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By Rev. Dr. T. D. Witherspoon, late Chaplain of the Forty-Second Mississippi Regiment.
Paper no. 2.
It was my lot to be entertained successively in two of the leading hotels of this prison, and of these I will briefly speak.
The first was the loft of the stable in which the horses of the officers of the fort were stalled.
The floor, which separated us from our neighing neighbors beneath us, was full of broad seams from the shrinkage of the rough boards of which it was composed, so that the hot, steamy air from below had full access to us, and during the oppressive days and sultry nights of July and August, with the thin roof of shingles between us and the sun, and the hot steam arising from the stalls beneath, our situation was anything but comfortable.
Nor must you judge us too harshly if I assure you that there was a general feeling of relief when we found one morning, to our surprise, that a process of summary ejectment had been served upon our four-footed neighbors and a hundred or more ragged and bare-foot Confederates were being marched in
sans ceremonies and quartered in their stalls.
The lower story of our hotel having thus come into requisition for purposes of prison transfer, it was not long until the demand was also made for the upper story, as it was near to the office of the
Provost Marshal, and, therefore, convenient for the temporary herding of Confederates on their passage through.
Our next hotel was a more airy one, and, therefore, in good weather, a more comfortable one--an old shed, originally built as a barracks for Federal troops, some twenty feet wide by an hundred feet long, with dirt floor, weatherboarding of rough boards set upright and without strips to cover the seams, which were from a half inch to an inch in breadth, with roofing of the same rough boards, warped and shriveled by the sun so that the heavy September rains ran down in torrents upon us. On either side of the long apartment were rows of two-story berths (or
bunks in soldier parlance), made of rough boards, without mattresses, or straw or bedding of any kind, our only protection from the hard board being found in the army blanket, which each prisoner had brought with him to the fort, or with which he had been provided through the generosity of friends.
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In so far as concerns the provisions made for our comfort by the
Federal authorities, there is nothing more to relate.
The bunks were never supplied with straw.
There were no chairs or stools.
No basins or towels were given us for purposes of ablution.
No plates or cups, no knives or forks or spoons with which to partake of our food.
As to ablutions, they were performed during those hours of the day when we had access to the well by water drawn from the pump and poured from canteens into our hands.
Most of us were possessors of a pocket knife and a tin cup apiece.
Hard crackers served us for plates, and forks and spoons were whittled out of the soft pine wood of the boxes in which our hard tack was served.
Having thus glanced at prison accommodations, let us turn for a moment to the bill of fare.
Picture to yourself an immense camp kettle, holding thirty or forty gallons, brought three times a day into our barracks, borne like the famous clusters of Eschol on a pole between two blue coats, whilst behind follows a third soldier, bearing on his shoulders a box some two feet and a half in length.
Add at dinner-time a swarthy darkey to close the procession carrying on his head a camp kettle holding six or eight gallons, and you have a complete view of our peripatetic dining-room service as it might have been seen any day during the latter part of our imprisonment.
The procession files in through the door of the shed.
The four deposit their burdens on the dirt floor.
One of them sings out, “I say, Rebs, here's your
raytions” (why was it that the
Federals always pronounced the word that way?). Then the party retire and leave the viands to be consumed after the most approved Rebel fashion.
Let us draw near and inspect the prison fare.
The eager rush for the large camp kettle by all who are fortunate enough to possess a tin cup shows that it contains something to drink.
What it is depends on the hour of the day. If it is morning or evening the camp kettle contains coffee (so-called). If the hour is noon, the immense cauldron contains bean soup.
But as the same vessel brings coffee in the morning and soup at noon, it would be no very easy matter to decide by the taste which is coffee and which is soup.
The smaller camp kettle, which makes its visit only once a day, contains meat.
One day “salt horse” (the army name for the poorer quality of pickled beef, which was sometimes issued as army rations), and the next day mess-pork, usually ancient and
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rancid.
Of one of these meats a half pound a day was issued for each prisoner, and considering the kind of ration this was certainly enough.
The square box contained “hard tack,” a kind of ship biscuit that would have been nutritious and wholesome if in good condition, but which was always stale, often moulded, not unfrequently wormy and putrescent.
These articles of diet, with once a week perhaps some Irish potatoes and an occasional change to fresh beef, constituted our prison diet.
