior in rank!"

The Adjutant reined his horse back. His two followers leveled their
pieces at the Major and waited orders to fire. They were covered by a
dozen carbines in the hands of our men. The Adjutant ordered his men to
"recover arms," and rode away with them. He presently returned with a
Colonel, and to him the Major handed his saber.

As the men realized what was being done, the first thought of many of
them was to snatch out the cylinder's of their revolvers, and the slides
of their carbines, and throw them away, so as to make the arms useless.

We were overcome with rage and humiliation at being compelled to yield to
an enemy whom we had hated so bitterly. As we stood there on the bleak
mountain-side, the biting wind soughing through the leafless branches,
the shadows of a gloomy winter night closing around us, the groans and
shrieks of our wounded mingling with the triumphant yells of the Rebels
plundering our tents, it seemed as if Fate could press to man's lips no
cup with bitterer dregs in it than this.




CHAPTER V.

THE REACTION--DEPRESSION--BITTING COLD--SHARP HUNGER AND SAD REFLEXION.

"Of being taken by the Insolent foe."--Othello.


The night that followed was inexpressibly dreary: The high-wrought
nervous tension, which had been protracted through the long hours that
the fight lasted, was succeeded by a proportionate mental depression,
such as naturally follows any strain upon the mind. This was intensified
in our cases by the sharp sting of defeat, the humiliation of having to
yield ourselves, our horses and our arms into the possession of the
enemy, the uncertainty as to the future, and the sorrow we felt at the
loss of so many of our comrades.

Company L had suffered very severely, but our chief regret was for the
gallant Osgood, our Second Lieutenant. He, above all others, was our
trusted leader. The Captain and First Lieutenant were brave men, and
good enough soldiers, but Osgood was the one "whose adoption tried, we
grappled to our souls with hooks of steel." There was never any
difficulty in getting all the volunteers he wanted for a scouting party.
A quiet, pleasant spoken gentleman, past middle age, he looked much
better fitted for the office of Justice of the Peace, to which his
fellow-citizens of Urbana, Illinois, had elected and reelected him, than
to command a troop of rough riders in a great civil war. But none more
gallant than he ever vaulted into saddle to do battle for the right.
He went into the Army solely as a matter of principle, and did his duty
with the unflagging zeal of an olden Puritan fighting for liberty and his
soul's salvation. He was a superb horseman--as all the older Illinoisans
are and, for all his two-score years and ten, he recognized few superiors
for strength and activity in the Battalion. A radical, uncompromising
Abolitionist, he had frequently asserted that he would rather die than
yield to a Rebel, and he kept his word in this as in everything else.

As for him, it was probably the way he desired to die. No one believed
more ardently than he that

Whether on the scaffold high,
Or in the battle's van;
The fittest place for man to die,
Is where he dies for man.

Among the many who had lost chums and friends was Ned Johnson, of Company
K. Ned was a young Englishman, with much of the suggestiveness of the
bull-dog common to the lower class of that nation. His fist was readier
than his tongue. His chum, Walter Savage was of the same surly type.
The two had come from England twelve years before, and had been together
ever since. Savage was killed in the struggle for the fence described in
the preceding chapter. Ned could not realize for a while that his friend
was dead. It was only when the body rapidly stiffened on its icy bed,
and the eyes which had been gleaming deadly hate when he was stricken
down were glazed over with the dull film of death, that he believed he
was gone from him forever. Then his rage was terrible. For the rest of
the day he was at the head of every assault upon the enemy. His voice
could ever be heard above the firing, cursing the Rebels bitterly, and
urging the boys to "Stand up to 'em! Stand right up to 'em! Don't give
a inch! Let them have the best you got in the shop! Shoot low, and
don't waste a cartridge!"

When we surrendered, Ned seemed to yield sullenly to the inevitable.
He threw his belt and apparently his revolver with it upon the snow.
A guard was formed around us, and we gathered about the fires that were
started. Ned sat apart, his arms folded, his head upon his breast,
brooding bitterly upon Walter's death. A horseman, evidently a Colonel
or General, clattered up to give some directions concerning us. At the
sound of his voice Ned raised his head and gave him a swift glance; the
gold stars upon the Rebel's collar led him to believe that he was the
commander of the enemy. Ned sprang to his feet, made a long stride
forward, snatched from the breast of his overcoat the revolver he had
been hiding there, cocked it and leveled it at the Rebel's breast.
Before he could pull the trigger Orderly Sergeant Charles Bentley, of his
Company, who was watching him, leaped forward, caught his wrist and threw
the revolver up. Others joined in, took the weapon away, and handed it
over to the officer, who then ordered us all to be searched for arms,
and rode away.

