At night, the lady told us that more people had come to her house during the day than ever visited it in a month before; and we were marched back through the darkness, to our first place of concealment.
X. Tuesday, December 27.
In the barn through the whole day. A messenger brought us a note from two late fellow-prisoners, Captain William Boothby, a Philadelphia mariner, and Mr. John Mercer, a Unionist, of Newbern, North Carolina, who had been in duress almost three years. They were now hiding in a barn two miles from us. They escaped from Salisbury two nights later than we, paying the guards eight hundred dollars in Confederate money to let them out.
Thurston at once joined them. During the rest of the journey, we sometimes traveled and hid together for several days and nights; but, when there was special danger, divided into two companies, one keeping twenty-four hours in advance—the smaller the party, the less peril being involved.
Now, for the first time, we began to have some hope of reaching our lines. But the road was still very long, and fraught with many dangers. We examined the appalling list of dead, which I had brought from Salisbury, and talked much of our companions left behind in that living entombment. Remembering how earnestly they longed and prayed for some intelligent, trustworthy voice to bear to the Government and the people tidings of their terrible condition, we pledged each other very solemnly, that if any one of us lived to regain home and freedom, he should use earnest, unremitting efforts to excite sympathy and secure relief for them.
Promises to aid Suffering Comrades.
It may not be out of place here to say, that upon reaching the North, before visiting our families, or performing any other duties, we hastened to Washington, and used every endeavor to call the attention of the authorities and the country to the Salisbury prisoners. Before many weeks, all who survived were exchanged; but more than five thousand—upwards of half the number who were taken to Salisbury five months before—were already buried just outside the garrison.
Those five thousand loyal graves will ever remain fitting monuments of Rebel cruelty, and of the atrocious inhumanity of Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War, who steadfastly refused to exchange these prisoners, on the ground that we could not afford to give the enemy robust, vigorous men for invalids and skeletons, and yet refrained from compelling them to treat prisoners with humanity, by just and discriminating retaliation upon an equal number of Rebel officers, taken from the great excess held by our Government.
Blind and Unquestioning Loyalty.
To-day, as usual, we saw a large number of the Union mountaineers. Theirs was a very blind and unreasoning loyalty, much like the disloyalty of some enthusiastic Rebels. They did not say "Unionist," or "Secessionist," but always designated a political friend thus: "He is one of the right sort of people"—strong in the faith that there could, by no possibility, be more than one side to the question. They had little education; but when they began to talk about the Union, their eyes lighted wonderfully, and sometimes they grew really eloquent. They did not believe one word in a Rebel newspaper, except extracts from the Northern journals, and reports favorable to our Cause. They thought the Union army had never been defeated in a single battle. I heard them say repeatedly: