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 hostages, one hundred and fifty Southern Unionists, and fifty northern citizens, composed the inmates.
[CHAPTER XXXVI.]
The miserable have no other medicine, But only hope.
Measure for Measure.
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow?
Macbeth.
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.