Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons Part 10

To afford diversion and as an antidote to depression, as well as for intellectual improvement, some of us studied mathematics[11] or _Shakespeare_. Three or four cla.s.ses were formed in modern languages.

We had card-playing with packs soiled and worn; checkers and chess on extemporized boards with rudely whittled "pieces"; occasional discussions historical, literary, political, or religious; many of us quite regular physical exercises in brisk walks on the empty lowest floor; story-telling; at times, though not often, the reading aloud of a Confederate newspaper, to a group of fifty or more listeners; at evening, sweet singing, riddles, jests, or loud-voiced sarcastic conundrums and satirical responses. Many found interest and pleasure in carving with the utmost nicety wood or bone.[12]

Something like military discipline prevailed among the two hundred in the upper room where the superior rank of General Hayes was often recognized. Among a hundred and fifty or more in the lower room, where for a month or two I was the senior but was unwilling to a.s.sume precedence, I secured with the aid of Major Byron, Captain Howe, and a few others a sort of civil government with semi-military features.

These measures and the favoring circ.u.mstances that have been mentioned tended of course to the preservation of health among the officers. There was severe suffering from hunger, cold, rheumatism, and scurvy, from all of which I was for weeks a victim and at one time seemed doomed to perish. I recall, however, the names of but two officers (there were said to be four) who died at Danville. Some of us, though enfeebled, were soon able to rejoin our commands; as Putnam his at Newbern in April, Gardner and I ours at Morehead City the day after Lee's surrender at Appomattox.

Of the effect in after-life of these strange experiences it is safe to say that to some extent they were a spur to intellectual effort. At least they should have made all sadder and wiser; and they certainly were in some cases an equipment for descriptive authors.h.i.+p. Major (Adner A.) Small wrote a valuable account of prison life. Dr. Burrage's narratives of his capture and its results are entertaining and instructive. Major Putnam's _A Prisoner of War in Virginia_ (reprinted in his _Memories of My Youth_) is an important contribution to our military history.[13] Lieutenant Estabrooks's _Adrift in Dixie_ is charmingly told.[14] "Dutch Clark" (Adjutant James A. Clark, 17th Pa.

Cav.), one of the four who nightly tried to sleep under my blanket, started and edited with ability at Scranton _The Public Code_, for which I was glad to furnish literary material. He afterwards became prominent in theosophic circles. Others distinguished themselves. Captain (Frank H.) Mason, in prison our best chess player, was long Consul-General at Paris. Cook studied five or six years in Germany, France, and Italy, then was for eight or ten years a.s.sistant professor in German at Harvard, and afterwards for two years, until his untimely death, professor in the same department at the Inst.i.tute of Technology in Boston. In addressing a Sunday-school in Brooklyn, 1871, I unexpectedly lighted upon Captain Tiemann doing good work as a teacher. Captain Gardner continued for many months a model military officer in Georgia.[15] I remained in the service a full year, often on courts-martial, military commissions, and "reconstruction" duty.

As already described, the condition of the enlisted men strongly contrasted with ours. The Report of the Confederate Inspector of Prisons now on file in the _War Records_ of our government, though the reports of his subordinate officers are significantly missing, covers the few months next preceding January, 1865. It sharply censures the immediate prison authorities, stating, as the result of the privations, that the deaths at Danville were at the rate of about five per day! I think they were more numerous in January and February. None of my battalion were there, but at Salisbury three-sevenths of them died in less than three months!

It is hard to refrain from the expression of pa.s.sionate indignation at the treatment accorded to our non-commissioned officers and privates in those southern h.e.l.ls. For years we were accustomed to ask, "In what military prison of the north, in what common jail of Europe, in what dungeon of the civilized or savage world, have captives taken in war--nay, condemned criminals--been systematically exposed to a lingering death by cold and hunger? The foulest felon--his soul black with sacrilege, his hands reeking with parricide--has enough of food, of clothing, of shelter; a chair to sit in, a fire to warm him, a blanket to hide his nakedness, a bed of straw to die on!"

But listen a moment to the other side. Alexander H. Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, afterwards for eight years a representative in our Congress, a man of unquestioned integrity, shows in his _War between the States_ (pub. 1868-70) by quotation from the Report of our then Secretary of War (July 19, 1866) that only 22,576 Federal prisoners died in Confederate hands during the war, whilst 26,436 Confederate prisoners died in Federal hands. He shows also from the United States Surgeon-General Joseph K. Barnes's Report that the number of Federal prisoners in southern prisons was about 270,000, but the number of Confederate prisoners in northern prisons was about 220,000; so that the percentage of deaths in southern prisons was under nine, while the percentage of deaths in northern prisons was over twelve![16]

Had there been, from the first, prompt exchanges of prisoners between the north and the south, few of these forty-nine thousand lives would have been lost. _Who, then, blocked the exchange?_

Stephens declares (_War between the States_, vol. ii):

"It is now well understood to have been a part of the settled policy of the Was.h.i.+ngton authorities in conducting the war, not to exchange prisoners. The grounds upon which this extraordinary course was adopted were, that it was humanity to the northern men in the field to let their captured comrades perish in prison rather than to let an equal number of Confederate soldiers be released on exchange to meet them in battle."

