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1864.]

REBEL EXPECTATIONS OF PEACE.

423

Clellan is certain to be elected President, and peace will immediately follow."

"You southerners are the most credulous people in the whole world. You have been so long strangers to freedom of speech and the press, that you cannot comprehend it at all. There are half a dozen public men and as many newspapers in the North, who really belong to your side, and express their Rebel sympathies with little or no disguise. Can you not see that they never receive any accessions? Point out a single important convert made by them since the beginning of the war. Before Sumter, these same men told you that, if we attempted coërcion, it would produce war in the North; and you believed them. Again and again they have told you, as now, that the loyal States would soon give up the conflict, and you still believe them. Wait until the people vote, in November, and then tell me what you think."

In due time came news of Mr. Lincoln's re-election. The prisoners received it with intense satisfaction. I conveyed it to the Union officers, from whom we were separated by bayonets-tossing to them a biscuit containing a concealed note. A few minutes after, their cheering and 'shouting excited the surprise and indignation of the prison authorities. The next morning I asked Stockton how he now regarded the peace prospect. Shaking his head, he sadly replied:

"It is too deep for me; I cannot see the end.”

A private belonging to the Fifty-ninth Massachusetts Infantry, had left Boston, a new recruit, just six weeks before we met him. In the interval he participated in two great battles and five skirmishes, was wounded in the leg, captured, escaped from his guards, while en route for Georgia, traveled three days on foot,, was then

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THE PRISON LIKE THE TOMB.

[1864.

re-captured and brought to Salisbury. His six weeks' experience had been fruitful and varied.

That hope deferred which maketh the heart sick, began to tell seriously upon our mental health. We grew morbid and bitter, and were often upon the verge of quarreling among ourselves. I remember even feeling a pang of jealousy and indignation at an account of some enjoyment and hilarity among my friends at home.

Our prison was like the tomb. No voice from the North entered its gloomy portal. Knowing that we had been unjustly neglected by our own Government, wondering if we were indeed forsaken by God and man, we seemed to lose all human interest, and to care little whether we lived or died. But I suppose lurking, unconscious hope, still buoyed us up. Could we have known positively that we must endure eight months more of that imprisonment, I think we should have received with joy and gratitude our sentence to be taken out and shot.

Frequently prisoners asked us, sometimes with tears in their eyes:

"What shall we do? We grow weaker day by day. Staying here we shall be certain to follow our comrades to the hospital and the dead-house. The Rebels assure us that if we will enlist, we shall have abundant food and clothing; and we may find a chance of escaping to our own lines."

I always answered that they owed no obligation to God or man to remain and starve to death. Of the two thousand who did enlist, nearly all designed to desert at the first opportunity. Their remaining comrades had no toleration for them. If one who had joined the Rebels came back into the yard for a moment, his life was in imminent peril. Two or three times such persons were

1864.]

SOMETHING ABOUT TUNNELING.

425

shockingly beaten, and only saved from death by the interference of the Rebel guards. This ferocity was but the expression of the deep, unselfish patriotism of our private soldiers. These men, who carried muskets and received but a mere pittance, were so earnest that they were almost ready to kill their comrades for joining the enemy even to escape a slow, torturing death.

We grew very familiar with the occult science of tunneling. Its modus operandi is this: the workman, having sunk a hole in the ground three, six, or eight feet, as the case may require, strikes off horizontally, lying flat on his face, and digging with whatever tool he can find-usually a case-knife. The excavation is made just large enough for one man to creep through it. The great difficulty is, to conceal the dirt. In Salisbury, however, this obstacle did not exist, for many of the prisoners lived in holes in the ground, which they were constantly changing or enlarging. Hence the yard abounded in hillocks of fresh earth, upon which that taken from the tunnels could be spread nightly without exciting notice.

After the great influx of prisoners of war in October, a large tunneling business was done. I knew of fifteen in course of construction at one time, and doubtless there were many more. The Commandant adopted an ingenious and effectual method of rendering them abortive.

In digging laterally in the ground, at the distance of thirty or forty feet the air becomes so foul that lights will not burn, and men breathe with difficulty. In the great tunnel sixty-five feet long, by which Colonel Streight and many other officers escaped from Libby prison, this embarrassment was obviated by a bit of Yankee ingenuity. The officers, with tacks, blankets, and boards, constructed a pair of huge bellows, like those used by blacksmiths. Then, while one of them worked with his case-knife,

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THE TUNNELERS INGENIOUSLY BAFFLED.

[1864.

progressing four or five feet in twelve hours, and a second filled his haversack with dirt and removed it (of course backing out, and crawling in on his return, as the tunnel was a single track, and had no turn-table), a third sat at the mouth pumping vigorously, and thus supplied the workers with fresh air.

At Salisbury this was impracticable. I suppose a paper of tacks could not have been purchased there for a thousand dollars. There were none to be had. Of course we could not pierce holes up to the surface of the ground for ventilation, as that would expose every thing.

Originally there was but one line of guards-posted some twenty-five feet apart, upon the fence which surrounded the garrison, and constantly walking to and fro, meeting each other and turning back at the limits of each post. Under this arrangement it was necessary to tunnel about forty feet to go under the fence, and come up far enough beyond it to emerge from the earth on a dark night without being seen or heard by the sentinels.

When the Commandant learned (through prisoners actually suffering for food, and ready to do almost any thing for bread) that tunneling was going on, he tried to ascertain where the excavations were located; but in vain, because none of the shaky Unionists had been informed. Therefore he established a second line of guards, one hundred feet outside of those on the fence, who also paced back and forth in the same manner until they met, forming a second line impervious to Yankees. This necessitated tunneling at least one hundred and forty feet, which, without ventilation, was just as much out of the question as to tunnel a hundred and forty miles.

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A good wit will make use of any thing: I will turn diseases to commodity."

KING HENRY IV.

WE were constantly trying to escape. During the last fifteen months of our imprisonment, I think there was no day when we had not some plan which we hoped soon to put in execution. We were always talking and theorizing about the subject.

Indeed, we theorized too much. We magnified obstacles. We gave our keepers credit for greater shrewdness and closer observation than they were capable of. We would not start until all things combined to promise success. Therefore, as the slow months wore away, again and again we saw men of less capacity, but greater daring, escape by modes which had appeared to us utterly chimerical and impracticable.

Fortune, too, persistently baffled us. At the vital moment when freedom seemed just within our grasp, some unforeseen obstacle always intervened to foil our plans. Still, assuming a confidence we did not feel, we daily promised each other to persist until we gained our liberty or lost our lives. After the malignity which the Richmond authorities had manifested toward us, escape seemed a thousand-fold preferable to release by exchange.

I should hardly dare to estimate the combined length of tunnels in which we were concerned; they were

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