Border and Bastille

by George A. Lawrence

I speak of the effect—moral, intellectual, and physical—produced by those eight weeks of imprisonment.

I do not wish to intimate that there were any actual hardships beyond the prevention of free air and exercise to be endured. More than this: I am ready and willing to allow, that certain privileges were conceded to me that I had no right to claim, which were granted to few, if any, of my fellows in misfortune. The Corporal of the Keys was a clerk in the house of Ticknor & Field, the great Boston publishers, before he became a soldier; and was disposed to show every consideration and indulgence to one whom he was pleased to consider a brother of the Literate Guild. The under-superintendent—Donnelly by name—treated one with a benevolence quite paternal. The monotony of my solitary confinement was often broken by his rambling chat and reminiscences of a gambler's life in the Far West; for he liked nothing better than lingering in my cell for an hour or so, when his day's work was done. After the prison doors were opened, I lingered for ten minutes within them, to exchange a farewell hand-grip with that quaint, kind old man. There was a stringent curfew-order, enjoining the extinguishment of all lights at nine, P. M.; but on condition of vailing my window with a horse-rug, so as not to establish a bad precedent, I was allowed to keep mine burning at discretion. Now some readers of these pages may think that a confinement, such as I have described, wherein, there was to be obtained a sufficiency of meat, drink, tobacco, and light literature, is not, after all, a peine forte et dure; and that it is both weak and unreasonable thereanent to make one's moan. So, in bygone days, when a lazy fit was strong upon me, have I thought myself. I am not malicious enough to wish that the most contemptuously skeptical of such critics may be undeceived, at the price which I paid for the learning. It is possible that a person of settled sedentary habits, endowed not only with powerful resources within himself, but also with the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, might hold out well enough for awhile, more especially if supported by the reflection that he was suffering for his country's good or for his own private advantage. But take the converse example of a man unsupported by any consolations of patriotism or peculation, of a temperament somewhat impatient, and prone to anger, accustomed, too, from youth upwards, to constant habits of strong out-door exercise, with such an one I fancy it will fare—very much as it fared with me. It is an established fact, that a few months' confinement within four walls, without stint of food or aggravation of punishment, will bring an athletic Red Indian to the extreme of bodily prostration, if not to mortal sickness.

It is humiliating to confess, but I fear unhappily true, that in despite of all advantages of a civilized education, some of us, under like circumstances, will go down as helplessly as the noble savage.

Would you like to hear of the process? It is not pleasant to look upon, or to tell.

The first few days are spent in an uneasy, irritable expectation that every hour will bring some news—good or bad—from the world without, bearing on your own especial case; then comes the frame of mind wherein you allow that there must be certain official delays, and begin to calculate, wearily, how far the wire-drawn formalities will be protracted, making a liberal margin for unexpected contingencies: this phase soon passes away: then comes the bitter, up-hill fight of hoping against hope; how long this may endure depends much on temperament—more on bodily health; but in most cases it is soon over, and is succeeded by the last state, ten thousand times worse than the first: slowly, but very surely, the dense black cloud of utter listlessness settles down, never broken thereafter save by brief flashes of a futile, irrational ferocity. All your ideas move round like tired mill-horses, in the narrowest circle, with an unhappy Ipse Ego for its centre: all the passing events of the outward world seem unnaturally dwarfed and distant, as if seen through an inverted telescope: the struggles of stranger nations move you no more than the battles on an ant-hill; the only question of civil or religious liberty in which you feel the faintest interest is the unimportant one involving your own personal freedom. And throughout you are shamefully conscious that this indifference is not philosophical, but simply selfish.

So much for the morale. Does the physique fare better.

When you enter the gaol, there is probably laid up in your lungs a certain store of fresh, free air, which takes some time to exhaust itself; but soon you begin to draw your breath more and more slowly, and to feel that the atmosphere inhaled no longer refreshes you; no wonder—it is laden with compressed animal life. Then a dull, hot weight closes round your brows, as if a heavy, fever-stricken hand was always clasping them; there it lies—at night, when the drowsiness which is not sleep overcomes you—in the morning, when you wake, with damp linen and dank hair: plunge your forehead in ice-cold water; before the drops have dried there it is burning—burning again. The distaste for all food grows upon you, till it becomes a loathing not to be driven away by bitters or quinine: there is no savor in the smoke of Kinnekinnick, nor any flavor in the still waters of Monongahela. Physical prostration of necessity speedily ensues. Let me mention one fact—not in vaunting, but in proof that I do not speak idly. When we were trying those athletics at Greenland, the day after my capture, I could rend a broad linen band fastened tightly round my upper arm by bending the biceps: when I had been a month in Carroll place I had to halt, at least once, from absolute breathlessness and debility, on the stairs leading from the yard to the third story; my pulse was almost imperceptible. By this time my sight had become so seriously affected that I was absolutely unable to read the clearest print; even now, a month after my enfranchisement, though keen Atlantic breezes and home comforts have worked wonders, I cannot write five consecutive sentences without a respite.

I am forced to quote my own experience; but I know that it could be matched, if not exceeded, by very many cases of equal or worse suffering.

Long confinement falls, of course, intensely harder on a stranger than on a native. The latter, I suppose, can never quite divest himself of an interest in passing events, which the former, at the best of times, can but faintly share: besides which, most Americans—not purely political prisoners—have either a definite term of captivity to look forward to, or are, in one way or other, subject to the chances of exchange.

If the Federal Government had avowed at once, that it was their sovereign pleasure to keep an Englishman in durance for a certain period, without attempting to excuse the arbitrary stretch of authority, one would have chafed, I suppose, under the injustice, but still submitted, as it is the duty of manhood to submit to any inevitable necessity. It was the doubt and indefiniteness of the whole affair that made it so inexpressibly exasperating. It was bad enough to have no palpable adversary to grapple with: it was worse to have no specific charge. As I had contravened a general order by crossing the Federal lines without a pass, the Legation did not apply for my unconditional release: it merely pressed for the inquiry and trial that, in most civilized countries, a criminal can claim as a right. I was never confronted with any judicial authority from the moment that I entered the prison doors till they opened to let me go free: I never received any official intimation of the reasons for my prolonged detention; and Lord Lyons' repeated applications were at last only met by a vague assertion that they "had reason to believe that an aide-de-camp's commission, signed by General Lee, had reached me at Baltimore." There was not, of course, the faintest scintilla of evidence to establish anything of the sort. While in America I received no communication whatever—written or verbal—from any person connected with the Confederate Government or army.