<h3><SPAN name="CHAPTER_XXXI" id="CHAPTER_XXXI">CHAPTER XXXI</SPAN></h3>
<div class="chapquot">
<div>
<p>——Give me to drink mandragora,<br/>
That I may sleep out this great gap of time.</p>
<p class="citation">Antony and Cleopatra.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div class="sidenote">Arrival in Richmond.</div>
<p>At 5 o'clock on the morning of Saturday, May 16th, we reached
Richmond. At that early hour, the clothing-dépôt of the
Confederate government was surrounded by a crowd of poor, ill-clad
women, seeking work.</p>
<p>We were marched to the Libby Prison. Up to this time we had
never been searched. I had even kept my revolver in my pocket until
reaching Jackson, Mississippi, where, knowing I could not much longer
conceal it, I gave it to a friend. Now a Rebel sergeant carefully
examined our clothing. All money, except a few dollars, was taken
from us, and the flippant little prison clerk, named Ross, with some
inquiries not altogether affectionate concerning the health of Mr.
Greeley, gave us receipts.</p>
<p>As we passed through the guarded iron gateway, I glanced
instinctively above the portal in search of its fitting
legend:—</p>
<div class="blockquot">
<p>"Abandon all hope who enter here."</p>
</div>
<p>Up three flights of stairs, we were escorted into a room, fifty
feet by one hundred and twenty-five, filled with officers lying in
blankets upon the floor and upon rude bunks. Some shouted, "More
Yankees!—more Yankees!" while many crowded about us to hear our
story, and learn the news from the West. </p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</SPAN></span></p>
<div class="sidenote">Incarcerated in Libby Prison.</div>
<p>We soon found friends, and became domesticated in our novel
quarters. With the American tendency toward organization, the
prisoners divided into companies of four each. Our journalistic trio
and Captain Ward ceased to be individuals, becoming merely "Mess
Number Twenty-one."</p>
<p>The provisions, at this time consisting of good flour, bread, and
salt pork, were brought into the room in bulk. A commissary, elected
by the captives from their own number, divided them, delivering its
quota to each mess.</p>
<p>Picking up two or three rusty tin plates and rheumatic knives and
forks, we commenced housekeeping. The labor of preparation was not
arduous. It consisted in making little sacks of cotton cloth for
salt, sugar, pepper, and rice, fitting up a shelf for our dishes, and
spreading upon the floor blankets, obtained from our new comrades,
and originally sent to Richmond by the United States Government for
the benefit of prisoners.</p>
<p>The Libby authorities, and white and negro <span
lang="fr">attachés</span>, were always hungry for
"greenbacks," and glad to give Confederate currency in exchange. The
rates varied greatly. The lowest was two dollars for one. During my
imprisonment, I bought fourteen for one, and, a few weeks after our
escape, thirty were given for one.</p>
<p>A prison sergeant went out every morning to purchase supplies.
He seemed honest, and through him we could obtain, at extravagant
prices, dried apples, sugar, eggs, molasses, meal, flour, and corn
burnt and ground as a substitute for coffee. Without these additions,
our rations would hardly have supported life.</p>
<p>In our mess, each man, in turn, did the cooking for an entire day.
In that hot, stifling room, frying pork, baking griddle-cakes, and
boiling coffee, over the crazy, smoking, broken stove, around which
there was a constant
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</SPAN></span>
crowd, were disagreeable in the extreme. The prison hours were long,
but the cooking-days recurred with unpleasant frequency.</p>
<p>We scrubbed our room two or three times a week, and it was fumigated
every morning. At one end stood a huge wooden tank, with an abundant
supply of cold water, in which we could bathe at pleasure.</p>
<div class="sidenote">Sufferings from Vermin.</div>
<p>The vermin were the most revolting feature of the prison, and the
one to which it was the most difficult to become resigned. No amount
of personal cleanliness could guard our bodies against the insatiate
lice. Only by examining under-clothing and destroying them once or
twice a day, could they be kept from swarming upon us. For the first
week, I could not think of them without shuddering and faintness: but
in time I learned to make my daily entomological researches with calm
complacency.</p>
<p>In Nashville, two weeks before my capture, I met Colonel A.