To the same effect our Secretary Stanton in one of his letters in 1864 pointed out "that it would not be good policy to send back to be placed on the firing line 70,000 able-bodied Confederates, and to receive in exchange men who, with but few exceptions, were not strong enough to hold their muskets."

The responsibility, then, for this refusal and the consequent enormous sacrifice of life with all the accompanying miseries, must rest in part upon the Government of the United States.[17]

Blame not the tender-hearted Lincoln for this.

Did he not judge wisely? Was it not best for the nation that we prisoners should starve and freeze?

The pivotal question for him and Grant and Stanton was, "Shall we exchange and thereby enable the South to reinforce their armies with fifty to a hundred thousand trained soldiers?

"If yes, then we must draft many more than that; for they being on the defensive we must outnumber them in battle. If no, then we must either stop their cruelties by equally cruel retaliation, as Was.h.i.+ngton hung Andre for the execution of Hale, or we must, more cruelly still, leave myriads of our soldiers to sink into imbecility and death."

The North had not the excuse of dest.i.tution which the South had, and it could not bring itself to make reprisals in kind. To draft again, as evinced in the terrible riots of July, 1863, would have been extremely unpopular and perhaps overthrown the administration and defeated the policy of the government. To exchange would pretty surely have prolonged the war, and might have resulted in permanent disunion.

As to the right or wrong of the refusal to exchange, it is hardly relevant to insist that the triumph of the South would have perpetuated slavery. Lincoln's Proclamation, January 1, 1863, did not touch slavery in the Border States. And from the southern nation, denuded of slaves by their escape to the North and confronted by the growing anti-slavery sentiment of the civilized world, the "peculiar inst.i.tution" would soon have died out.

Need we attempt, as is often done, to justify our government's att.i.tude in this matter by affirming that the nation was in a life-and-death struggle for its very existence? Did that existence depend upon its territorial limits? Would it have gone to pieces if the victorious North had relinquished its hold on the defeated South? Had a boundary line been drawn half-way across the continent, separating the twenty-three loyal States from the eleven seceding, the twenty-two millions of the North from the nine or ten millions of the South, would it not have remained a mighty nation with no cause for further disunion, and able as the war had shown to place in the field more than two million fighting men?

Is it not equally unnecessary to urge, as if it were a valid excuse for our government's refusal to exchange, that between the two nations there would have been frequent if not perpetual hostilities? Why so, any more than between the United States and Canada, where for fifty (it is now a hundred) years, along a boundary line of thirty-eight hundred miles, there had been unbroken peace and no fort nor wars.h.i.+p?

Let us not raise the question whether Lincoln made a colossal blunder when he renounced his favorite doctrine so emphatically set forth in his Congressional speech (page 47). The die was cast when Sumter was fired on. The question which confronted him in 1863-64--What to do with the peris.h.i.+ng Union prisoners?--was simply one of military necessity.

According to the ethics of war was he not fully justified in sacrificing us rather than imperiling the great cause which he had at heart?

Are we, then, to blame President Davis, or the Confederate Commissioner Robert Ould, or Gen. John H. Winder, Superintendent of Military Prisons, for allowing the Federal prisoners to starve and freeze and die by thousands? Must we not admit the truth of their contention that their soldiers needed the food, clothing, and medical care for want of which their prisoners were suffering? And if the shocking conditions at Andersonville, Salisbury, Danville, and other prisons could easily have been avoided, or even if they were made more distressing by the deliberate inhumanity of those in immediate charge, ought not such facts to have intensified a desire on the part of both governments to effect a speedy exchange?

The southern people were threatened with subjugation, their government with annihilation. In such a critical situation, what measures are allowable?

We endeavor to look at the matter from both standpoints.

This brings up the whole question of the rightfulness of war. If it must be waged, is success the highest duty? If military necessity demands, may any and every law of G.o.d and man be disregarded?

While we write these concluding pages, the European conflict is raging, and the voice of the most warlike nation on the globe is heard continually affirming that war is useful and highly honorable, and that any means, however frightful, if necessary to ensure or hasten victory is praise-worthy!

Then both presidents were right!

