With Fire and Sword

CHAPTER XII

I was scarcely returned to the Macon prison again when two hundred of us, all officers, were selected to be placed under the fire from our navy then bombarding Charleston. By some wonderful fiction of military law the "Confederates," as the Rebels called themselves, pretended to regard the bombardment of Charleston as a crime. I do not remember now how the selection of victims to be sent to Charleston was made one evening about the end of July, 1864. This, however, happened that night, to add adventure and excitement to the Charleston trip. The greater number of those selected were members of a "Secret Band" of prisoners who had resolved to mutiny or to do any act in our power that could result in our escape from captivity. I recall how Major Marshall one afternoon secretly administered to me the oath of this desperate band. With my hand on my heart I swore to instantly obey every order given to me by the "head captain." I was to ask no questions, but to strike, whenever told; to kill, no matter whom, even were my own brother to be the victim. I was ready to do anything. I had been mistreated and starved long enough. Death could be little worse than all of us had been undergoing for months. The news coming to us from our prison comrades at Andersonville was perfectly horrible. History had never related the like of it. We received the Telegraph, a Macon newspaper, into the prison pen every morning. At the head of one of its columns each day the editor reported the awful number of poor starving creatures who had died at Andersonville the day before. It was not unlike the reports of the number of dumb beasts killed each day in the Chicago slaughter pens. Pretty soon I learned that the eighty comrades of my regiment captured with me at Missionary Ridge were nearly every one dead. The details of their sufferings were too horrible to dilate upon. We wondered sometimes if God had forsaken the world.

We who joined the "Band," and took the awful oath we did, knew what it all meant. Outside our stockade loaded cannon waited but the least alarm to fire upon us. On top of the stockade guards walked day and night with orders to instantly kill any prisoner who should approach within twelve feet of the high wall. We were only eight hundred prisoners all told, and nothing to fight with but naked hands. Outside whole regiments armed to the teeth lay with guns in their hands waiting to destroy every one of us should we offer to escape. What was our chance? Almost nothing; or if anything, death! Still we resolved to try.

Then came that night when we were to get on the cars and start for Charleston. Instantly the word was passed along for every member of the secret "Band" to quietly arm himself with a short club, made from our bunks and sheds, and to keep it hid under his coat or blanket. Now we were counted and put into a train of box cattle cars. Twenty-five prisoners were in a car, and in the side door of each car stood a guard with his loaded musket. We who were not leaders of the "Band" wondered what desperate thing we were about to try. I do not know where the tools came from, but when the train was well in motion, and the noise deadened our movements, a big hole, large enough to permit a man to creep through, was knocked in the end of each car. The darkness, the crowd in the cars and the noise prevented the guards knowing what was going on. This was the first "vestibule" railroad train ever made.

Shortly now one of our leaders came creeping along from car to car, and in a low voice he told us what was about to happen. The train on its way to Charleston would halt close to the sea at a little town called Pocotaligo. We knew that some ships of the Union navy lay out in the water there, scarce a dozen miles away. The design was to seize on our guards as we reached the village, disarm them, kill them, if necessary, ditch the train, destroy the road and the telegraph, and then escape to the ships. I think not a soul of us doubted the likelihood of our success. We would be free men on the morrow if all went well. It would be two or three o'clock in the night when the train would pass the point of action. Every one of us had his club and his pocket knife in his hand ready to strike. At the proper moment Colonel – , our leader, with three comrades, was to spring through the end of the front car where he was, onto the tender, seize the engineer and fireman and wave a lantern violently as a signal for us to suddenly lay hold of every Rebel soldier on the train. Ten miles out from Pocotaligo our hearts beat in terrible excitement. No one spoke; we only waited. It was silence, all save the rumbling of the car wheels. So far our guards seemed in perfect ignorance of the approaching danger. Five miles out, so sure were we of success, a few began to act without waiting for the signal. In one or two of the cars the guards had been suddenly seized and their muskets were in our hands. In the car where I was, one of the astonished guards, finding himself without a gun, coolly said: "And what are you 'uns going to do with we 'uns?" It was a tremendous moment, as the train sped along in the dark. Three miles to Pocotaligo; two miles; one mile. With quick beating heart I leaned from our car door, straining my eyes for the lantern signal. Then the whistle blew loudly, but the train only hastened its speed, and in two minutes, instead of stopping, we shot past the station at lightning speed.

What had happened? Were we discovered? Not a signal had been given to us. In the morning we were all hurried inside the jail yard of Charleston. Now we knew it all. At the crucial moment our leader had lost his nerve and become a coward; or had he betrayed us? He had not waved the lantern, though he had captured it, and held it in his hand. We were now much alarmed as to what would be done with us for seizing the guards. We might lose our lives. Colonel – , the false leader, was taken to another prison to save him from being torn to pieces by his own comrades.

