Breathe the enlivening spirit, and fix
The generous purpose in the glowing breast.”
Not a man in the prison with us could read! Bill practiced largely upon their credulity, and when he desired a little “contraband” fun, he would go to the window, which was always crowded outside with “secesh,” and cry out:
“What will you have?”
“We want to see a Yankee,” they frequently answered.
“Well, now you see me, and what do you think of us?”
“What are you ’uns all down here fighting we ’uns fur?”
Bill would reply: “For a hundred and sixty acres of land and your negroes.”
“Calico Bill” was a genuine, shrewd and intelligent Yankee, from the State of Maine. He gave me a sketch of his history, in which I learned that he was teaching in a private family in Florida, when the war broke out, was pressed into the Confederate service, and had quarreled with his captain, who undertook to exercise an authority over him, incompatible with his native freedom. He said he would rather meet his fate there than to die in the rebel army. He said there were many Northern men in their army, and that three-fourths of them would vote for the old banner and Constitution, if uninfluenced by their leaders. “But,” he added, “you see how this fellow does” (referring to the man he had been drilling); “and there are thousands in their army just as ignorant as he.”
When he went for a bucket of water, he would call out, “Come on, about thirty or forty of you infernal rebels, and go with me after some water!”