BELLE ISLE AND THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS.

597

Over three thousand boxes, sent to the captives in Libby Prison, and on Belle Isle in the James River, near, were stored close by the former building, where the writer saw a large portion of them, immediately after the evacuation of Richmond.

In the few indications here given of the condition of the Union captives in Libby Prison, we have a glimpse, only, of the horrors of the "starving time," in the history of such captives, in all parts of the country under the rule of the Conspirators. The finishing touch in the ghastly picture of the iniquity of those Conspirators, is given in the fact, that they prepared to blow up Libby Prison, with its starving inmates, with gunpowder, rather than allow them to regain their liberty. To the testimony concerning that premeditated act, already given in this work,' may be added that of Turner, the commandant of the prison, who said, in answer to the question of a captive officer, "Was the prison mined ?" "Yes, and I would have blown. you all to Hades before I would have suffered you to be rescued." A remark of Bishop Johns was corroborative as well as curious, in reply to the question, "Whether it

was a Christian mode of warfare to blow up defenseless prisoners ?" The Bishop replied, "I suppose the authorities are satisfied on that point, though I do not mean to justify it."?

The sufferings of the captives on Belle Isle, during the "starving time" were much greater than of those in Libby Prison, for the latter were under shelter.

3

Belle Isle was a small island of a few acres, in the James River, in front of Richmond, near the Tredegar Iron Works. A part of it was a grassy bluff, covered with trees, and a part was a low sandy barren, a few feet above the surface of the river, which there flows swiftly. There was a bridge across the James, over which the captives passed on their way to Belle Isle, which became truly a "Bridge of Sighs." Over the Richmond entrance to it might have been appropriately placed, the inscription which Dante saw over the gate of Hell-"He who enters here, leaves hope behind."

For the captives, the cool green grass that carpeted the hill on Belle Isle, and the shade of the trees that adorned it, had no blessings, for the prisoners were confined to the low and treeless sand-barren, and were never allowed,

See page 291.

2 Report of the Committee. 3 See engraving on page 288. This was the bridge of the Richmond and Petersburg railroad.

598

THE SUFFERING PRISONERS ON BELLE ISLE.

in the hottest weather, to leave it and go to the cooler spot a few rods off, that appeared so much like heaven, in comparison with the hell in which they were compelled to suffer. That barren spot, not to exceed five acres in extent, was surrounded by earth-works about three feet in height, with a ditch on both sides. Along the outer ditch guards were stationed about forty feet apart, and kept watch night and day. The prisoners were without shelter. At first there were a few ragged Sibley tents, but these soon disappeared. Notwithstanding this, an established station for prisoners, was in a country of forests, with lumber plentiful, not a movement was made, from the beginning, to erect barracks, or to make any humane provision for the comfort of those confined there. Quickly would the hundreds of mechanics sent there have constructed comfortable shelter for all, from the scorching sun and biting frost, but they were not allowed to have the raw material for the purpose. At one time there were no less than eleven thousand captives on that bleak space of five acres―" so crowded, according to the estimated area given them," says the Report, "there could not have been but the space of two feet by seven given them, and, at the most, three feet by nine, per man......... Stripped of blankets and overcoats, hatless often, shoeless often, in ragged coats and rotting shirts, they were obliged to take the weather as it came..... The winter came-and one of the hardest winters ever experienced in the South-but still no shelter was provided. The mercury was down to zero, at Memphis, which is further south than Richmond. The snow lay deep on the ground around Richmond. The ice formed in the James, and flowed in masses upon the rapids, on either side of the island. Water, left in buckets on the island, froze two or three inches deep in a single night. The men resorted to every expedient to keep from perishing. They lay in the ditch, as the most protected place, heaped upon one another, and lying close together, as one of them expressed it, 'like hogs in winter,' taking turns as to who should have the outside of the row. In the morning, the row of the previous night was marked by the motionless forms of those who were sleeping on in their last sleep-frozen to death!"

1963-64.

And while thus exposed to the frost, the prisoners were starving, and the only defender of exposed men from the severity of the cold, namely, wholesome and abundant food, was denied them. "The cold froze them," says the Report, "because they were hungry, the hunger consumed them because they were cold. These two vultures fed upon their vitals, and no one in the Southern Confederacy had the mercy or the pity to drive them away." And while hundreds of women were administering comforts to the sick and wounded insurgents in Northern prisons and hospitals, not one woman was ever seen upon Belle Isle while the Union captives were there. Many methods of cruelty to aggravate the sufferings of the prisoners on Belle Isle were resorted to. Unnecessary restrictions; brutal treatment of slight and oftentimes unconscious offenders; deprivation of the use of the running water, for bathing, in the summer, and scores of other operations calculated to crush the life out of the poor men. The sick were tardily taken to hospitals, there neglected and prematurely returned;' and every precaution seems to have

1 The Confederate Surgeon-General's Report showed that in the months of January, February and March. 1864, out of nearly 2,800 patients, about 1,400, or one-half the number, died. There was only a single hospital tent on Belle Isle. The sick were laid on dirty straw, on the ground, with logs for pillows.

