"You southerners are the most credulous people in the whole world. You have been so long strangers to freedom of speech and the press, that you cannot comprehend it at all. There are half a dozen public men and as many newspapers in the North, who really belong to your side, and express their Rebel sympathies with little or no disguise. Can you not see that they never receive any accessions? Point out a single important convert made by them since the beginning of the war. Before Sumter, these same men told you that, if we attempted coërcion, it would produce war in the North; and you believed them. Again and again they have told you, as now, that the loyal States would soon give up the conflict, and you still believe them. Wait until the people vote, in November, and then tell me what you think."
In due time came news of Mr. Lincoln's re-election. The prisoners received it with intense satisfaction. I conveyed it to the Union officers, from whom we were separated by bayonets—tossing to them a biscuit containing a concealed note. A few minutes after, their cheering and shouting excited the surprise and indignation of the prison authorities. The next morning I asked Stockton how he now regarded the peace prospect. Shaking his head, he sadly replied:
"It is too deep for me; I cannot see the end."
A private belonging to the Fifty-ninth Massachusetts Infantry, had left Boston, a new recruit, just six weeks before we met him. In the interval he participated in two great battles and five skirmishes, was wounded in the leg, captured, escaped from his guards, while en route for Georgia, traveled three days on foot, was then re-captured and brought to Salisbury. His six weeks' experience had been fruitful and varied.
That hope deferred which maketh the heart sick, began to tell seriously upon our mental health. We grew morbid and bitter, and were often upon the verge of quarreling among ourselves. I remember even feeling a pang of jealousy and indignation at an account of some enjoyment and hilarity among my friends at home.
The Prison Like the Tomb.
Our prison was like the tomb. No voice from the North entered its gloomy portal. Knowing that we had been unjustly neglected by our own Government, wondering if we were indeed forsaken by God and man, we seemed to lose all human interest, and to care little whether we lived or died. But I suppose lurking, unconscious hope, still buoyed us up. Could we have known positively that we must endure eight months more of that imprisonment, I think we should have received with joy and gratitude our sentence to be taken out and shot.
Frequently prisoners asked us, sometimes with tears in their eyes:
"What shall we do? We grow weaker day by day. Staying here we shall be certain to follow our comrades to the hospital and the dead-house. The Rebels assure us that if we will enlist, we shall have abundant food and clothing; and we may find a chance of escaping to our own lines."
I always answered that they owed no obligation to God or man to remain and starve to death. Of the two thousand who did enlist, nearly all designed to desert at the first opportunity. Their remaining comrades had no toleration for them. If one who had joined the Rebels came back into the yard for a moment, his life was in imminent peril. Two or three times such persons were shockingly beaten, and only saved from death by the interference of the Rebel guards. This ferocity was but the expression of the deep, unselfish patriotism of our private soldiers. These men, who carried muskets and received but a mere pittance, were so earnest that they were almost ready to kill their comrades for joining the enemy even to escape a slow, torturing death.