We staid in Salisbury until about eleven o’clock p. m., during which time the reb guard, and their lady friends, were parading around the depot where we were waiting for the train, singing, flirting, and talking about the Yankee prisoners.
While we were sitting on the depot platform waiting, we were smoking, and as the platform was filled with bales of cotton, we were, while apparently uninterested spectators of what was going on, emptying our pipes into the cotton bales.
We thus managed to set fire to a number of these bales of cotton, well knowing that after we were gone and the guard had retired, there would be apt to be a blaze; and the next day we heard that the depot at Salisbury was burned the night before, destroying a large amount of cotton stored there. On my arrival at Danville, I met Colonel W. C. Raulston, of the 24th New York Cavalry, with whom I was acquainted, and who introduced me to the members of his mess, Brigadier-General A. N. Duffie, Brigadier-General Hays, and Lieutenants Leydon and VanDerweed, who were all anxious to talk with me about the chances of escape. Knowing that I had had considerable experience in that line, they naturally concluded that I could give them some valuable points on how to escape, and how best to reach our lines after we had got out.
Well, we held a long and animated conference, in which I gave some of my own experience, in and out of rebel prisons, telling them of the hardships and exciting scenes through which I and my comrades had passed in trying to reach our lines, of the difficulties we had encountered, and the privations we had been obliged to endure. To get out of prison was not a difficult task for one or two, but a successful prison delivery was quite another thing to accomplish.
Two hundred officers, each having ideas of their own, were harder to control than five times that number of enlisted men, who had been disciplined to obey; and as no one had any authority to command, or control the actions, of his fellow officers, we lacked the greatest essential to success—organization. Various plans were suggested and discussed, but none which seemed to promise success, appeared to be practical just at that time. Almost daily conferences were held, but the prevailing opinion seemed to be, that an attempted general outbreak, without thorough organization, would prove disasterous, and only end in an unnecessary sacrifice of life, and almost certain failure.
CHAPTER XXII.
danville prison—a cold winter—double-quicking around the room to keep warm—excitement caused by the arrival of fresh troops—they stack arms in front of our prison—plans for escape.
Danville in 1864-5 was a town of considerable importance to the Confederacy, being the base of supplies for the Confederate army at Richmond and Petersburg. There were three or four military prisons there, in which were confined about two thousand enlisted men, captured from the Union forces, and four hundred officers. They were all confined in tobacco warehouses in different parts of the city, the officers being separate from the enlisted men.