All our dejection could not make us forget that we were intensely hungry.
We had eaten nothing all day. The fight began before we had time to get
any breakfast, and of course there was no interval for refreshments
during the engagement. The Rebels were no better off than we, having
been marched rapidly all night in order to come upon us by daylight.

Late in the evening a few sacks of meal were given us, and we took the
first lesson in an art that long and painful practice afterward was to
make very familiar to us. We had nothing to mix the meal in, and it
looked as if we would have to eat it dry, until a happy thought struck
some one that our caps would do for kneading troughs. At once every cap
was devoted to this. Getting water from an adjacent spring, each man
made a little wad of dough--unsalted--and spreading it upon a flat stone
or a chip, set it up in front of the fire to bake. As soon as it was
browned on one side, it was pulled off the stone, and the other side
turned to the fire. It was a very primitive way of cooking and I became
thoroughly disgusted with it. It was fortunate for me that I little
dreamed that this was the way I should have to get my meals for the next
fifteen months.

After somewhat of the edge had been taken off our hunger by this food,
we crouched around the fires, talked over the events of the day,
speculated as to what was to be done with us, and snatched such sleep as
the biting cold would permit.




CHAPTER

"ON TO RICHMOND!"--MARCHING ON FOOT OVER THE MOUNTAINS--MY HORSE HAS A
NEW RIDER--UNSOPHISTICATED MOUNTAIN GIRLS--DISCUSSING THE ISSUES OF THE
WAR--PARTING WITH "HIATOGA."

At dawn we were gathered together, more meal issued to us, which we
cooked in the same way, and then were started under heavy guard to march
on foot over the mountains to Bristol, a station at the point where the
Virginia and Tennessee Railroad crosses the line between Virginia and
Tennessee.

As we were preparing to set out a Sergeant of the First Virginia cavalry
came galloping up to us on my horse! The sight of my faithful "Hiatoga"
bestrid by a Rebel, wrung my heart. During the action I had forgotten
him, but when it ceased I began to worry about his fate. As he and his
rider came near I called out to him; he stopped and gave a whinny of
recognition, which seemed also a plaintive appeal for an explanation of
the changed condition of affairs.

The Sergeant was a pleasant, gentlemanly boy of about my own age.
He rode up to me and inquired if it was my horse, to which I replied in
the affirmative, and asked permission to take from the saddle pockets
some letters, pictures and other trinkets. He granted this, and we
became friends from thence on until we separated. He rode by my side as
we plodded over the steep, slippery hills, and we beguiled the way by
chatting of the thousand things that soldiers find to talk about, and
exchanged reminiscences of the service on both sides. But the subject he
was fondest of was that which I relished least: my--now his--horse. Into
the open ulcer of my heart he poured the acid of all manner of questions
concerning my lost steed's qualities and capabilities: would he swim?
how was he in fording? did he jump well! how did he stand fire?
I smothered my irritation, and answered as pleasantly as I could.

In the afternoon of the third day after the capture, we came up to where
a party of rustic belles were collected at "quilting." The "Yankees"
were instantly objects of greater interest than the parade of a menagerie
would have been. The Sergeant told the girls we were going to camp for
the night a mile or so ahead, and if they would be at a certain house,
he would have a Yankee for them for close inspection. After halting,
the Sergeant obtained leave to take me out with a guard, and I was
presently ushered into a room in which the damsels were massed in force,
--a carnation-checked, staring, open-mouthed, linsey-clad crowd, as
ignorant of corsets and gloves as of Hebrew, and with a propensity to
giggle that was chronic and irrepressible. When we entered the room
there was a general giggle, and then a shower of comments upon my
appearance,--each sentence punctuated with the chorus of feminine
cachination. A remark was made about my hair and eyes, and their
risibles gave way; judgment was passed on my nose, and then came a ripple
of laughter. I got very red in the face, and uncomfortable generally.
Attention was called to the size of my feet and hands, and the usual
chorus followed. Those useful members of my body seemed to swell up as
they do to a young man at his first party.

Then I saw that in the minds of these bucolic maidens I was scarcely,
if at all, human; they did not understand that I belonged to the race;
I was a "Yankee"--a something of the non-human class, as the gorilla or
the chimpanzee. They felt as free to discuss my points before my face as
they would to talk of a horse or a wild animal in a show. My equanimity
was partially restored by this reflection, but I was still too young to
escape embarrassment and irritation at being thus dissected and giggled
at by a party of girls, even if they were ignorant Virginia mountaineers.

I turned around to speak to the Sergeant, and in so doing showed my back
to the ladies. The hum of comment deepened into surprise, that half
stopped and then intensified the giggle.