D. Streight, of Indiana. At the head of a provisional brigade
from Rosecrans's army, he was about starting on a raid through
northern Alabama and Georgia. The expedition promising more romance
and novelty than ordinary army experiences, now grown a little
monotonous, I desired to accompany him; but other duties prevented. I
had been in Libby just four hours, when in walked Streight, followed
by the officers of his entire brigade. We had taken very different
routes, but they brought us to the same terminus.</p>
<p>Streight's command had been furnished with mules, averaging about
two years old, and quite unused to the saddle. Utterly worthless,
they soon broke down, and with much difficulty, he remounted his
men upon horses, pressed from the citizens; but the delay proved
fatal.</p>
<p>The Rebel General Forrest overtook him with a
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</SPAN></span>
largely superior force. Streight was an enterprising, brave officer,
and his exhausted men behaved admirably in four or five fights;
but at last, near Rome, Georgia, after losing one third of his
command, the colonel was compelled to surrender. The Rebels were very
exultant, and Forrest—originally a slave-dealer in Memphis, and
a greater falsifier than Beauregard himself—telegraphed that,
with four hundred men, he had captured twenty-eight hundred.</p>
<p>Lieutenant Charles Pavie, of the Eightieth Illinois, who commanded
Streight's artillery, came in with his coat torn to shreds; a piece
of shell had struck him in the back, inflicting only a flesh wound.
Upon feeling the shock, he instinctively clapped his hands to his
stomach, to ascertain if there was a hole there, under the impression
that the entire shell had passed through his body!</p>
<div class="sidenote">Prisoners Denounced as Blasphemous.</div>
<p>The prisoners bore their confinement with good-humor and hilarity.
During the long evenings, they joined in the "Star-Spangled Banner,"
"Old Hundred," "Old John Brown," and other patriotic and religious
airs. <cite>The Richmond Whig</cite>, shocked that the profane and ungodly
Yankees should presume to sing "Old Hundred," denounced it as a piece
of blasphemy.</p>
<p>Captain Brown and his officers, of the United States gunboat
Indianola, were pointed out to me as men who had actually been in
prison for three months. I regarded them with pity and wonder. It
seemed utterly impossible that I could endure confinement for half
that time. After-experiences inclined me to patronize new-comers,
and regard with lofty condescension, men who had been prisoners only
twelve or fifteen months! "The Father of the Marshalsea" became an
intelligible and sympathetic personage, with whom we should have
hobnobbed delightfully. </p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</SPAN></span></p>
<div class="sidenote">Thievery of a "Virginia Gentleman."</div>
<p>Simultaneously with our arrival in Richmond, a Rebel officer
of the exchange bureau received a request from the editor of <cite>The
World</cite>, for the release of Mr. Colburn. It proved as efficient
as if it had been an order from Jefferson Davis. After ten days'
confinement in Libby, Colburn was sent home by the first truce-boat.
A thoroughly loyal gentleman, and an unselfish, devoted friend, he
was induced to go, only by the assurance that while he could do no
good by remaining, he might be of service to us in the North.</p>
<p>At his departure, he left for me, with Captain Thomas P. Turner,
commandant of the prison, fifty dollars in United States currency.
