Though with patience he stands waiting, with exactness grinds he all.”
CHAPTER XII
PRISONS AND PRISONERS
It is not my purpose to give a complete history of the military prisons in St. Louis during the war. There were several of them. They were for the most part improvised to meet the exigencies of the hour. The military authorities seized certain buildings belonging to the disloyal, which, by a little alteration, were easily and quickly made suitable for the reception of political prisoners. Among these buildings was the slave-pen, mentioned in the preceding chapter, at the corner of Fifth and Myrtle Streets. Another was the McDowell Medical College on Gratiot Street.
Dr. McDowell, who founded this college, and had conducted it successfully for many years, was one of the staunchest of pro-slavery men, and a pronounced and bitter secessionist. He was tall and imposing in appearance. His long, white locks, thrust back of his ears, hung down over his coat collar. His eyes gleamed from beneath shaggy, gray eyebrows. Any stranger would have noted him in a crowd as an unusual character. Although he was old, his step had the elasticity of youth. He was an antagonist that few men cared to encounter. For years he had been active in politics. On the stump he at times denounced those of opposite views in terms of unmeasured severity. On one occasion, having some apprehension that his opprobrious epithets might provoke violent opposition, just as he began his speech, as a warning to all antagonists, he drew his revolver and ostentatiously laid it down on the desk before him and then proceeded with his fiery harangue. At the beginning of the war he left our city for the more congenial society of the Southern Confederacy, and the military authorities confiscated his college building and made it serve the cause that its owner hated and denounced.
GRATIOT STREET PRISON, FORMERLY THE MCDOWELL MEDICAL COLLEGE.
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The military prisons of St. Louis were sanitary and well kept. No one within them was permitted unnecessarily to suffer. All had enough wholesome food. The fare of the prisoners was as good as that of the soldiers who guarded them. In winter, so far as it was possible, they were kept warm and comfortably clad. Most of them were incarcerated, not for ordinary criminal acts, but because taken in arms against the United States, or detected in aiding those who were intent on breaking up the Union. Not a few of them had been accustomed to the luxuries of life, and could not but contrast their prison with the homes from which they had come. Still, while they inevitably suffered more or less, taking everything into consideration, the government treated them with great leniency. Their friends were often permitted not only to minister to their necessities, but also to eke out their prison fare with the delicacies of the season.
But a few incidents, which came under my observation, and in some of which I was an active participant, will more clearly reveal what transpired in those military prisons than any general statements that I could make, however full and just they might be. Early in the war I received a note from an officer at the Arsenal, stating that the son of an honored Baptist minister of Illinois was a prisoner in the Guard-house and wished me to visit him. I at once went to see the young man in his prison-house. I found him in a wretched plight. The Guard-house was far from being a model of neatness. The young man’s clothing was begrimed and repulsive, his face and hands unwashed, his hair unkempt, and to his foot was riveted a chain to which was attached a heavy iron ball. He was cowed in spirit, and had nearly lost heart and hope. He timidly told me his story. He was a boy scarcely out of his teens. He had patriotically enlisted in the Union army, but having had a very imperfect notion of the rigorous discipline to which every soldier must necessarily be subjected, he had grown weary of his task and more than once had tried to desert, not fully realizing how heinous his offence was. I saw at a glance that, instead of being cast down on account of his heavy punishment, he ought to be grateful that he had not been court-martialed and shot. While his condition aroused my sympathy, I laid before him the gravity of his crime, then vainly pleaded with the military authorities for his release. They argued that his offence was so great he richly deserved further punishment, and that his release would be detrimental to the discipline of the army. The boy at last became very sick in his prison. His father, large both in body and in heart, came, and so put the case of his son before the officers in command, that they discharged him from the army.
This case was a type of many others. Some young men, among the hundreds of thousands that enlisted in the Northern and Southern armies, failed adequately to count the cost of what they so enthusiastically undertook to do. Two young men of St. Louis, who enlisted in the Confederate army, were doing duty under Price, in Missouri. November had come with its chilling storms of rain and sleet; and without a tent they were compelled to spend a night in the shelterless field. They had gathered some logs and sticks and were endeavoring, as the gusts of wind swept over them, to light a fire; but their kindling was wet and the wind would quickly blow out their matches. Shivering with cold that seemed to pierce to the very marrow of their bones, looking in blank despair on those wet sticks and logs, one of them said: “Joe, soldiering is not what it is cracked up to be. It is just hell, and I am going to get out of it as soon as I can.” Still he was an ardent Southerner, but just for a little his burning zeal was damped and cooled by a chill November rain.
But my chief experiences were with Confederate prisoners. While the disloyal of my own denomination abhorred my politics and exercised at best a rather strained and attenuated brotherly love towards me, when, for any cause, they were so unfortunate as to get into prison, they often urgently appealed to me for succor.