Four of them were held for Kentucky bushwhackers, whom one of our military courts had sentenced to death, which they clearly deserved under well-defined laws of war. Had they been promptly executed, the Rebels would never have dared, in retaliation, to hurt the hair of a prisoners head. But Mr. Lincoln's kindness of heart induced him to commute their sentence to imprisonment, and made him unwittingly the cause of this barbarity toward our own officers.
The hostages were plucky and enterprising, frequently attempting to escape. One night they suspended from their fourth-story window a rope which they had constructed of blankets. Captain Ives, of the Tenth Massachusetts Infantry, descended in safety. A daring and loyal Rebel deserter, from East Tennessee, named Carroll, who designed to pilot them to our lines, attempted to follow; but the rope broke, and he fell the whole distance, striking upon his head. It would have killed most men; but Carroll, after spending the night in the guard-house, bathed his swollen head and troubled himself no further about the matter.
Captain B. C. G. Reed, from Zanesville, Ohio, was constantly trying to secure his own release. It always seemed to make him unhappy when he passed two or three weeks without making attempts to escape. They usually resulted in his being hand-cuffed and ballasted by a ball and chain, or confined in a filthy cell.
A Cool Method of Escape.
But, sooner or later, perseverance achieves. Once, while so weak from inflammatory rheumatism, contracted in a Richmond dungeon, that he could hardly walk, he made a successful endeavor, in company with Captain Litchfield. At nine o'clock, on a rainy March night, with their blankets wrapped about them, they coolly walked up to the gate. They rebuked the guard who halted them, indignantly asking him if he did not know that they belonged at head-quarters! Impudence won the day. The innocent sentinel permitted them to pass. They went directly through Captain Galloway's office, which fortunately happened to be empty; reached the outer fence; Litchfield helped over his weak companion, and the world was all before them, where to choose. They traveled one hundred and twenty miles, but, in the mountains of East Tennessee, were recaptured and brought back.
Nothing daunted, Reed repeated the attempt again and again. Finally, he jumped from a train of cars in the city of Charleston, found a negro who secreted him, and by night conveyed him in a skiff to our forces at Battery Wagner. Reed returned to his command in Thomas's Army, and was subsequently killed in one of the battles before Nashville. Entering the service as a private, and fairly winning promotion, he was an excellent type of the thinking bayonets, of the young men who freely gave their lives "for our dear country's sake."
Captured through an Obstinate Mule.
Early in the summer, our mess was agreeably enlarged by the arrival of Mr. William E. Davis, Correspondent of The Cincinnati Gazette and Clerk of the Ohio Senate. Davis owed his capture to the stupidity of a mule. Riding leisurely along a road within the lines of General Sherman's army, more than a mile from the front, he was compelled to pass through a little gap left between two corps, which had not quite connected. He was suddenly confronted by a double-barreled shot-gun, presented by a Rebel standing behind a tree, who commanded him to halt. Not easily intimidated, Davis attempted to turn his mule and ride for a life and liberty. With the true instinct of his race, the animal resisted the rein, seeming to require a ten-acre lot and three days for turning around—wherefore the rider fell into the hands of the Philistines.
Books whiled away many weary hours. As Edmond Dantes, in the Count of Monte Christo, came out from his twelve years of imprisonment "a very well-read man," we ought to have acquired limitless lore; but reading at last palled upon our tastes, and we would none of it.