[IV.]
THE ESCAPE.
[CHAPTER XXXIX.]
"A good wit will make use of any thing: I will turn diseases to commodity."
King Henry IV.
Fifteen Months of Fruitless Endeavor.
We were constantly trying to escape. During the last fifteen months of our imprisonment, I think there was no day when we had not some plan which we hoped soon to put in execution. We were always talking and theorizing about the subject.
Indeed, we theorized too much. We magnified obstacles. We gave our keepers credit for greater shrewdness and closer observation than they were capable of. We would not start until all things combined to promise success. Therefore, as the slow months wore away, again and again we saw men of less capacity, but greater daring, escape by modes which had appeared to us utterly chimerical and impracticable.
Fortune, too, persistently baffled us. At the vital moment when freedom seemed just within our grasp, some unforeseen obstacle always intervened to foil our plans. Still, assuming a confidence we did not feel, we daily promised each other to persist until we gained our liberty or lost our lives. After the malignity which the Richmond authorities had manifested toward us, escape seemed a thousand-fold preferable to release by exchange.
I should hardly dare to estimate the combined length of tunnels in which we were concerned; they were always discovered, usually on the eve of completion. My associate was wont to declare that we should never escape in that way, unless we constructed an underground road to Knoxville—two hundred miles as the bird flies!
Even if we passed the prison walls, the chance of reaching our lines seemed almost hopeless. We were in the heart of the Confederacy. During the ten months we spent in Salisbury, at least seventy persons escaped; but nearly all were brought back, though a few were shot in the mountains. We knew of only five who had reached the North.