The newspapers of Charleston that morning contained flaming articles, describing how a terrible catastrophe had been averted by the cowardice or treason of one man. Where they got the details of the proposed capture of the train, no one will ever know. Was the leader simply a coward, or was he paid for betraying us?

After a while we were transferred to what was called the "Roper Hospital." It was close to the jail, and the danger of being killed by the shells from our own fleet was still very great, though, in fact, few of us were hurt. The yellow fever was to be a greater scourge than Yankee cannon.

Our fleet officers had learned the locality where the prisoners were guarded, and fired their shells mostly in other directions. It was a grand spectacle at night – the soaring through the heavens of so many blazing bombshells and their bursting in the city. Parts of Charleston that we could see were perfect pictures of desolation; whole quarters stood in black ruins and uninhabited. The weather was exceedingly hot, and the yellow fever broke out and raged fearfully among both prisoners and guards. It seemed as if we should all die there. At last they transported us away to a little open field in the woods, close to the town of Columbia, the capital of South Carolina.

The surgeon of the prison camp at Charleston was Dr. Todd, a brother of President Lincoln's wife. A more rabid Secessionist was nowhere to be found. It was a curious situation, that the brother-in-law of the great President should be so attached to the country's opponents.

On our way to the prison at Columbia Major Marshall of my regiment and two captains escaped from the train and reached the North by tramping at night through the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. They had horrible experiences for many weeks.

CHAPTER XIII

Now we were near the capital of South Carolina. It is our third prison. We were placed in a cleared field among the pine woods, a few miles from the town. Here we spent a part of a terrible winter exposed to the storm and rain. We had no shelter save such as we made at last of sticks and logs that we were allowed to carry in from the neighboring wood. Our food was wretched, we had almost no clothing, and the weather was very bad nearly all the time. We were surrounded by a line of guards. A battery constantly in readiness to fire on us should an alarm be given stood near by. Our food was still the half-cooked corn and cobs together, with quantities of a poor and sickly sorghum molasses. We heard that the Rebel army was living little better than we were. In ridicule of the rations the prisoners dubbed this prison pen "Camp Sorghum." Every man among us was sick with diarrhœa. The little grave-yard for the prisoners near by grew rapidly. The details of our life in this miserable camp I shall not relate. They were simply too horrible. As for myself, – my only shelter was a hole in the ground, four feet deep, four feet wide and eight feet long. It was covered with boughs and earth. Lieutenant Morris and myself occupied this living grave for months. We had a tiny fire-place of clay built in the end of it, where we burned roots, and the long rainy nights we two sat there alone, reading an old newspaper by our root-light or talking of our far-away homes. One very stormy night our water-soaked roof fell in on us, and then we were compelled to walk about in the rain. I wonder now that any soul survived the miseries of that camp. Valley Forge was paradise compared to it. But all this misery was a part of war.

Naturally, numbers ran the guard lines at this woeful prison pen and escaped into the woods. Firing by the sentinels on these escaping prisoners was a common occurrence on dark nights. Here and there an officer was killed, and sometimes under circumstances that marked the sentinel a common murderer. A battery of loaded cannons stood outside the guard line, with orders to open on the prisoners should five musket shots be heard. With the constant escaping of prisoners at night these five fatal shots could occur at any hour.

For my own part, I resolved to again attempt escape, but my efforts failed again, and twice in succession. I recall with a shudder how one night late in November my friend, Lieutenant Ecking of New York, was foully murdered. He had bribed a guard to let two or three of us run across the line that night at midnight. The bribe was to consist of a silver watch. Some of these men were easily bribed. They were not regular Confederate soldiers, but usually cowardly home guards, who regarded the murdering of a helpless prisoner a heroic act.

When midnight came three of us were secreted close to the dead line. As soon as the bribed sentinel came to his post and commenced walking up and down his beat Lieutenant Ecking rose and approached him. The night was clear moonlight. The moment Ecking had crossed the dead line, and was holding the watch up to the guard, the coward shot him dead. For this outrage the home guard received a furlough.

About this time, too, Lieutenant Turbayne was murdered by a guard for mistaking the ringing of a bell. Some of us had been permitted to go out on parole and carry in wood at stated times. Without notice, this privilege was suspended, but the bellman, by mistake, rang as usual. Turbayne started for the dead line. "Go back, halt!" shouted a sentinel. Turbayne turned to obey, but was instantly shot in the back and dropped dead. There was a furious commotion among the prisoners. The guards, too, collected about the spot. The Rebel officer in charge left his lunch and walked over also. He held in his hand a great piece of pumpkin pie, and continued eating from it as he stood there by the corpse of the man they had murdered. There was almost a mutiny in the prison camp, and one proper leader at that moment would have put an end to the whole Rebel outfit. In the end it would have been death to the whole of us.

