Success kindled a corresponding joy. I have seen sick and dying prisoners on cold and filthy floors of the wretched hospitals filled with a new vitality—their sad, pleading eyes lighted with a new hope, their wan faces flushed, and their speech jubilant, when they learned that all was going well with the Cause. It made life more endurable and death less bitter.
Already suffering from anxiety for Flynn and Sawyer, and disheartened by the reports from Pennsylvania, we received intelligence that Grant had been utterly repulsed before the works of Vicksburg, the siege raised, and the campaign closed in defeat and disaster. It was a very black night when this grief was added to the first. The prison was gloomy and silent many hours earlier than usual. Our hearts were too heavy for speech.
But suddenly there came a great revulsion. Among the negro prisoners was an old man of seventy, who had particularly attracted my attention from the fact that when I happened to speak to him about the National conflict, he replied, after the manner of Copperheads, that it was a speculators' war on both sides, in which he felt no sort of interest; that it would do nobody any good; that he cared not when or how it ended. I wondered whether the old African was shamming, lest his conversation should be reported, to the curtailing of his privileges, or whether he was really that anomaly, a black man who felt no interest in the war.
Glorious Revulsion of Feeling.
But about five o'clock, one afternoon, he came up into our room, and, when the door was closed behind him, so that he could not be seen by the officers or guards, he made a rush for an open space upon the floor, and immediately began to dance in a manner very remarkable for a man of seventy, and rheumatic at that. We all gathered around him and asked—
"General" (that was his soubriquet in the prison), "what does this mean?"
"De Yankees has taken Vicksburg! De Yankees has taken Vicksburg!" and then he began to dance again.
As soon as we could calm him into a little coherence, he drew from his pocket a newspaper extra—the ink not yet dry—which he had stolen from one of the Rebel officers. There it was! The Yankees had taken Vicksburg, with more than thirty thousand prisoners.
Good tidings, like bad, seldom come alone. Shortly after, we learned that there was also a slight mistake about Gettysburg—that Lee, instead of Meade, was flying in confusion; and that, while our people had captured fifteen or twenty thousand Rebels, those forty thousand Yankee prisoners were "conspicuous for their absence."
How our hearts leaped up at this cheering news! How suddenly that foul prison air grew sweet and pure as the fragrant breath of the mountains! There was laughing, there was singing, there was dancing, which the old negro did not altogether monopolize. Some one shouted, "Glory, hallelujah!" Mr. McCabe, an Ohio chaplain, whose clear, ringing tones, as he led the singing, cheered many of our heaviest hours, instantly took the hint, and started that beautiful hymn, by Mrs. Howe, of which "Glory, hallelujah" is the chorus:—