Sword and Pen / Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier

by John Algernon Owens

For a long time you have doubtless waited with anxiety some intelligence of your absent son, which would tell you of his health, and his prospects of release from the disagreeable restraints of prison life; and I am now delighted to find this opportunity of writing to you. Since my last letter, which was dated at Libby Prison, I have been confined at Danville, Virginia; Macon and Savannah, Georgia; and at this point. My health for the most part has been very poor, which I attribute to the inactivity of prison life. I have also suffered much for want of clothing. I have a pair of shoes on to-day that I bought more than a year ago; have run about barefoot for days and weeks during the past summer; many of my comrades have been compelled to do the same. I do not look for a general exchange before winter, though I hope and pray that it may take place to-morrow. There is now an opportunity for sending boxes to prisoners. I should be glad to receive one from home if convenient. Please give my love to all the family circle. Remember me to my friends, and believe me ever

Your affectionate son,

Willard.

The days passed anxiously with Glazier, when the yellow fever began its inroads upon the prisoners. He had now, at the same moment, to face death at the hands of man, and by the pestilence—a condition of things to which the bravest spirit might succumb. One great source of consolation was derived from the visits of the Sisters of Charity, who were always found where suffering and peril prevailed. Writing of these angelic women, Captain Glazier says:—"Confined as we are, so far away from every home comfort and influence, and from all that makes life worth living, how quickly do we notice the first kind word, the passing friendly glance! Can any prisoner confined here ever forget the 'Sisters of Charity?' Ask the poor private now suffering in the loathsome hospital so near us, while burning with fever, or racked with pain, if he can forget the kind look, the gracious word given him by that sister. Many are the bunches of grapes—many the sip of their pure juice, that the sufferer gets from her hands. They seem, they are 'ministering angels;' and while all around us are our avowed enemies, they remain true to every instinct of womanhood. They dare lift the finger to help, they do relieve many a sufferer. All through the South our sick and wounded soldiers have had reason to bless the 'Sisters of Charity.' They have ministered to their wants and performed those kind womanly offices which are better to the sick than medicine, and are so peculiarly soothing to the dying. These noble women have attended their sick-beds when other Christian ladies of the South looked on unpityingly, and turned away without even tendering the cheap charity of a kind word. They have done what others were too scornful and cruel to do—they have done what others did not dare do. They were, for some inscrutable reason, permitted to bestow their charities wherever charities were needed. Their bounties were bestowed indiscriminately on Federal and Confederate sufferers, and evidenced a broad philanthropy untainted by party-feeling or religious bigotry. Many a poor soldier has followed them from ward to ward with tearful eyes.... Were other Christian denominations in the South as active in aiding us as the Catholics have been, I might have some faith in 'Rebel Christianity.'"

This is no mean tribute to the beneficent influences of the Catholic church, albeit the pen of a Protestant records it; but the facts fully justify him. Protestant England had one—the Church of Rome has her legions of Florence Nightingales. They are found in the camp, and the hospital, and the prison—wherever human sympathy can palliate human suffering; they are to be found where even wives and mothers flee before the dreaded pestilence, and these ministers of divine love, like light and air, and the dews of Heaven, visit alike the rich and poor, the sinner and the saint; the only claim they recognize being the claim of suffering and misfortune.

Willard Glazier remained under the guns of his friends until the fifth of October, and during his sojourn here had various opportunities of forming an acquaintance with vagrant shot and shell that struck or exploded near the hospital building, but fortunately did no greater damage to its inmates than create "a scare."

What was much more serious was the prevalence of the deadly fever, which was of a most malignant type, and carried off, among its many victims, the Confederate commander and his adjutant. The prisoners therefore were removed—the authorities assigning as their reason for the step, the "danger to which they would be exposed on account of the fever;" and although, at the time, it appeared an anomaly to the prisoners, "after bringing them there to be murdered by their own guns, to remove them for the purpose of saving them from death in another shape,"—yet it is possible such was the case. At all events they were removed, and their "Poet Laureate"—Lieutenant Ogden, of Wisconsin—wrote a farewell poem, containing among others, the following "Byronic" stanza:

"Thy Sanctuaries are forsaken now;
Dark mould and moss cling to thy fretted towers;
Deep rents and seams, where struggling lichens grow,
And no sweet voice of prayer at vestal hours;
But voice of screaming shot and bursting shell,
Thy deep damnation and thy doom foretell.
The 'fire' has left a pile of broken walls,
And Night-hags revel in thy ruined halls!"

Who will say that a dread Nemesis has not overtaken the metropolis of the Palmetto State? Streets, once the busy scene of commerce and industry, now covered with grass, in this city of secession—formerly the head and front of treason and rebellion and the defiant advocate of human slavery!

Escorted by the Thirty-second Georgia Volunteers, Glazier and his fifteen hundred companions were marched through the principal streets of the city to the depot, where they took the cars for Columbia, the State capital. None will ever forget the parade of ragged and bearded men through King Street. But the Georgian guards, while strictly attentive to duty, showed the politeness and demeanor of gentlemen. He says of them, at this point in the history of his imprisonment, "the Georgia troops seem to be by far the most civil and gentlemanly of all the Southern army. They were the most respectable in appearance, most intelligent and liberal in conversation, and to a greater extent than others, recognized the principle that a man is a man under whatever circumstances he may be placed, and is entitled to humane treatment. They very generally addressed the prisoners as 'gentlemen.'"