I was puzzled for a minute, and then the direction of their glances, and
their remarks explained it all. At the rear of the lower part of the
cavalry jacket, about where the upper ornamental buttons are on the tail
of a frock coat, are two funny tabs, about the size of small pin-
cushions. They are fastened by the edge, and stick out straight behind.
Their use is to support the heavy belt in the rear, as the buttons do in
front. When the belt is off it would puzzle the Seven Wise Men to guess
what they are for. The unsophisticated young ladies, with that swift
intuition which is one of lovely woman's salient mental traits,
immediately jumped at the conclusion that the projections covered some
peculiar conformation of the Yankee anatomy--some incipient, dromedary-
like humps, or perchance the horns of which they had heard so much.

This anatomical phenomena was discussed intently for a few minutes,
during which I heard one of the girls inquire whether "it would hurt him
to cut 'em off?" and another hazarded the opinion that "it would probably
bleed him to death."

Then a new idea seized them, and they said to the Sergeant "Make him
sing! Make him sing!"

This was too much for the Sergeant, who had been intensely amused at the
girls' wonderment. He turned to me, very red in the face, with:

"Sergeant: the girls want to hear you sing."

I replied that I could not sing a note. Said he:

"Oh, come now. I know better than that; I never seed or heerd of a
Yankee that couldn't sing."

I nevertheless assured him that there really were some Yankees that did
not have any musical accomplishments, and that I was one of that
unfortunate number. I asked him to get the ladies to sing for me,
and to this they acceded quite readily. One girl, with a fair soprano,
who seemed to be the leader of the crowd, sang "The Homespun Dress," a
song very popular in the South, and having the same tune as the "Bonnie
Blue Flag." It began,

I envy not the Northern girl
Their silks and jewels fine,

and proceeded to compare the homespun habiliments of the Southern women
to the finery and frippery of the ladies on the other side of Mason and
Dixon's line in a manner very disadvantageous to the latter.

The rest of the girls made a fine exhibition of the lung-power acquired
in climbing their precipitous mountains, when they came in on the chorus

Hurra! Hurra! for southern rights Hurra!
Hurra for the homespun dress,
The Southern ladies wear.

This ended the entertainment.

On our journey to Bristol we met many Rebel soldiers, of all ranks,
and a small number of citizens. As the conscription had then been
enforced pretty sharply for over a year the only able-bodied men seen in
civil life were those who had some trade which exempted them from being
forced into active service. It greatly astonished us at first to find
that nearly all the mechanics were included among the exempts, or could
be if they chose; but a very little reflection showed us the wisdom of
such a policy. The South is as nearly a purely agricultural country as
is Russia or South America. The people have, little inclination or
capacity for anything else than pastoral pursuits. Consequently
mechanics are very scarce, and manufactories much scarcer. The limited
quantity of products of mechanical skill needed by the people was mostly
imported from the North or Europe. Both these sources of supply were
cutoff by the war, and the country was thrown upon its own slender
manufacturing resources. To force its mechanics into the army would
therefore be suicidal. The Army would gain a few thousand men, but its
operations would be embarrassed, if not stopped altogether, by a want of
supplies. This condition of affairs reminded one of the singular paucity
of mechanical skill among the Bedouins of the desert, which renders the
life of a blacksmith sacred. No matter how bitter the feud between
tribes, no one will kill the other's workers of iron, and instances are
told of warriors saving their lives at critical periods by falling on
their knees and making with their garments an imitation of the action of
a smith's bellows.

All whom we met were eager to discuss with us the causes, phases and
progress of the war, and whenever opportunity offered or could be made,
those of us who were inclined to talk were speedily involved in an
argument with crowds of soldiers and citizens. But, owing to the polemic
poverty of our opponents, the argument was more in name than in fact.
Like all people of slender or untrained intellectual powers they labored
under the hallucination that asserting was reasoning, and the emphatic
reiteration of bald statements, logic. The narrow round which all from
highest to lowest--traveled was sometimes comical, and sometimes
irritating, according to one's mood! The dispute invariably began by
their asking:

"Well, what are you 'uns down here a-fightin' we 'uns for?"

As this was replied to the newt one followed:

"Why are you'uns takin' our niggers away from we 'uns for?"

Then came:

"What do you 'uns put our niggers to fightin' we'uns for?" The windup
always was: "Well, let me tell you, sir, you can never whip people that
are fighting for liberty, sir."

Even General Giltner, who had achieved considerable military reputation
as commander of a division of Kentucky cavalry, seemed to be as slenderly
furnished with logical ammunition as the balance, for as he halted by us
he opened the conversation with the well-worn formula:

"Well: what are you 'uns down here a-fighting we'uns for?"

