1863.] STEALING FROM FLAG-OF-TRUCE LETTERS. 397 pared in the prison kitchen, by paying the old negro who presided there. These were privileges enjoyed by none of the other inmates. Supplies commanded very high prices; it was a favorite jest in the city, that the people had to carry money in their baskets and bring home marketing in their porte-monnaies. Our mess consisted of the four correspondents and Mr. Charles Thompson, a citizen of Connecticut, whose Democratic proclivities, age, and gravity, invariably elected him spokesman when we wished to communicate with the prison authorities. As they regarded us with special hostility, we kept in the back-ground; but Mr. Thompson's quiet tenacity, which no refusal could dishearten, and the "greenbacks" which no attaché could resist, secured us many favors. Northern letters from our own families reached us with considerable regularity. Those sent by other persons were mostly withheld. Robert Ould, the Rebel Commissioner of Exchange, with petty malignity, never permitted one of the many written from The Tribune office to reach us. All inclosures, excepting money, and sometimes including it, were stolen with uniform consistency. I finally wrote upon one of my missives, which was to go North: "Will the person who systematically abstracts newspaper slips, babies' pictures, and postage-stamps from my letters, permit the inclosed little poem to reach its destination, unless entirely certain that it is contraband and dangerous to the public service?" Apparently a little ashamed, the Rebel censor thereafter ceased his peculations. For a time, boxes of supplies from the North were forwarded to us with fidelity and promptness. Supposing that this could not last long, we determined to make hay while the sun shone. One day, dining from the contents 398 PAROLES REPUDIATED BY THE REBELS. [1863, of a home box, in cutting through the butter, my knife struck something hard. We sounded, and brought to the surface a little phial, hermetically sealed. We opened it, and there found "greenbacks!" Upon that hint we acted. While it was impossible to obtain letters from the North, we could always smuggle them thither by exchanged prisoners, who would sew them up in their clothing, or in some other manner conceal them. We immediately began to send many orders for boxes; all but two or three came safely to hand, and "brought forth butter in a lordly dish." Treasury notes were also sent bound in covers of books so deftly as to defy detection. One of my messmates thus received two hundred and fifty dollars in a single Bible. The supplies of money, obtained in this manner, lasted through nearly all our remaining imprisonment, and were of infinite service. All the prisoners who were taken to Richmond with us had received identically the same paroles. In every case, except ours, the Rebels recognized the paroles, and sent the persons holding them through the lines. But they utterly disregarded ours. We felt it a sort of duty. to keep them occasionally reminded of their solemn, deliberate, written obligation to us. We first did this through our attorney, General Humphrey Marshall, of Kentucky. His relations with Robert Ould were very close. Upon receiving heavy fees in United States currency, he had secured the release of several citizens, after all other endeavors failed. The prisoners believed that Ould shared the fees. General Marshall made a strong statement of our case in writing, adding to the application for release: "I am instructed by these gentlemen not to ask any favors at your 1863.] SENTENCED TO THE SALISBURY PRISON. 399 hands, but to enforce their clear, legal, unquestionable rights under this parole." Commissioner Ould indorsed upon this application that he repudiated the parole altogether. In reporting to us, General Marshall said: "I don't feel at liberty to accept a fee from you, because I consider your case hopeless." Early in the new year, we addressed a memorial to Mr. Seddon, the Rebel Secretary of War, in which we attempted to argue the case upon its legal merits, and to prove what a flagrant, atrocious violation of official faith was involved in our detention. We plumed ourselves a good deal on our legal logic, but Mr. Seddon returned a very convincing refutation of our argument. He simply wrote an order that we be sent to the Rebel penitentiary at Salisbury, North Carolina, to be held until the end of the war, as hostages for Rebel citizens confined in the North, and for the general good conduct of our Government toward them! Like the historic Roman, content to be refuted by an emperor who was master of fifty legions, we yielded gracefully to the argument of the Secretary who had the whole Confederate army at his back; and thus we were sent to Salisbury. On the night before our departure, the warden, a Maryland refugee, named Wiley, ordered us below into a very filthy apartment, to be ready for the morning train. We appealed to Captain Richardson, Commandant of the Castle, who, countermanding the order, permitted us to remain in our own more comfortable quarters during the night. Ten minutes after, one of the little negroes came to our room, and, beckoning me to bend down, he whispered : "What do you think Mr. Wiley says about Captain 400 "ABOLITIONISTS BEFORE THE WAR." 1863.] Richardson's letting you stay here to-night? As soon as the Captain went out, he said: 'It's a shame for Richardson and Browne to receive so many more favors than the other prisoners. Why, them, they were Abolitionists before the war!'"' On the way to Salisbury we were very closely guarded, but there were many times during the night when we might easily have jumped from the car window. At Raleigh, a pleasant little city of five thousand people, named in honor of the great Sir Walter, the temptation was very strong. In the confusion and darkness through which we passed from one train to another, we might easily have eluded the guards; but we were feeble, a long distance from our army lines, and quite unfamiliar with the country. It was a golden opportunity neglected; for it is always comparatively easy for captives to escape while in transitu, and very difficult when once within the walls of a military prison. On the evening of February 3d we reached Salisbury, and were taken to the Confederate States Penitentiary. It was a brick structure, one hundred feet by forty, four stories in hight, originally erected for a cotton-factory. In addition to the main building, there were six smaller ones of brick, which had formerly been tenement houses; and a new frame hospital, with clean hay mattresses for forty patients. The buildings, which would hold about five hundred prisoners, were all filled. Confederate convicts, Yankee deserters, about twenty enlisted men of our navy and three United States officers confined as host→ ages, one hundred and fifty Southern Unionists, and fifty northern citizens, composed the inmates. TRULY saith the Italian proverb, "There are no ugly loves and no handsome prisons." Still we found Salisbury comparatively endurable. Captain Swift Galloway, commanding, though a hearty Confederate, was kind and courteous to the captives. Our sleeping apartment, crowded with uncleanly men, and foul with the vilest exhalations, was filthy and vermin-infested beyond description. No northern farmer, fit to be a northern farmer, would have kept his horse or his ox in it. But the yard of four acres, like some old college. grounds, with great oak trees and a well of sweet, pure water, was open to us during the whole day. There, the first time for nine months, our feet pressed the mother earth, and the blessed open air fanned our cheeks. Mr. Luke Blackmer, of Salisbury, kindly placed his library of several thousand volumes at our disposal.. Whenever we wished for books we had only to address. a note to him, through the prison authorities, and, in a few hours, a little negro with a basket of them on his head would come in at the gate. It seemed more like life and less like the tomb than any prison we had inhabited before. And yet those long Summer months were very dreary to bear, for we had upon us the one heavy, crushing |