A day or two afterward, Turner handed the sum to me in Confederate
rags, dollar for dollar, asserting that this was the identical money
he had received. The perpetrator of this petty knavery was educated
at West Point, and claimed to be a Virginia gentleman.</p>
<p>"Junius" suffered greatly from intermittent fever. The weather was
torrid. In the roof was a little scuttle, to which we ascended by a
ladder. The column of air rushing up through that narrow aperture was
foul, suffocating, and hot as if coming from an oven. At night we
went out on the roof for two or three hours to breathe the out-door
atmosphere. When the authorities discovered it, they informed us,
through Richard Turner—an ex-Baltimorean, half black-leg
and half gambler, who was inspector of the prison—that if
we persisted, they would close the scuttle. It was a refined and
elaborate method of torture.</p>
<p>On one occasion, this same Turner struck a New York captain in the
face for courteously protesting against being deprived of a little
fragment of shell which he had brought from the field as a relic. A Rebel
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</SPAN></span>
sergeant inflicted a blow upon another Union captain who chanced to
be jostled against him by the crowd.</p>
<p>For slight offenses, officers were placed in an underground cell
so dark and foul, that I saw a Pennsylvania lieutenant come out,
after five weeks' confinement there, his beard so covered with mold
that one could pluck a double handful from it!</p>
<div class="sidenote">Prisoners Murdered by the
<del>Gaurds</del><ins>Guards</ins>.</div>
<p>Prisoners putting their heads for a moment between the bars of the
windows, and often for only approaching the apertures, were liable
to be shot. One officer, standing near a window, was ordered by
the sentinel to move back. The rattling carriages made the command
inaudible. The guard instantly shot him through the head, and he
never spoke again.</p>
<p>Colonel Streight was the most prominent prisoner. He talked to the
Rebel authorities with imprudent, but delightful frankness. More than
once I heard him say to them:—</p>
<p>"You dare not carry out that threat! You know our Government will
never permit it, but will promptly retaliate upon your own officers,
whom it holds."</p>
<p>When our rations of heavy corn-bread and tainted meat grew
very short, he addressed a letter to James A. Seddon, Confederate
Secretary of War, protesting in behalf of his brigade, and inquiring
whether he designed starving prisoners to death! The Rebels hated him
with peculiar bitterness.</p>
<p>The five Richmond dailies helped us greatly in filling up the long
hours. At daylight an old slave, named Ben, would arouse us from our
slumbers, shouting:—</p>
<p>"Great news in de papers! Great news from de Army of Virginny!
Great tallygraphic news from the Soufwest!" </p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</SPAN></span></p>
<div class="sidenote">Fourth-of-July Celebration Interrupted.</div>
<p>He disbursed his sheets at twenty-five cents per copy, but they
afterward went up to fifty.</p>
<p>A lieutenant in Grant's army, while charging one of the batteries
in the rear of Vicksburg, received a shot in the face which entered
one eye, destroying it altogether. Ten days after, he arrived in
Libby. He walked about our room with a handkerchief tied around his
head, smoking complacently, apparently considering a bullet in the
brain a very slight annoyance.</p>
<p>We attempted to celebrate the Fourth of July. Captain Driscoll,
of Cincinnati, with other ingenious officers, had manufactured from
shirts a National flag, which was hung above the head of Colonel
Streight, who occupied the chair, or rather the bed, which necessity
substituted. Two or three speeches had been made, and several hours
of oratory were expected, when a sergeant came up and said:—</p>
<p>"Captain Turner orders that you stop this furse!"</p>
<p>Observing the flag, he called upon several officers to assist
him in taking it down. Of course, none did so. He finally reached
it himself, tore it down, and bore it to the prison office. A long
discussion ensued about obeying Turner's order. After nearly as
much time had been consumed in debate as it would have required
to carry out the programme, and speak to all the toasts—dry
toasts—it was voted to comply. So the meeting, first adopting
a number of intensely patriotic resolutions, incontinently
adjourned.</p>
<div class="sidenote">The Horrors of Belle Isle.</div>
<p>The Rebel authorities confiscated large sums of money sent
from home to the prisoners, and sometimes stopped the purchase of
supplies, asserting that it was done in retaliation for similar
treatment of their own soldiers confined in the North. Still our
officers fared incomparably better than the Union privates who were
half
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</SPAN></span>
starved upon Belle Isle, in sight of our prison. We did not fully
accredit the reports which reached us touching the sufferings of
these prisoners, though the engravings of their emaciation and
tortures in the New York illustrated papers, which sometimes drifted
to us, so enraged the Rebels, that we often called their attention to
them. But our own paroled officers, who were permitted to distribute
among the privates clothing sent by our Government, assured us that
they were substantially true. </p>
<hr class="chap" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</SPAN></span></p>
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