"Not with the roll of the stirring drum,
Nor the trumpet that sings of fame,"—
but as a plain, unpretending American citizen, a representative republican Chief Magistrate, unheralded, almost unattended, with "malice towards none, with charity for all," as he had but a few weeks previously proclaimed from the steps of the Capitol at Washington.
He visited Libby prison, breathed for a moment its fetid air, gazed upon the iron-grated windows and the reeking filth upon the slippery floors, and gave way to uncontrollable emotions.
Libby Prison! What horrors it recalls! What sighs and groans! What prayers and tears! What dying out of hope! What wasting away of body and mind! What nights of darkness settling on human souls! Its door an entrance to a living charnel-house, its iron-barred windows but the outlook of hell! It was the Inferno of the slave Confederacy. Well might have been written over its portal, "All hope abandon, ye who enter here."
Visiting the prison the next morning, I found it occupied by several hundred Rebels, who were peering from the grated windows, looking sadly upon the desolation around them. A large number were upon the roof, breathing the fresh air, and gazing upon the fields beyond the James, now green with the verdure of spring. Such liberty was never granted Union prisoners. Whoever approached the prison bars, or laid his hand upon them, became the victim of a Rebel bullet.
A. Lincoln.
There was a crowd of women with pails and buckets at the windows, giving the prisoners provisions and talking freely with their friends, who came not only to the windows, but to the door, where the good-natured sentinel allowed conversation without restraint.
The officer in charge conducted our party through the wards. The air was saturated with vile odors, arising from the unwashed crowd,—from old rags and dirty garments, from puddles of filthy water which dripped through the floor, ran down the walls, sickening to all the senses. From this prison fifteen hundred men were hurried to the flag-of-truce boat on Sunday, that they might be exchanged before the evacuation of the city. Many thousands had lived there month after month, wasting away, starving, dying of fever, of consumption, of all diseases known to medical science,—from insanity, despair, idiocy,—having no communication with the outer world, no food from friends, no sympathy, no compassion,—tortured to death through rigor of imprisonment, by men whose hearts grew harder from day to day by the brutality they practised.