With some of his fellow-prisoners he made several attempts at escape: once he was actually outside the jail, but was soon retaken. From the jail he was removed to the Macon stockade. Digging out thence, he was making his way towards our lines at Atlanta,—travelling only nights, resting in the woods by day,—when he was caught by a rebel scout, and returned to his prison quarters. From Macon he was taken to Millen, to be guarded in the stockade at Camp Lawton. Returned to Macon, he was ordered thence again to Andersonville. Shrinking from the horrors of that well-remembered pen, he was willing to risk every thing in another attempt at escape on his way thither. Going by rail, he determined to jump from the moving train; and, as several who had thus jumped with the cars in slow motion had been shot down by the guard, he made up his mind to leap while the train was at highest speed. On a down grade, he made the fearful plunge, and, as though by a miracle, he rolled unharmed down the embankment and into the ditch below. Quick as thought he was up and off for the woods. How pure and free seemed the fresh air of heaven! God speed and shield the flying boy! At the next station, the guard of the train gave the alarm, and soon a pack of five blood-hounds, with their mounted brutal keepers, were on his track, and in full pursuit. Bravely but vainly Manning sought to retain the freedom he had won at such fearful risk. Plunging into the recesses of a dismal swamp, he had brief hope that he should evade his pursuers; but soon the baying of the hounds was in his strained ears, and about him were the ringing echoes of the on-spurring guard. His hiding-place was speedily surrounded, and his hope of escape cut off. Yet he clung to dear liberty to the last. Again and again came the blaspheming shouts of his pursuers, demanding his surrender, and threatening him with "no quarter" if he compelled them to push further through the entangling briers and slimy morasses. He waded out into the sluggish waters of the inner swamp depths, to turn if possible the trail of the keen-scented hounds; but with undeviating directness they bounded towards him through brake and fen: he heard their labored breathing; then caught a glimpse of their flashing eyes and foaming jaws, as, with a vindictive howl at their long-delayed triumph, they leaped ferociously out of the thicket into the water where he stood, firm in despair. "Oh! 'twas a horrid moment," he said, "when they caught me and made a spring for my throat. I sank in the mire: a gurgling sound filled my ears—" One hound clutched him by the shoulder as he fell in the water: another sent his sharp fangs through the flesh of his side. As he rolled in the deadly struggle, the keepers came up and choked off the dogs, although one of them was urgent to have him torn in pieces because of his temerity. Weak, bruised, bleeding, despondent, Manning was carried to the Andersonville stockade, there to have his only nursing at the hands of the keepers of that accursed den, amid its exposures, its privations, its gloom, and its loathsomeness.
Oh, how wearily the hours dragged in Andersonville! Shivering, unsheltered, in the cold nights of rain; sweltering, all exposed, under the noonday's sun; cramped in the seething mass of the close-packed stockade, where half-naked men strove with each other for the last garment from the body of their latest dead comrade; weighed down with the poison-laden air of the malarial swamp; knowing no relief from the gnawings of hunger in the soul-straining processes of slow starvation; needing Christian courage to hold back from the relief of the dead-line; full of sad forebodings of evil to home loved ones who mourned him as dead, and from whom no comforting word could come; and chafing, most of all, in his overwrought and high-strung nervous powers, under enforced inaction at a time when every patriot's strength should tell for God and Government,—Manning's life wasted surely away, and his system imbibed fairly that disease which at length destroyed his firm and vigorous constitution, and brought him so early in life's day to the house appointed to all living.
IN THE REBEL RANKS.—LOYAL STILL.
Finding himself still held as a suspected spy, although the special charges against him had been lost, and denied the treatment of an ordinary prisoner of war, Manning prayerfully determined on a course he would not have counselled for one captured in open battle. The special orders from his department commander clearly authorized such a proceeding in his case, and he sought to find a temporary place in the rebel ranks, that he might escape to the Union lines with the valuable information he had in various ways obtained. Circumstances providentially favored him, and he adroitly managed to pass out with a squad who had regularly enlisted; and, without taking any oath of allegiance to the "Confederate" powers, he was counted and equipped as a soldier in that army, and hurried towards the rebel front. However any might question the propriety or policy of this movement on his part, it cannot be denied that in it he acted conscientiously, and verily felt he was doing God service. He was acting for his government, to which he was loyal as ever, and was carrying out the very letter and spirit of his specific instructions. "I gained all the information I could, from every thing that passed," he wrote, "and laid it up in my memory. When I saw a big bridge, I studied how I might blow it up; when I passed a large city, I was planning how I might set it on fire; and when I saw a leading general, I was contriving some way how I might blow his brains out. I was in the enemy's country,—nothing but enemies around me; and the more harm I could do them, the greater service I should be doing my country." It was not long before the Union cavalry made a dash on the rebel lines in Manning's vicinity. At once he ran for the battle-line of the assailing force, facing its sharpest fire, while also fired at by his rebel comrades who divined the object of his move; and he reached the Union ranks unharmed.
A PRISONER AMONG FRIENDS.—GOOD NEWS FOR HOME.
Once more under the old flag, Manning told his strange story to the commander before whom he was taken; but it is not to be wondered at that it was discredited, in the absence of proof. He was deemed a rebel prisoner, and as such was sent to the military prison at Alton, Illinois. Sending forward his complaint to his regiment, he was, after a few weeks' delay, ordered released by direct command from the War Department. It was then—for he would not write to his dear ones while a prisoner at Alton—that he sent his first letter home. The simple message,—
"St. Louis, Mo. March 10, 1865.
"My dear Loved Ones,—
"I still live, and you shall hear from me soon.
"Henry H. Manning."