“Well, you can get that back in the profit of one good trip.”
“And den it vash all borrowed monish.”
“Then that is so much the better—you won’t lose anything.”
“Oh, you don’t know all, Mr. Benty. My poor wife, she yust git a leetle baby, unt ven she hear dis it makes her right down stone dead.”
From conversations had with Western prisoners, I judge there is more intense bitterness of feeling in the West, particularly in Missouri and Kentucky, than in the Eastern border section. One old Missourian in our room said he was from Schuyler County, and had been in prison since the 12th of August. That one of the prisoners in the Court House, named Ford, was shot with a pistol by one of the guards.
He said the Union men were called “Sheepskins,” and they perpetrated the most villainous outrages. That on one occasion a party arrested a man, and while carrying him through the village, some little boys playing marbles, cried out: “Here comes the militia,” and ran away. One of the “Sheepskins” fired into the crowd of children and killed a boy twelve years old. They picked the child up, carried him to his home, and threw him in the door to his mother, saying: “Here is one we’ve kept from growing up to be a damned Secesh.”
Another man told me he was in prison with some of the men who were executed by General McNeil. He said he was playing cards with Wade when he was called out. Wade put down his cards, saying he knew he was called out to be killed. There was among the doomed men one old man with a large and helpless family. A brave young hero volunteered to take the old man’s place, saying he had none to leave behind to regret him or feel the loss. He was accepted. His savage executioners, dumb to this noble exhibition of heroism and self-sacrifice, sent him off on his coffin with the others.
I afterward learned the facts concerning this brutal tragedy:
In the Fall of 1862, the Confederates, under Colonel James Porter, captured the town of Palmyra, and during their occupancy a man named Andrew Allsman, an ex-soldier of the Third Missouri Cavalry (said to have been a spy), disappeared.
After the Confederates evacuated the town and McNeil returned, he learned of the abduction of Allsman, and thereupon issued a notice, that unless Allsman was returned within ten days he would retaliate upon the Rebel prisoners then in his hands. At the expiration of the ten days, ten prisoners then in his custody: Willis Baker, Thomas Humston, Morgan Bixler, and John Y. McPheeters, of Lewis County; Herbert Hutson, John M. Wade and Marion Lair, of Ralls County; Captain Thomas A. Sidner, Monroe County; Eleazer Lake, Scotland County, and Hiram Smith, Knox County, were selected—ten men, to give up their lives for one man missing.