The rancid meat and the musted bread, which made the staple of it, were utterly destructive of health, and had we not been provided with better food through the generosity of friends in
Baltimore, without the knowledge of the officers of the fort, few of us would have survived even the brief time of our imprisonment.
That it was the design of the
Federal authorities to subject us to these hardships I seriously question.
I think that in both Confederate and Federal prisons it will be found that most of the discomforts and privations came through the negligence or malice or greed of those to whom the care of the prisoners was immediately entrusted.
The assistant steward, who brought our rations to us, acknowledged, when closely pressed, that the rations served to us were not those issued to us by the
Government, but damaged commissary stores that had been condemned for army use and sold at auction in
Baltimore, and which were bought by the steward of the prison for a mere trifle and issued to us, whilst the rations assigned us by the
Government were converted to their own use and disposed of at high rates of profit.
We did not live upon these rations.
Kind friends in
Baltimore supplied us from time to time with money.
Cooked vegetables and fruits were brought every day into the barracks for sale, and we were thus enabled to purchase what was needful to our comfort and health.
Indeed, if the friends of the
South in
Baltimore had been permitted to do for us all that their generous hearts prompted, our every want would have been supplied.
Day after day we saw carriages enter the fort laden with blankets and clothing, while the white handkerchiefs waved to us as the carriages swept by showed us that these supplies were designed for us. They never reached us, however, and though many of our number were in threadbare clothing, and during the latter part of our stay shivering with cold, the only supplies of clothing they received were those which by secret channels of communication were conveyed to us by friends
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With the daily routine of our prison life I will not weary the reader, for its only peculiarity was its dull and wearisome monotony.
With nothing to occupy us from morning until night; chafing under a sense of our own unjust imprisonment, and oppressed with a sense of the misfortunes that crowded thick and fast upon our beloved country; cut off from books and ordinary sources of recreation; forbidden the privilege of receiving visits from friends in
Baltimore; our only communications with home being through the doubtful and unsatisfactory medium of the flag of truce correspondence; our only news from the war coming through the fallacious bulletins of the
Northern press, it required a constant struggle, as the prison discipline grew more harsh and the hope of release more distant, to ward off that prison melancholy which is so sure a precursor of debility and disease.
The usual expedients were resorted to for the purpose of driving away dull care.
There was all manner of cunning artifice in wood, in gutta-percha, in ivory and in silver.
Rings, chains, breastpins, lockets, charms, &c., were made and exchanged with the guard for rations or kept as mementoes for the loved ones at home.
Then there was the writing and receiving of underground letters, the rehearsal of the stories of camp life, speculations upon the state of the country, discussion and criticism of military movements, the planning of imaginary campaigns, the achievement of imaginary victories, &c. As these lost their novelty, and the spirits of the party began to flag, the more bouyant amongst us resorted to fresh and somewhat juvenile methods of diversion.
First of all we organized ourselves into a regiment in burlesque of the splendidly equipped and caparisoned regiment which guarded the fort, and thus had the daily diversion, of guard-mounting and dress-parade.
The uniform of the regiment, it is needless to say, was not up to army regulations.
Most of us had come into the fort in badly damaged apparel.
Many had been supplied by the ladies of
Baltimore through “underground” channels of communication; but many were still somewhat threadbare, whilst of those who were supplied the fit of the uniform was not very exact, as our kind donors could not know the size of those whom they were to supply, and were obliged to send medium sizes of clothing.
And thus it occurred that when we were drawn up in line, here stood an officer of more than ordinary height of stature, his long arms protruding several inches through his coat sleeves, and by his side a small but ambitious little soldier, who looked for all the
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world as if his coat had swallowed him. These fancy uniforms, capped with the far-famed Confederate hat, which assumed under exposure to the weather every hue of color and every possible transformation of shape, made up a regiment of which.
Falstaff himself might justly have been proud.
The soldiers of the garrison had their guard mountings, and so had we. We were their prisoners — the rats were ours.
Every morning our guard was duly mounted.
A sentinel was stationed at each hole where the rats were burrowing beneath our walls.
When the alarm was sounded and the enemy under chase, the “Department of the
Patapsco” expected every man to do his duty, and woe to the unfortunate sentinel who suffered the enemy to escape.
The great event of the day in the
Federal garrison was the brilliant dress parade, held every evening a little before sunset in full view of our barracks, and attended by many elegant people from the city.