The question had become raspingly monotonous to me, whom he addressed,
and I replied with marked acerbity:

"Because we are the Northern mudsills whom you affect to despise, and we
came down here to lick you into respecting us."

The answer seemed to tickle him, a pleasanter light came into his
sinister gray eyes, he laughed lightly, and bade us a kindly good day.

Four days after our capture we arrived in Bristol. The guards who had
brought us over the mountains were relieved by others, the Sergeant bade
me good by, struck his spurs into "Hiatoga's" sides, and he and my
faithful horse were soon lost to view in the darkness.

A new and keener sense of desolation came over me at the final separation
from my tried and true four-footed friend, who had been my constant
companion through so many perils and hardships. We had endured together
the Winter's cold, the dispiriting drench of the rain, the fatigue of the
long march, the discomforts of the muddy camp, the gripings of hunger,
the weariness of the drill and review, the perils of the vidette post,
the courier service, the scout and the fight. We had shared in common

The whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The insolence of office, and the spurns

which a patient private and his horse of the unworthy take; we had had
our frequently recurring rows with other fellows and their horses, over
questions of precedence at watering places, and grass-plots, had had
lively tilts with guards of forage piles in surreptitious attempts to get
additional rations, sometimes coming off victorious and sometimes being
driven off ingloriously. I had often gone hungry that he might have the
only ear of corn obtainable. I am not skilled enough in horse lore to
speak of his points or pedigree. I only know that his strong limbs never
failed me, and that he was always ready for duty and ever willing.

Now at last our paths diverged. I was retired from actual service to a
prison, and he bore his new master off to battle against his old friends.

...........................

Packed closely in old, dilapidated stock and box cars, as if cattle in
shipment to market, we pounded along slowly, and apparently interminably,
toward the Rebel capital.

The railroads of the South were already in very bad condition. They were
never more than passably good, even in their best estate, but now,
with a large part of the skilled men engaged upon them escaped back to
the North, with all renewal, improvement, or any but the most necessary
repairs stopped for three years, and with a marked absence of even
ordinary skill and care in their management, they were as nearly ruined
as they could well be and still run.

One of the severe embarrassments under which the roads labored was a lack
of oil. There is very little fatty matter of any kind in the South.
The climate and the food plants do not favor the accumulation of adipose
tissue by animals, and there is no other source of supply. Lard oil and
tallow were very scarce and held at exorbitant prices.

Attempts were made to obtain lubricants from the peanut and the cotton
seed. The first yielded a fine bland oil, resembling the ordinary grade
of olive oil, but it was entirely too expensive for use in the arts.
The cotton seed oil could be produced much cheaper, but it had in it such
a quantity of gummy matter as to render it worse than useless for
employment on machinery.

This scarcity of oleaginous matter produced a corresponding scarcity of
soap and similar detergents, but this was a deprivation which caused the
Rebels, as a whole, as little inconvenience as any that they suffered
from. I have seen many thousands of them who were obviously greatly in
need of soap, but if they were rent with any suffering on that account
they concealed it with marvelous self-control.

There seemed to be a scanty supply of oil provided for the locomotives,
but the cars had to run with unlubricated axles, and the screaking and
groaning of the grinding journals in the dry boxes was sometimes almost
deafening, especially when we were going around a curve.

Our engine went off the wretched track several times, but as she was not
running much faster than a man could walk, the worst consequence to us
was a severe jolting. She was small, and was easily pried back upon the
track, and sent again upon her wheezy, straining way.

The depression which had weighed us down for a night and a day after our
capture had now been succeeded by a more cheerful feeling. We began to
look upon our condition as the fortune of war. We were proud of our
resistance to overwhelming numbers. We knew we had sold ourselves at a
price which, if the Rebels had it to do over again, they would not pay
for us. We believed that we had killed and seriously wounded as many of
them as they had killed, wounded and captured of us. We had nothing to
blame ourselves for. Moreover, we began to be buoyed up with the
expectation that we would be exchanged immediately upon our arrival at
Richmond, and the Rebel officers confidently assured us that this would
be so. There was then a temporary hitch in the exchange, but it would
all be straightened out in a few days, and it might not be a month until
we were again marching out of Cumberland Gap, on an avenging foray
against some of the force which had assisted in our capture.