But is not international war murder on a great scale? It is glorious to die for one's country; but how about killing for our country? killing innocent men, too? for the soldiers on either side honestly believe they are doing their duty in shooting and stabbing as many as possible! "The business of war," said John Wesley, "is the business of devils." So it would seem; but at heart few are enemies, none devils.

It has been a pleasure in this narrative to record instances of a very different spirit. Surely, in proportion to population such were not fewer in the South than in the North. Like Whittier's _Angels of Buena Vista_ they rescue us from pessimism. They are prophetic of a better day.

Not wholly lost, O Father, is this evil world of ours!

Upward through the blood and ashes spring afresh the Eden flowers: From its smoking h.e.l.l of battle, Love and Pity send their prayer, And still thy white-winged angels hover dimly in our air!

FOOTNOTES:

[11] I still possess the copy of Davies's _Legendre_ which I bought on the 8th of November for twenty Confederate dollars, and of which I memorized three books in prison. As to the _Shakespeare_, see _ante_, p.

85.

[12] I retain with pride the wooden spoon which did me good service when I was _in limbo_. It cost me over two weeks' labor in shaping it with half a knife-blade and pieces of broken gla.s.s. For the little block of wood I paid the sentry one "rebel dollar!"

[13] Many years after the war he rendered financial aid to fellow prisoners, his chum, artist Vander Weyde, and General Hayes. Author of several valuable works, he is now head of the publis.h.i.+ng house of G. P.

Putnam's Sons.

[14] It was a special pleasure after the lapse of fifty years to meet Estabrooks at the Ma.s.sachusetts Commandery of the Loyal Legion, where, without knowing of his presence, I had just made honorable mention of him in an address on prison life.

[15] In my own case the prison experience was peculiar: it changed the course of my whole subsequent life. I had studied law, been admitted to the bar in two states, and "practiced" with fair success, "though," as a friend was accustomed to remark, "not enough to do much harm!" Many times one of the best men I ever knew, my father, had said to me at parting, "Do all the good you can." Much meditating while in the army and especially while in prison, I finally resolved to pursue an educational career. Of course I felt sadly the loss of years of study that might have better equipped me; but it seemed a duty. I had had some experience which, I thought, proved me not wholly unqualified. While a student in college and while reading law I had partly supported myself by giving instruction to private pupils and in the schools of General Russell and Mayor Skinner. Afterwards, before the war, I had taught Greek in the Worcester (Ma.s.s.) Academy; and English literature, Greek, and Latin for more than three years as princ.i.p.al of the Worcester public high school. I knew the vocation would be congenial. So I became princ.i.p.al of a state normal school, of two high schools, of a large academy; house chairman of a (Conn.) legislative committee securing the enactment of three school measures of importance; later, president of a college, professor in a theological seminary and in Cornell University; founder and for three years first president of the earliest and long the largest of the world's general _summer_ schools (which now in the United States number nearly 700); lecturer in many Chautauqua a.s.semblies, colleges, vacation schools, and university extension centres; President of the State University of North Dakota; editor, with biographic sketches and copious notes, of many masterpieces as text-books in higher English literature; author of a history of my regiment; also of a treatise on _Voice and Gesture_, of many monographs and magazine articles mostly educational; a.s.sociate founder and first president of _The Watch and Ward Society_; one of the directors and executive committee of the _American Peace Society_; director of the _Ma.s.sachusetts Peace Society_; president of _The American Inst.i.tute of Instruction_; translator, annotator, and essayist of _The Book of Job_; etc.

It may be proper to add that among those indebted in some degree to my instruction or training were several who captured Yale's highest prize for rhetorical excellence (the hundred dollar gold medal of which I was the first recipient): one college president; six college professors; three university presidents; two governors of states; two United States Senators; and many others eminent as clergymen, authors, judges, editors, and business men.

[16] The higher death-rate (if that be conceded) of southern soldiers is easily accounted for. The northern soldiers had been carefully selected by competent surgeons. They were physically perfect, or nearly so. They were in the bloom of early manhood or the strength of middle age--not an old man among them, not a diseased man among them, not a broken-down const.i.tution among them. But mult.i.tudes of the southern, enrolled by conscription, were physically unfit. Many were much too old or too young. Said our General Grant, "To fill their ranks, they have robbed the cradle and the grave!"

[17] The exchange is said to have been stopped in 1862-63 by the refusal of the Confederates to give up captured negro soldiers in return for southern captives in the North, the United States properly insisting upon perfect equality in the treatment of black and white. But early in 1864, if not previously, the Confederates yielded the point and were anxious to surrender man for man.

APPENDIX

(From the original record. See p. 88.)

Proceedings of a Court Martial convened at Danville Mil. Pris. by virtue of the following Order:

DANVILLE MIL. PRISON, Oct. 29, 1864.