“Behold this Ephraim to his idols joined—
Let him alone.”
I cannot speak very explicitly of our last three months. In telling this story, I have tried to picture only the better side of everything, and to make it imprisonment with the unpleasant parts left out. The story is “the truth,” but not “the whole truth,” and does not deny or conflict with the narratives of others. A sense of honor forbids that the better actions of our late enemies should be hidden, or that the good and the bad should be condemned together. Yet I may as well add here, for the benefit of certain persons, that the respect yielded to a southern soldier standing by his State, and heroically fighting for that false belief (in which he was bred), does not extend to those cowards who, “sympathizing with the South,” have skulked through the war behind the generous protection of the United States.
The Red River prisoners arrived, and were followed by numbers from Arkansas. Our soldiers and sailors of Camp Groce, who, four months before, left us hopefully sure of their release, came back—I need not say how sad and disappointed. Our number swelled from a hundred officers, to forty-seven hundred and twenty-five, officers, soldiers and sailors. Then followed a quarter of a year of loathsome wretchedness, beside which, the squallor and vice of a great city’s worst haunts appeared—and still appear, too bright and pure to yield a comparison.
The healthy character of our camp changed in a single week. Disease and death followed each other quickly in. The friendless sick lay shelterless on the ground around us, the sun scorching and blighting them by day, and the cold Texan night-wind smiting them by night. We walked over the dying and the dead, whenever we moved, and saw and heard their miseries through every hour. Beside the gate stood a pile of coffins, reminding all who went out and came in, of their probable impending fate. The vice and lawlessness that live in the vile haunts of cities sprang up and flourished here. The Confederate troops (idle after their victories on the Red River) came back to scour the country for deserters; and our unhappy conscript friends whispered that escape was hopeless now, and sought to comfort us by lamenting that no dim prospect of exchange cheered them. Our kind friends, the Allens, had gone, and the English Lieutenant-Colonel, who commanded, treated a few with surly civility, but the great mass with brutal cruelty. The horrors of these great prison camps are not yet told—will never be.
It is darkest before the dawn. We sat at dinner, one day, and a sailor, whose nick-name was Wax, came to the door, and said to his Captain, “The paroling officer, sir, who was here three months ago, has come back, and the guards say, there are some of us to be exchanged.” The Captain thanked the man, and we went on with our dinner. “I suppose,” some one remarked, “that if exchange ever does come, the news will come through Wax;” and then we dropped the subject; for a hundred times just such stories had been told, and a hundred times they had proved false. Captain Dillingham finished his dinner, and said he would go out and see that officer; perhaps the fellow had brought us some letters. The Captain came back in a few minutes, and said, as cheerily as though he were telling good news for himself, “You are to go, and I am to stay—none of us navy fellows to be exchanged.” Our rose had its thorn.
Three days of anxious waiting passed, and we bade our naval friends farewell. Some of them had been tried then six months longer than we had been. The trial of all went on for seven months more. They suffered, again and again, the sorest pain that can be inflicted on prisoners of war—the sight of those marching out who were captured long subsequent to themselves, and the fear that the injustice comes from the neglect of their own government. There was thrown upon them also a strong temptation; for there were desertions, I am sorry to say, from the army. The deserters were chiefly foreign born, but not all. The first, indeed, was a young man in the 2d Rhode Island Cavalry, a native of another New England State. Yet these sailors never faltered. If men who have fought bravely in battle, and who have been faithful through suffering, ever deserved to be welcomed home with honors and ovations, then did these sailors of the “Morning Light,” “Clifton,” and “Sachem.”
One thousand of us marched out of the crowded camp, We inhaled long breaths of the pure untainted air, yet dared not believe that this would end in exchange. It was the sixth time that some had marched over the same road, and we might well be incredulous. There was weary marching over burning sand, and the long-confined men grew weak and foot-sore, before they had marched an hour. The Confederate officers acted kindly, but the prisoners had seen chances of exchange lost by a single day’s delay, and they dragged themselves forward with a rigor that would have been cruelty had it been enforced on them. The white sand glaring under their feet, and the burning sun beating down through the breathless air, made a fiery ordeal. Shoeless men, with feet seared and blistered so that the hot sand felt like coals of fire, tottered along, not faster than a mile an hour, yet moving steadily. A few wagons, pressed from the harvest-fields, were covered with the sick and dying, and thus appearing, on the fifth day, we marched through the streets of Shreveport.
Here three days of insupportable longness awaited us; for Shreveport had been the dam that had always stopped prisoners and turned them back. On the fourth morning we marched on board of the steamboats that were to carry us down the Red River; and then, when Shreveport was fairly behind us, we breathed freer, and for the first time allowed ourselves to hope. At Alexandria we were stopped and landed, and made to endure two other days of suspense, but at last we re-embarked for the point of exchange.
The mouth of Red River was the place where our flag-of-truce boat was to meet us. We reached it before sunrise, and saw again the muddy current of the Mississippi. No flag-of-truce boat was in sight. But we saw two gun-boats that sentinelled the river, and our eyes rested on the flag that streamed over their decks, and silently proclaimed to us the still sovereign power of the United States. A shot from the gun-boats bade us stop. A small boat was lowered; we saw its crew enter it, and an officer come over the side; and then it pulled toward us. The officer inquired the object of the Confederate flag-of-truce, and told us the disheartening fact that he had heard nothing of this exchange. Then followed nine hours; that seemed as though they would never move away. A crowd of prisoners stood on the upper deck, their eyes strained on the river. The morning passed, the afternoon began, and still nothing could be seen. At two o’clock, a little puff of black smoke appeared far down the Mississippi, and a murmur ran through the crowd. An hour crawled away, and a large, white steamer pushed around a headland of the river, and came rapidly up against the muddy current. The strained eyes thought they saw a white flag, but it was hard to distinguish it on the white back-ground of the boat. Suddenly the steamer turned and ran in to the bank below us—the white flag streamed out plainly in view, and the decks were covered with Confederate prisoners.