Our dress parade was our
chef d'ouvre, too, being held immediately after the other, just outside of our barracks and in view of a considerable portion of the garrison.
The Federal regiment prided itself on its band of music, the leader or drum-major of which was a handsome Pole, of almost giant stature, whose tall form was rendered still more imposing by his lofty
Cossack hat and plume, and by the immense mace which he balanced gracefully in his hand, marking time for his musicians as he led them along the line of flashing bayonets in the parade.
We had a drum-major, too — a noble-hearted Virginian, whose hand I have recently had the pleasure of shaking at
Orange Court-house.
Nearly as tall as the Pole, we made up the additional height by stacking some of our old Confederate farmer-shaped hats one upon another.
He had carved out of wood a fair counterpart of the mace of his Yankee rival, and, when thus equipped, he moved up and down along the line of the regiment, followed by his band, one with a half flour-barrel suspended from his neck for a drum, another with two tin plates as cymbals, a third with an old cracked flageolet which had been thrown away by some soldier of the fort, and the fourth with a coarse comb, covered with a slip of paper, after the well-remembered mechanism of our childhood, the scene was striking beyond description, especially when, as was generally the case, the full power of the orchestra was exhausted upon Hail Columbia,
Yankee Doodle, or some other favorite National
air.
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Then again, for the entertainment of lonely evenings, we organized a literary society, which held its meetings once or twice a week, immediately after supper, and which numbered some twenty or more clever debaters.
Many and various were the subjects discussed; vast and heterogeneous the stores of original thought evolved by men who had no access to books, and amidst throes which attested the profoundness of that vasty deep from which the treasures were being drawn up. It is a matter of profound regret that no stenographer was present, and that thus all these purely original thoughts have been lost to the world.
Like snow drops on the river,
A moment white, then gone forever.
It would naturally be supposed, the debates which awakened most interest were those in which woman was in some way involved.
On these occasions not only would every Rebel be in place to hear the discussion, but Yankees, too, would crowd around us. Even Federal captains and lieutenants would swell the line of blue coats that formed a cordon about our quarters.
The usual taps for extinction of lights would be disregarded, and the discussion ran on towards the hour of midnight.
Then, alas for the speaker who was appointed to defend the side of the question which was unfavorable to woman, and thus go against the popular current!
He might plead with the eloquence of a Demosthenes, or the smooth persuasion of a Tully; his logic might be irrefragable, his arguments conclusive, his positions impregnable; but no inspiring applause greeted his most masterly efforts, while his opponent was cheered at every point, and in the final vote the unlucky orator was sure to be in a lean and helpless minority.
Well do I remember when it was made my duty to defend the negative in the question, “Is love a safe guide in the formation of matrimonial alliances?”
I traversed, as far as I could in unaided memory, all history and literature to establish the proverbial blindness of love — then entered the domain of poetry and art, painting
Cupid the blind boy, as
Aurora with her rosy fingers drew aside the curtains of the dawn, and
Apollo, god of day, drove his fiery steeds up along the eastern sky, whilst the poor boy groped in his blindness and shot his arrows at random through the air. Then I entered the domain of Metaphysics, and with Kaut's marvellous trichotomy as my guide, showed how in that three-fold adjustment of man's nature god-like reason was designed to sit upon the
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throne, love with all other passions to be in subjection to its wise control — how perilous in its subversion of the order of nature, therefore, to make love, a mere passion of the soul, our guide.
Thus, mingling sentiment with argument, and alternating between pathos and invective, I gave my best energies to the subject, and sat down at length amidst a feeble effort at applause, which, as I saw, came from my colleague appointed on the same side.
And when the final vote was taken, my voice was the only one heard in the negative, even my colleague having ingloriously deserted me and whipped over to the other side.
When our stock of available questions had run low and interest in our society began to flag, the expedient was resorted to of re-enacting the celebrated scene in the debating club so graphically described by
Judge Longstreet in the
Georgia scenes.
Many of you remember the question in that famous debate, “Whether, in popular elections, the vote of factions should predominate according to the bias of jurisprudence, or according to the force of internal suggestion.”
At first it was proposed to introduce the same question, but as it was found that one of the proposed debaters was familiar with the debate in
Georgia scenes, it was found necessary to substitute another; and so, after considerable conference amongst those admitted to the secret, the following question was agreed upon and announced, “Whether the foundations of wise legislation are to be sought in the inherent principles of social ethics, or in the philosophy of practical utility.”
