This seemed to irritate the doughty Colonel, and he replied very fiercely:
“I’ll let you know that we have a government strong enough to hold you. You will have to go into close confinement.”
In a short time four men with loaded guns entered, and took Lieutenant Herbert from the prison. What was to be his fate we knew not, but in five days he returned, his appearance indicating that he had been exposed to severe treatment. He told me that he was taken to the old county jail, was there incarcerated in a damp, filthy, and bedless cell, swarming with odious vermin, and from which a negro had recently been taken to be executed. This barbarous outrage was inflicted for the sole purpose, in the language of his tormentor, “of letting him know that there was a Southern Confederacy.”
The sick and wounded prisoners in the room above us were suffering intensely, and we were not allowed the privilege of visiting them. In order to hold any communication at all with the inmates above, we were compelled to resort to an expedient which answered our purpose for the time. We obtained a small wire, and by letting it down from the upper window to the one below, and attaching a written communication to it, opened up a kind of telegraphic connection between the two departments of the prison. In this way we were daily informed of the transactions of our friends above.
We were now about to leave the prison, and we quitted it, feeling with Bishop King, that
“A prison is in all things like a grave,
Where we no better privileges have
Than dead men; nor so good.”
We were next taken to Mobile, Alabama. On our way thither, I conversed with a number of Southrons, among whom was an insignificant personage from South Carolina. He complained because their officers were not allowed to have their servants with them. He called it one of the most inhuman deprivations imaginable!