Fortunately for this delusive hopefulness there was no weird and boding
Cassandra to pierce the veil of the future for us, and reveal the length
and the ghastly horror of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, through
which we must pass for hundreds of sad days, stretching out into long
months of suffering and death. Happily there was no one to tell us that
of every five in that party four would never stand under the Stars and
Stripes again, but succumbing to chronic starvation, long-continued
exposure, the bullet of the brutal guard, the loathsome scurvy, the
hideous gangrene, and the heartsickness of hope deferred, would find
respite from pain low in the barren sands of that hungry Southern soil.

Were every doom foretokened by appropriate omens, the ravens along our
route would have croaked themselves hoarse.

But, far from being oppressed by any presentiment of coming evil, we
began to appreciate and enjoy the picturesque grandeur of the scenery
through which we were moving. The rugged sternness of the Appalachian
mountain range, in whose rock-ribbed heart we had fought our losing
fight, was now softening into less strong, but more graceful outlines as
we approached the pine-clad, sandy plains of the seaboard, upon which
Richmond is built. We were skirting along the eastern base of the great
Blue Ridge, about whose distant and lofty summits hung a perpetual veil
of deep, dark, but translucent blue, which refracted the slanting rays of
the morning and evening sun into masses of color more gorgeous than a
dreamer's vision of an enchanted land. At Lynchburg we saw the famed
Peaks of Otter--twenty miles away--lifting their proud heads far into the
clouds, like giant watch-towers sentineling the gateway that the mighty
waters of the James had forced through the barriers of solid adamant
lying across their path to the far-off sea. What we had seen many miles
back start from the mountain sides as slender rivulets, brawling over the
worn boulders, were now great, rushing, full-tide streams, enough of them
in any fifty miles of our journey to furnish water power for all the
factories of New England. Their amazing opulence of mechanical energy
has lain unutilized, almost unnoticed; in the two and one-half centuries
that the white man has dwelt near them, while in Massachusetts and her
near neighbors every rill that can turn a wheel has been put into harness
and forced to do its share of labor for the benefit of the men who have
made themselves its masters.

Here is one of the differences between the two sections: In the North man
was set free, and the elements made to do his work. In the South man was
the degraded slave, and the elements wantoned on in undisturbed freedom.

As we went on, the Valleys of the James and the Appomattox, down which
our way lay, broadened into an expanse of arable acres, and the faces of
those streams were frequently flecked by gem-like little islands.




CHAPTER VII.

ENTERING RICHMOND--DISAPPOINTMENT AT ITS APPEARANCE--EVERYBODY IN
UNIFORM--CURLED DARLINGS OF THE CAPITAL--THE REBEL FLAG--LIBBY PRISON--
DICK TURNER--SEARCHING THE NEW COMERS.

Early on the tenth morning after our capture we were told that we were
about to enter Richmond. Instantly all were keenly observant of every
detail in the surroundings of a City that was then the object of the
hopes and fears of thirty-five millions of people--a City assailing which
seventy-five thousand brave men had already laid down their lives,
defending which an equal number had died, and which, before it fell, was
to cost the life blood of another one hundred and fifty thousand valiant
assailants and defenders.

So much had been said and written about Richmond that our boyish minds
had wrought up the most extravagant expectations of it and its defenses.
We anticipated seeing a City differing widely from anything ever seen
before; some anomaly of nature displayed in its site, itself guarded by
imposing and impregnable fortifications, with powerful forts and heavy
guns, perhaps even walls, castles, postern gates, moats and ditches,
and all the other panoply of defensive warfare, with which romantic
history had made us familiar.

We were disappointed--badly disappointed--in seeing nothing of this as we
slowly rolled along. The spires and the tall chimneys of the factories
rose in the distance very much as they had in other Cities we had
visited. We passed a single line of breastworks of bare yellow sand,
but the scrubby pines in front were not cut away, and there were no signs
that there had ever been any immediate expectation of use for the works.
A redoubt or two--without guns--could be made out, and this was all.
Grim-visaged war had few wrinkles on his front in that neighborhood.
They were then seaming his brow on the Rappahannock, seventy miles away,
where the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac lay
confronting each other.

At one of the stopping places I had been separated from my companions by
entering a car in which were a number of East Tennesseeans, captured in
the operations around Knoxville, and whom the Rebels, in accordance with
their usual custom, were treating with studied contumely. I had always
had a very warm side for these simple rustics of the mountains and
valleys. I knew much of their unwavering fidelity to the Union, of the
firm steadfastness with which they endured persecution for their
country's sake, and made sacrifices even unto death; and, as in those
days I estimated all men simply by their devotion to the great cause of
National integrity, (a habit that still clings to me) I rated these men
very highly. I had gone into their car to do my little to encourage
them, and when I attempted to return to my own I was prevented by the
guard.