The first speaker in the affirmative was a youthful chaplain, who had been until recently a private in the ranks, and for whom a chaplain's commission had been procured by way of promotion for gallantry in the ranks.
He was as modest and retiring as a woman, though brave and generous almost to a fault.
As his name was called and he took his place upon the floor, it was evident that he was not at allat ease.
He began by saying that the question was a new and difficult one, that he undertook its discussion with great diffidence and hoped all due indulgence would be given him. He then proceeded to state as clearly as he could what he conceived to be the question for discussion, and had about gotten before the house a question which was susceptible of debate, when the president interrupted him by saying that whilst the question which he was discussing was a very interesting one, he must remind him that it was not the question of the evening and he would please confine his remarks to the subject immediately under debate.
The
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face of the speaker crimsoned, he stammered a little, but recovered his self-possession and with heroic courage returned to the question as originally propounded, and again attempted a definition.
Scarcely, however, had the question begun to assume tangible shape, when the president again called him to order, stating that he had manifestly wandered from the subject.
The situation was now not only critical but perilous for our young orator.
The great beads of perspiration were upon his brow.
His knees, unconsciously to himself, were smiting together; his fingers were nervously plying as if to catch the thin air by his side; a faint, half-choking “
Mr. President” ; a somewhat more audible repetition after a long pause, “
Mr. President” ; a half-vacant stare around the room as if he would catch the lost thread of his argument in the look of some one of his hearers; then the light play of a smile upon his features, as he began to realize the ludicrousness of the situation, a smile followed by a simultaneous outburst of laughter and shouts of huzzah from the audience, in the midst of which the discomfited orator retired, losing himself from view in the depths of the throng.
The first speaker in the negative was then called, but was shrewd enough to baffle us by entering a plea, sustained by the president, that as no argument had been advanced on the affirmative side, he had the right to withhold his rejoinder until the second affirmative had spoken.
The second affirmative was therefore called for, and a surgeon responded, one of those ready speakers whose boast it was that he was always ready to speak, and that the more abstruse the subject the better suited to his tastes.
He began by saying that he was exceedingly gratified that the subject now under consideration had been chosen for discussion.
It was one to the study of which he had. devoted much attention.
Indeed, its importance could not be overestimated.
It was the neglect of this great question on the part of our statesmen which had deluged the land in blood, dismembered a once prosperous and happy republic, arrayed brother against brother in fratricidal strife, &c. After this telling introduction, he proceeded to state that there were two great sources of knowledge — intuitive or
a priori convictions, and inductive or a
posteori conclusions — that from the first of these we derive the inherent principles of social ethics, and from the second the philosophy of practical utility; that the question, therefore, resolves itself into this, whether we are to be governed by
a priori and intuitive convictions of conscience, or by
a posteori and inductive
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experiences of reason?
and was just proceeding to launch out upon this question when the president very blandly interposed with the statement that he had slightly wandered from the question, which had nothing to do with
a priori or
a posteori, but was a question as to the true basis of legislation.
The speaker bowed politely, though it was evident that he was very much disconcerted, and, being a passionate man, somewhat angered.
He said, however, pleasantly that if the president would bear with him for a moment he would convince him that his wandering from the question was only apparent and not real; that the president well remembered the two great ethical schools of
Europe at the close of the last century, the one having its highest exponent in
Paley, whose cardinal doctrine was that expediency was the sole ground of right; the other in
Reid, the great master of the intuitional or common sense school.
He was proceeding most eloquently to defend the intuitional school, when the president again called him to order.
This time the rising storm of anger was apparent, but he checked it, righted himself gallantly and made a third sally and a fourth, only each time to be interrupted by the mild voice of the president, and to be provoked by a suppressed titter in the audience, until at length, when for the fourth time the president had interfered, he turned with flushed face, his eyes fairly flashing fire, and exclaimed, “But I say, sir, I
am in order.”
“But I say, sir,” said the president, “you are
not in order.”
“Then, sir,” said he, advancing and bringing his clenched fist down in a menacing attitude, “I would like to know what in the thunder you call being in order?”
The explosion that followed put an end to the discussion for the evening.
The committee on questions felt it necessary for a little while to avoid the presence of the “second affirmative,” but his good nature soon got the better of him, and he laughed as heartily as any of us over the joke at his expense.
