As the rebel authorities were now arresting and imprisoning every man who refused to bear arms for the Confederacy, we had additions made to our numbers every morning. On one occasion, among a crowd that were brought in, was a very large man. He was five feet eight inches high, and weighed three hundred and eighty pounds. He was a man of wealth and influence, and after having had innumerable servants to wait upon him, it came rather hard on him to be obliged to get his own place ready to sleep in. I say place, for our quarters were entirely innocent of a bed, and if we took turns sleeping on a blanket, we considered ourselves lucky. In the morning he spent some time in rising, for it needed his utmost efforts to get his vast body to an upright position. His exertions ruffled his temper exceedingly, and as the perspiration poured down his face, he muttered to himself over and over again:
“Now, old Henry, you’ve got yourself in a h—l of a fix, ain’t you, you d——d old fool!” Notwithstanding, this old man was very gentlemanly in his deportment.
Among a batch that had lately arrived, was a man whom the rebels were endeavoring to force to take the oath of allegiance to the Southern Confederacy. But his wife, who had been confined just after his arrest, fearing that his regard for her condition might induce him to submit to what was demanded, sent her son, who was only eight years old, to tell his father not to take the oath.
This brave little fellow came nearly one hundred miles on his mission, and, when he arrived, the guards refused to admit him. Undaunted, however, by the rebuff, the young hero got close to the picket-fence, and shouted with all his might:
“Pa! pa! don’t you swear! Oh, pa, don’t you swear! We can get along; I got the lot ploughed to put in the wheat!”
I wished at the time that this scene could be witnessed by the whole North. I feel convinced that in that case no one would raise a cry of indignation at the arrest of traitors who cry for peace, and who thus aid the South in oppressing the really true Union men in that region.
A gentleman by the name of Shaw, was the object of Confederate malice, and on no rational grounds whatever. Hoping to secure a place of refuge for his wife and helpless children, he had, some ten months previous, sought to leave his native State, Virginia, as he knew that the most terrible battles of the war must take place there. On the road he was met and seized by a band of ruffians, who, without the slightest explanation, tore him from the presence of his family, and hurried him away to jail, for disloyalty to the South. The last he had seen of his wife and four little ones was when they stood weeping and wringing their hands on the road-side, as his ruthless captors carried him from their sight. He had never heard tale nor tidings of them since, and what their fate had been he knew not. His case was only one of a thousand others.
“See the dire victim, torn from social life,
The shrieking babe, the agonizing wife.
See! wretch forlorn is dragged by hostile hands