Rebellion Record: a Diary of American Events: Documents and Narratives, Volume 10.
Frank Moore, Ed.

The second scene that I witnessed in Libby Prison, was the selection of Captains Sawyer and Flynn, to be executed in the place of those two that were shot for recruiting within our lines by the order of General Burnside. An order came into our rooms that all the captains should report below, and there was a gay time among them. They said, Now we are going to be paroled, and go home. There was a smile upon every countenance, and we said to one another, don't you wish you was a Captain. I do. I would like to leave this place and go home. Seventy-five captains, with light hearts and happy countenances, passed down stairs into one of the lower rooms. When they got down there, one of the officers came in with an order from General Winder, that from this number, then confined in Libby Prison, two were to be selected by lot to be executed in retaliation for the two that were shot by General Burnside. They stood there around the room in a circle. A box was placed in the centre, and in that box was put the lots. Two of the chaplains in the prison with me came down to witness the drawing of these lots. Old Father Brown, a man whose head is almost as white as snow, Chaplain of the Sixth Maryland regiment, was the man who was to draw the lots. The lots fell upon Captain Flynn and Captain Sawyer: one was from New Jersey and the other from Indiana. I did think then that it was exceedingly singular that as New Jersey and Indiana had been more Butternut than any two other states, that the lot should fall upon them. I thought it something singular, and so it was. I hope these states have since redeemed themselves. The lots were drawn and the captains returned. There was a solemnity upon the countenances of the captains that I never saw upon the countenances of men before. To go into the battle-field, and stand before the cannon's mouth and before musketry, and even to shout in the charge and die upon the battle-field, seems to be something glorious, and men go into it with spirit and with nerve; but to be drawn by lot, and deliberately executed, was something for a brave man to face.

I saw men, who had braved every danger, quail under the idea of being thus selected for execution.

These men have never been executed yet, and they never will. For our government holds General Lee and Captain Winder in their stead, and we say to them, just as you deal with Flynn and Sawyer so we will deal with Lee and Winder.

The third scene that transpired in Libby Prison was in regard to Colonel Powell, who, in an engagement with the rebels, had been shot through the breast, and it was supposed that he would die. The Confederates came upon him where he was lying in his gore, and wanted to butcher him in cold blood. He was sent to Richmond and put into the hospital. He had been in the hospital about two weeks, when the man Turner took him down into the basement of the building, and opened the door of a dark damp cell, and said to him, “Get in there.” Colonel Powell said, “Sir, for what am I to be put in there?” Turner said, “God d — n you, get in there! you will know before you get out what you are in there for.” He went into the cell, and we got word of it in the upper part of the building, and one of our number got down below, and Colonel Powell got a chance to send a slip of paper to us, saying, “I am here in a cell; I have nothing to read; I have only a few leaves of Matthew, which I have got by heart. I can hear you pray and sing up there in the officers' room. Pray louder and sing louder: I want to hear you.” Well, we began to inquire how he came to be in this cell. Finally, we asked General Winder why he was in the cell. The General replied that he did not know why it was, and General Jones knew nothing about it; and said he had given no such order. Our government, after a time, got word of it, and they informed the rebels that unless Colonel Powell was released from that cell, an officer of equal rank would be put in the same condition; and then Colonel Powell came out of the cell, having been put there simply upon Turner's authority, and because he had the power to do it. A truer, better, and nobler man never lived. A better soldier never drew a sword in battle. His regiment is the Second Virginia cavalry. It happened that the whole regiment was recruited in Ohio; but at that time our government had no need of cavalry, but was willing to accept them as a regiment of infantry. They crossed the Ohio and tendered their services to Governor Pierpont, of Virginia, who received them and commissioned the officers, calling them the Second Virginia cavalry, and in this way Ohio loses in the count one thousand two hundred men. I have seen men confined in the dungeon two days, on bread and water, for spitting on the floor of that old tobacco house. I have seen a member of the Eighty-seventh Pennsylvania regiment confined in one of these cells five weeks, until his clothes were mouldy.

In regard to the charge against me. They said there was abundance of evidence against me, but I was suffered to go with the other chaplains, and I never heard much more about the charge. They permitted me to fare as well as the rest of the officers, and to choose the soft side of a plank to sleep on. When a friend came in to see us we could not offer him a chair or a stool; we had to sit on the floor.

Among our number in prison we had one who amused himself in sketching. He would sketch the new-comer in his first observation of the prison; next, as he sat down to meditate on his condition; then, with a rebel paper in his hands reading rebel news; then, disgusted with rebeldom, as he laid himself down to seek some repose. There he lay, stretched on the floor, perhaps without a blanket, and a stick of wood for a pillow. There he lay down to repose. Next he made a discovery, and that was, that there was one of those great graybacks at work, about as big as a large grain of wheat. We understood the grayback