Crossing the long bridge, our train came to a halt on the other side of
the river with the usual clamor of bell and whistle, the usual seemingly
purposeless and vacillating, almost dizzying, running backward and
forward on a network of sidetracks and switches, that seemed unavoidably
necessary, a dozen years ago, in getting a train into a City.

Still unable to regain my comrades and share their fortunes, I was
marched off with the Tennesseeans through the City to the office of some
one who had charge of the prisoners of war.

The streets we passed through were lined with retail stores, in which
business was being carried on very much as in peaceful times. Many
people were on the streets, but the greater part of the men wore some
sort of a uniform. Though numbers of these were in active service, yet
the wearing of a military garb did not necessarily imply this. Nearly
every able-bodied man in Richmond was; enrolled in some sort of an
organization, and armed, and drilled regularly. Even the members of the
Confederate Congress were uniformed and attached, in theory at least, to
the Home Guards.

It was obvious even to the casual glimpse of a passing prisoner of war,
that the City did not lack its full share of the class which formed so
large an element of the society of Washington and other Northern Cities
during the war--the dainty carpet soldiers, heros of the promenade and
the boudoir, who strutted in uniforms when the enemy was far off, and
wore citizen's clothes when he was close at hand. There were many curled
darlings displaying their fine forms in the nattiest of uniforms, whose
gloss had never suffered from so much as a heavy dew, let alone a rainy
day on the march. The Confederate gray could be made into a very dressy
garb. With the sleeves lavishly embroidered with gold lace, and the
collar decorated with stars indicating the wearer's rank--silver for the
field officers, and gold for the higher grade,--the feet compressed into
high-heeled, high-instepped boots, (no Virginian is himself without a
fine pair of skin-tight boots) and the head covered with a fine, soft,
broad-brimmed hat, trimmed with a gold cord, from which a bullion tassel
dangled several inches down the wearer's back, you had a military swell,
caparisoned for conquest--among the fair sex.

On our way we passed the noted Capitol of Virginia--a handsome marble
building,--of the column-fronted Grecian temple style. It stands in the
center of the City. Upon the grounds is Crawford's famous equestrian
statue of Washington, surrounded by smaller statues of other
Revolutionary patriots.

The Confederate Congress was then in session in the Capitol, and also the
Legislature of Virginia, a fact indicated by the State flag of Virginia
floating from the southern end of the building, and the new flag of the
Confederacy from the northern end. This was the first time I had seen
the latter, which had been recently adopted, and I examined it with some
interest. The design was exceedingly plain. Simply a white banner, with
a red field in the corner where the blue field with stars is in ours.
The two blue stripes were drawn diagonally across this field in the shape
of a letter X, and in these were thirteen white stars, corresponding to
the number of States claimed to be in the Confederacy.

The battle-flag was simply the red field. My examination of all this was
necessarily very brief. The guards felt that I was in Richmond for other
purposes than to study architecture, statuary and heraldry,
and besides they were in a hurry to be relieved of us and get their
breakfast, so my art-education was abbreviated sharply.

We did not excite much attention on the streets. Prisoners had by that
time become too common in Richmond to create any interest. Occasionally
passers by would fling opprobrious epithets at "the East Tennessee
traitors," but that was all.

The commandant of the prisons directed the Tennesseeans to be taken to
Castle Lightning--a prison used to confine the Rebel deserters, among
whom they also classed the East Tennesseeans, and sometimes the West
Virginians, Kentuckians, Marylanders and Missourians found fighting
against them. Such of our men as deserted to them were also lodged
there, as the Rebels, very properly, did not place a high estimate upon
this class of recruits to their army, and, as we shall see farther along,
violated all obligations of good faith with them, by putting them among
the regular prisoners of war, so as to exchange them for their own men.

Back we were all marched to a street which ran parallel to the river and
canal, and but one square away from them. It was lined on both sides by
plain brick warehouses and tobacco factories, four and five stories high,
which were now used by the Rebel Government as prisons and military
storehouses.

The first we passed was Castle Thunder, of bloody repute. This occupied
the same place in Confederate history, that, the dungeons beneath the
level of the water did in the annals of the Venetian Council of Ten.
It was believed that if the bricks in its somber, dirt-grimed walls could
speak, each could tell a separate story of a life deemed dangerous to the
State that had gone down in night, at the behest of the ruthless
Confederate authorities. It was confidently asserted that among the
commoner occurrences within its confines was the stationing of a doomed
prisoner against a certain bit of blood-stained, bullet-chipped wall,
and relieving the Confederacy of all farther fear of him by the rifles of
a firing party. How well this dark reputation was deserved, no one but
those inside the inner circle of the Davis Government can say. It is
safe to believe that more tragedies were enacted there than the archives
of the Rebel civil or military judicature give any account of. The
prison was employed for the detention of spies, and those charged with
the convenient allegation of "treason against the Confederate States of
America." It is probable that many of these were sent out of the world
with as little respect for the formalities of law as was exhibited with
regard to the 'suspects' during the French Revolution.

