Picking up two or three rusty tin plates and rheumatic knives and forks, we commenced housekeeping. The labor of preparation was not arduous. It consisted in making little sacks of cotton cloth for salt, sugar, pepper, and rice, fitting up a shelf for our dishes, and spreading upon the floor blankets, obtained from our new comrades, and originally sent to Richmond by the United States Government for the benefit of prisoners.
The Libby authorities, and white and negro attachés, were always hungry for "greenbacks," and glad to give Confederate currency in exchange. The rates varied greatly. The lowest was two dollars for one. During my imprisonment, I bought fourteen for one, and, a few weeks after our escape, thirty were given for one.
A prison sergeant went out every morning to purchase supplies. He seemed honest, and through him we could obtain, at extravagant prices, dried apples, sugar, eggs, molasses, meal, flour, and corn burnt and ground as a substitute for coffee. Without these additions, our rations would hardly have supported life.
In our mess, each man, in turn, did the cooking for an entire day. In that hot, stifling room, frying pork, baking griddle-cakes, and boiling coffee, over the crazy, smoking, broken stove, around which there was a constant crowd, were disagreeable in the extreme. The prison hours were long, but the cooking-days recurred with unpleasant frequency.
We scrubbed our room two or three times a week, and it was fumigated every morning. At one end stood a huge wooden tank, with an abundant supply of cold water, in which we could bathe at pleasure.
Sufferings from Vermin.
The vermin were the most revolting feature of the prison, and the one to which it was the most difficult to become resigned. No amount of personal cleanliness could guard our bodies against the insatiate lice. Only by examining under-clothing and destroying them once or twice a day, could they be kept from swarming upon us. For the first week, I could not think of them without shuddering and faintness: but in time I learned to make my daily entomological researches with calm complacency.
In Nashville, two weeks before my capture, I met Colonel A. D. Streight, of Indiana. At the head of a provisional brigade from Rosecrans's army, he was about starting on a raid through northern Alabama and Georgia. The expedition promising more romance and novelty than ordinary army experiences, now grown a little monotonous, I desired to accompany him; but other duties prevented. I had been in Libby just four hours, when in walked Streight, followed by the officers of his entire brigade. We had taken very different routes, but they brought us to the same terminus.
Streight's command had been furnished with mules, averaging about two years old, and quite unused to the saddle. Utterly worthless, they soon broke down, and with much difficulty, he remounted his men upon horses, pressed from the citizens; but the delay proved fatal.
The Rebel General Forrest overtook him with a largely superior force. Streight was an enterprising, brave officer, and his exhausted men behaved admirably in four or five fights; but at last, near Rome, Georgia, after losing one third of his command, the colonel was compelled to surrender. The Rebels were very exultant, and Forrest—originally a slave-dealer in Memphis, and a greater falsifier than Beauregard himself—telegraphed that, with four hundred men, he had captured twenty-eight hundred.