Despite such disappointments, however, when the time came, as it soon did, for the prisoners to leave Savannah, they did so with sentiments of gratitude for the comparatively humane treatment they had received at the hands of the Georgians, not unmingled, however, with apprehensions concerning their future, for it was openly rumored that they were destined to join their former fellow-prisoners now under fire of Gilmore's siege guns at Charleston.
CHAPTER XIX.
UNDER FIRE AT CHARLESTON.
Under siege. — Charleston Jail. — The Stars and Stripes. — Federal compliments. — Under the guns. — Roper Hospital. — Yellow Jack. — Sisters of Charity. — Rebel Christianity. — A Byronic stanza. — Charleston to Columbia. — "Camp Sorghum." — Nemesis. — Another dash for liberty. — Murder of Lieutenants Young and Parker. — Studying topography. — A vaticination. — Back to reality.
The next we see of Lieutenant Glazier is in the city of Charleston, South Carolina, on the twelfth of September, 1864. Coming Street on the morning of that day was crowded with people of every variety of calling, from the priest and sister of charity, out on their merciful errands, to the riff-raff and sans-culottes out on no errand at all but to help the excitement. The city was under siege.
At the end of the street a body of six hundred emaciated, broken-spirited, ragged men, escorted by a strong guard, marched along, and the busiest of the pedestrians paused to gaze upon them as they passed. Coarse and scurrilous was the greeting the captives received from the motley and shameless groups. A few of the more respectable citizens, however, spoke words of grace to them, and some added hopeful predictions of the final triumph of the Union cause. The prisoners were hurried forward to the yard of Charleston Jail, where for the first time in many weary months they beheld the glorious flag of their country floating in the breeze over Morris Island. Weak as they were the patriotic sentiment was still strong within and they gave one rousing cheer! Some, despite the curses of their guard, dancing like children, while others wept tears of joy.
CHARLESTON JAIL—CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA.
The jail, as Captain Glazier describes it, was a large octagonal building of four stories, surmounted by a tower. In the rear was a large workshop, in appearance like a bastile, where some of the prisoners were confined. As a lugubrious accessory to his own quarters, he had a remarkably clear view of a gallows, erected directly in front of his fragment of a tent. "The ground floor of the jail was occupied by ordinary criminal convicts; the second story by Confederate officers and soldiers, under punishment for military offences; the third by negro prisoners, and the fourth by Federal and Confederate deserters, and it is complimentary to the good sense of the rebels that deserters from either side were treated by them with equal severity." He gives a sad account of the terrible condition of the negro soldiers and their officers who were captured at Fort Wagner, and says the hospital at this place was "a lazar-house of indescribable misery."