Next we came to Castle Lightning, and here I bade adieu to my Tennessee
companions.

A few squares more and we arrived at a warehouse larger than any of the
others. Over the door was a sign

THOMAS LIBBY & SON,
SHIP CHANDLERS AND GROCERS.

This was the notorious "Libby Prison," whose name was painfully familiar
to every Union man in the land. Under the sign was a broad entrance way,
large enough to admit a dray or a small wagon. On one side of this was
the prison office, in which were a number of dapper, feeble-faced clerks
at work on the prison records.

As I entered this space a squad of newly arrived prisoners were being
searched for valuables, and having their names, rank and regiment
recorded in the books. Presently a clerk addressed as "Majah Tunnah,"
the man who was superintending these operations, and I scanned him with
increased interest, as I knew then that he was the ill-famed Dick Turner,
hated all over the North for his brutality to our prisoners.

He looked as if he deserved his reputation. Seen upon the street he
would be taken for a second or third class gambler, one in whom a certain
amount of cunning is pieced out by a readiness to use brute force. His
face, clean-shaved, except a "Bowery-b'hoy" goatee, was white, fat, and
selfishly sensual. Small, pig-like eyes, set close together, glanced
around continually. His legs were short, his body long, and made to
appear longer, by his wearing no vest--a custom common them with
Southerners.

His faculties were at that moment absorbed in seeing that no person
concealed any money from him. His subordinates did not search closely
enough to suit him, and he would run his fat, heavily-ringed fingers
through the prisoner's hair, feel under their arms and elsewhere where he
thought a stray five dollar greenback might be concealed. But with all
his greedy care he was no match for Yankee cunning. The prisoners told
me afterward that, suspecting they would be searched, they had taken off
the caps of the large, hollow brass buttons of their coats, carefully
folded a bill into each cavity, and replaced the cap. In this way they
brought in several hundred dollars safely.

There was one dirty old Englishman in the party, who, Turner was
convinced, had money concealed about his person. He compelled him to
strip off everything, and stand shivering in the sharp cold, while he
took up one filthy rag after another, felt over each carefully, and
scrutinized each seam and fold. I was delighted to see that after all
his nauseating work he did not find so much as a five cent piece.

It came my turn. I had no desire, in that frigid atmosphere, to strip
down to what Artemus Ward called "the skanderlous costoom of the Greek
Slave;" so I pulled out of my pocket my little store of wealth--ten
dollars in greenbacks, sixty dollars in Confederate graybacks--and
displayed it as Turner came up with, "There's all I have, sir." Turner
pocketed it without a word, and did not search me. In after months, when
I was nearly famished, my estimation of "Majah Tunnah" was hardly
enhanced by the reflection that what would have purchased me many good
meals was probably lost by him in betting on a pair of queens, when his
opponent held a "king full."

I ventured to step into the office to inquire after my comrades. One of
the whey-faced clerks said with the supercilious asperity characteristic
of gnat-brained headquarters attaches:

"Get out of here!" as if I had been a stray cur wandering in in search of
a bone lunch.

I wanted to feed the fellow to a pile-driver. The utmost I could hope
for in the way of revenge was that the delicate creature might some day
make a mistake in parting his hair, and catch his death of cold.

The guard conducted us across the street, and into the third story of a
building standing on the next corner below. Here I found about four
hundred men, mostly belonging to the Army of the Potomac, who crowded
around me with the usual questions to new prisoners: What was my
Regiment, where and when captured, and:

What were the prospects of exchange?

It makes me shudder now to recall how often, during the dreadful months
that followed, this momentous question was eagerly propounded to every
new comer: put with bated breath by men to whom exchange meant all that
they asked of this world, and possibly of the next; meant life, home,
wife or sweet-heart, friends, restoration to manhood, and self-respect--
everything, everything that makes existence in this world worth having.

I answered as simply and discouragingly as did the tens of thousands that
came after me:

"I did not hear anything about exchange."

A soldier in the field had many other things of more immediate interest
to think about than the exchange of prisoners. The question only became
a living issue when he or some of his intimate friends fell into the
enemy's hands.

Thus began my first day in prison.