Previous to this threatened outbreak I had again tried my own chance at escaping. It was now November 4, 1864, a cold blustering day, and the prisoners in their rags and almost barefooted stood and shivered in the naked field. At four o'clock a dozen were paroled and allowed to go out to the woods and carry in some fuel.

Lieutenant Fritchie and myself managed to mix ourselves among this little paroled company, and forgot to return to the enclosure. We helped a little in the fuel getting, and then suddenly disappeared in the pine forests. For some days we crept about in the great pine woods, scarcely knowing our direction or where we were going. Our leaving had been so sudden that we were planless. Here and there we stumbled onto a darkey, who never hesitated to bring us corn hoe cake or whatever eatables he might happen to have in his cabin. The slaves universally were the prisoners' friends, and they knew a hundred times more about the war and its object than their plantation masters ever supposed. Many an escaping prisoner was fed by them and, with the north star as a guide, conducted to safety. Many an army movement was made possible by loyal negroes. Barring an occasional Union white man, they were the only friends the soldiers had in the South.

Lieutenant Fritchie and I had some queer adventures while we wandered about the woods of South Carolina during this little leave of absence from the Confederates. We did not see a single white man, save one, and he tried to shoot us. One night we lodged in an open-topped corn-crib, not knowing in the darkness that we were quite close to an inhabited farmhouse. When daylight came we peeped over the corn-crib and were much astonished to see a woman at her wash-tub on the back porch of a cabin close by. She must have seen our heads, for that very moment she stopped her washing and entered the cabin. Shortly she appeared again, followed by a man, who took one long steady look at the corn-crib; then he entered the cabin, and we knew it was to get his gun. Very quick resolution and action on our part became advisable. A little plowed field only separated our corn-crib, at the back, from a thick piece of woods. In a moment the man was out again on the porch, bearing a musket.

"Drop to the ground behind the crib and run to the woods," said Fritchie. "I'll keep watch on the man. I'll drop down too. When you are across wave your hand if he is not coming, and then I'll run." In a moment's time I was running across the plowed field, keeping the crib between me and the porch of the cabin. The man with the musket never saw me. I waved to Fritchie; he, too, started on the run, and to this hour I laugh to myself when I picture to my mind Fritchie, a short, stumpy fellow, tumbling absolutely heels over head in his haste to cover that bit of plowed ground.

Very shortly we heard bloodhounds bellowing. We knew too well what that meant. Numbers of escaping prisoners had been torn to pieces by them. That was the common way of catching runaway slaves and prisoners of war down South. They hunt "niggers" that way to-day down there.

By hard running, turns and counter-turns, and frequent crossing and recrossing little streams, we threw the dogs off our track, and slept until night in the thicket. The wind blew hard and cold that night, and as we stood secreted under a thorn-tree by the roadside two men passed, so close we could have touched them. Something told us they, too, were escaping prisoners. We tried to attract their attention enough to be sure. One of us spoke, scarcely more than whisper. Instantly and in alarm the two men bounded away like scared wolves. Days afterward we found out that they had been not only fleeing prisoners, but were, indeed, two of our personal friends.

The next night was fair, and a full round moon lighted up the sandy desert with its oasis of tall, immense pine trees. The white winding road of sand that seemed to have been abandoned for a hundred years was almost trackless. Here and there, too, we saw an abandoned turpentine camp, the spiles still in the trees and the troughs lying rotting at their feet.

There was nothing but silence there, and loneliness, and moonlight. Here in the quiet night, if anywhere in the world, two poor escaping prisoners of war would be in no danger of a foe.

For hours we trudged along, going where we knew not, when suddenly to our amazement two mounted cavalrymen stood right in our way and called to us to surrender. There was nothing to do but to obey. Our capture had been an accident. These two officers, a captain and a lieutenant, had been riding the country trying to catch some deserters from their army and had blundered on to us. They started with us to Lexington jail, some miles away. The captain rode a dozen yards or so ahead, with a revolver in his hand. I trudged along in the sand at his side, faithfully hanging on to his stirrup strap. The lieutenant and Fritchie followed us in a like manner in the moonlight. It seems to have been a romantic occasion, when I think of it now; we two Federals and these two Confederates, there alone in the moonlight, and the big pine trees and the white sands about. I could not help reflecting, though, how many a captured prisoner had never been accounted for. Possibly we should never see Lexington jail. It would be an easy thing for these men to leave our bodies there in the sand somewhere. There were few words at first as we plodded our slow way in the moonlight. At last my captain and I entered into lively conversation about the South in general, and then both of us hoped the war would soon come to an end. To my surprise the young captain confided to me that he was, at heart, a Union man. "And why in the Confederate army?" I asked, in astonishment. "Because," said the captain, "everybody in my village in South Carolina is. I would have been hooted to death had I remained at home. My father is a rich man; he is opposed to the war, but he, too, is in the service at Richmond."