CHAPTER VIII

INTRODUCTION TO PRISON LIFE--THE PEMBERTON BUILDING AND ITS OCCUPANTS--
NEAT SAILORS--ROLL CALL--RATIONS AND CLOTHING--CHIVALRIC "CONFISCATION."

I began acquainting myself with my new situation and surroundings.
The building into which I had been conducted was an old tobacco factory,
called the "Pemberton building," possibly from an owner of that name,
and standing on the corner of what I was told were Fifteenth and Carey
streets. In front it was four stories high; behind but three, owing to
the rapid rise of the hill, against which it was built.

It fronted towards the James River and Kanawha Canal, and the James
River--both lying side by side, and only one hundred yards distant,
with no intervening buildings. The front windows afforded a fine view.
To the right front was Libby, with its guards pacing around it on the
sidewalk, watching the fifteen hundred officers confined within its
walls. At intervals during each day squads of fresh prisoners could be
seen entering its dark mouth, to be registered, and searched, and then
marched off to the prison assigned them. We could see up the James River
for a mile or so, to where the long bridges crossing it bounded the view.
Directly in front, across the river, was a flat, sandy plain, said to be
General Winfield Scott's farm, and now used as a proving ground for the
guns cast at the Tredegar Iron Works.

The view down the river was very fine. It extended about twelve miles,
to where a gap in the woods seemed to indicate a fort, which we imagined
to be Fort Darling, at that time the principal fortification defending
the passage of the James.

Between that point and where we were lay the river, in a long, broad
mirror-like expanse, like a pretty little inland lake. Occasionally a
busy little tug would bustle up or down, a gunboat move along with
noiseless dignity, suggestive of a reserved power, or a schooner beat
lazily from one side to the other. But these were so few as to make even
more pronounced the customary idleness that hung over the scene. The
tug's activity seemed spasmodic and forced--a sort of protest against the
gradually increasing lethargy that reigned upon the bosom of the waters--
the gunboat floated along as if performing a perfunctory duty, and the
schooners sailed about as if tired of remaining in one place. That
little stretch of water was all that was left for a cruising ground.
Beyond Fort Darling the Union gunboats lay, and the only vessel that
passed the barrier was the occasional flag-of-truce steamer.

The basement of the building was occupied as a store-house for the taxes-
in-kind which the Confederate Government collected. On the first floor
were about five hundred men. On the second floor--where I was--were
about four hundred men. These were principally from the First Division,
First Corps distinguished by a round red patch on their caps; First
Division, Second Corps, marked by a red clover leaf; and the First
Division, Third Corps, who wore a red diamond. They were mainly captured
at Gettysburg and Mine Run. Besides these there was a considerable
number from the Eighth Corps, captured at Winchester, and a large
infusion of Cavalry-First, Second and Third West Virginia--taken in
Averill's desperate raid up the Virginia Valley, with the Wytheville Salt
Works as an objective.

On the third floor were about two hundred sailors and marines, taken in
the gallant but luckless assault upon the ruins of Fort Sumter, in the
September previous. They retained the discipline of the ship in their
quarters, kept themselves trim and clean, and their floor as white as a
ship's deck. They did not court the society of the "sojers" below, whose
camp ideas of neatness differed from theirs. A few old barnacle-backs
always sat on guard around the head of the steps leading from the lower
rooms. They chewed tobacco enormously, and kept their mouths filled with
the extracted juice. Any luckless "sojer" who attempted to ascend the
stairs usually returned in haste, to avoid the deluge of the filthy
liquid.

For convenience in issuing rations we were divided into messes of twenty,
each mess electing a Sergeant as its head, and each floor electing a
Sergeant-of-the-Floor, who drew rations and enforced what little
discipline was observed.

Though we were not so neat as the sailors above us, we tried to keep our
quarters reasonably clean, and we washed the floor every morning; getting
down on our knees and rubbing it clean and dry with rags. Each mess
detailed a man each day to wash up the part of the floor it occupied,
and he had to do this properly or no ration would be given him. While
the washing up was going on each man stripped himself and made close
examination of his garments for the body-lice, which otherwise would have
increased beyond control. Blankets were also carefully hunted over for
these "small deer."

About eight o'clock a spruce little lisping rebel named Ross would appear
with a book, and a body-guard, consisting of a big Irishman, who had the
air of a Policeman, and carried a musket barrel made into a cane. Behind
him were two or three armed guards. The Sergeant-of-the-Floor commanded:

"Fall in in four ranks for roll-call."

We formed along one side of the room; the guards halted at the head of
the stairs; Ross walked down in front and counted the files, closely
followed by his Irish aid, with his gun-barrel cane raised ready for use
upon any one who should arouse his ruffianly ire. Breaking ranks we


 


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