ANDERSONVILLE PRISONER-PEN.

599

been taken to secure a daily diminution of the strength of the victims. As at Libby, so on Belle Isle, food and clothing sent to the captives, by friends, were withheld, and often appropriated by the Confederates. "As the weary months drew on, hunger told its inevitable tale on them all. They grew weak and emaciated. Many found that they could not walk; when they attempted it, a dizziness and a blindness came, and they fell to the ground. Diarrhea, scurvy, congestion of the lungs, and low fevers set in.

And what was done in prison and hospital to our private soldiers on Belle Isle, and to our officers in Libby, was done nearly all over the South. The very railroads can speak of inhuman transportations from one point to another of the sick, the wounded, and the unwounded together, crowded into cattle and baggage cars, lying and dying in the filth of sickness, and the blood of undressed wounds."?

But we will consider the revolting picture of atrocities at Libby Prison and Belle Isle no longer. It remains for us only to briefly notice Ander. sonville Prison, the most extensive, as it was the most infamous, of all the prisoner-pens into which Union captives were gathered. It was in an unhealthy locality, on the side of a red-clay hill, near Anderson Station, on the Southwestern railroad, in Georgia, about sixty miles south from Macon, and surrounded by the richest of the cotton and corn-growing regions of that State. The site was selected, at the suggestion it is said of Howell Cobb, the commander of the District, by Captain W. S. Winder, son of the Confederate Commissary of prisoners. It comprised twenty-seven acres of land, with a swamp in its center. A choked and sluggish stream flowing out of another swamp, crawled through it, while within rifle-shot distance from it flowed a large brook fifteen feet wide and three feet deep, of pure, delicious water. Had this been inclosed within the pen, the prisoners might have drank and bathed as much as they pleased. As that would have endangered the success of the murderous scheme of the Conspirators, it was not included. Another comfort was denied. The spot selected for the pen was covered with pine trees, which would have made a grateful shade for the captives. Winder gave orders for them to be cut down. When a spectator ventured to suggest that the shade would alleviate the sufferings of the captives, that officer, acting under higher authority, replied: "That is just what I am not

1 Colonel Ely, of the Eighteenth Connecticut, saw one of his men, a school-mate, and highly respectable citizen of Norwich, starving, and was permitted to throw him a hamn. When the poor fellow crawled to get it, the rebel guard charged bayonets upon him, called him a “damned Yankee,” and took the ham themselves. This is only a single item of like testimony of a cloud of witnesses examined by the Committee of the Sanitary Commission. 2 Report of the Committee, &c.

It is said to be the most unhealthy part of Georgia, and was probably selected as a depot for prisoners, on account of this fact."-Report of Captain James M. Moore to the Quartermaster-General,

4 Report of an Expedition to Andersonville, by Miss Clara Barton, for the purpose of identifying and marking the graves of the dead prisoners there. The labors of that remarkable young woman, during the war, in acts of benevolence and humanity, in hospitals and on the field, can scarcely be appreciated.

5 A most curious circumstance, attested by many eye-witnesses, occurred in that prisoner-pen during its occupation. The stream that moved sluggishly through the pen, and which was made a noisome cess-pool by the guards outside, was the only water the prisoners were allowed to drink. They dug some shallow wells, and thus obtained a little water that, for awhile, was somewhat purer than the surface pools. At length, one night the captives had a prayer-meeting around a large stump of a tree. A thunder-storm soon followed. On the following morning a spring of delicious water was found flowing out of the ground from near the stump, and continued to do so during the remainder of the confinement of the prisoners there It was a fountain of unspeakable blessings from the hand of God. Miss Barton, in her Narrative, says, it "broke out from the solid ground, near the foot of the northern slope, just under the western dead-line. It is still there-cool and clearthe only pleasing object in this horrid place."

600

THE FIENDISHNESS OF WINDER.

going to do! I will make a pen here for the damned Yankees, where they will rot faster than they can be sent."1

Howell Cobb issued orders for six hundred negroes to be impressed for the purpose of constructing a stockade around the designated inclosure. It received its first prisoners (soldiers of the New Hampshire, Connecticut, New Jersey and Michigan infantry), eight hundred in number, on the 15th of February, 1864, when batteries were planted at four points, bearing upon the inclosure, and a heavy guard was established, numbering at one time, three thousand six hundred men. The pen was a quadrangle, with two rows of stockades, from twelve to eighteen feet in height; and seventeen feet from the inner stockade was the "dead-line," over which no man could pass and live. Raised above the stockade, were fifty-two sentry boxes, in each of which was a guardsman perpetually, ready and eager to "kill a Yankee" whenever the infraction of a rule would permit. The perpetrators of such murders were generally rewarded by the Winders with a furlough.

The fiendish intentions of these men were carried out as far as possible, and the atrocities committed in the great prisoner-pen there established were awful in the extreme. It is difficult to write with calmness, with the terrible testimony in full volume before us. The details are too shocking even to make it proper to present an abstract here. Suffice it to say, that Winder, with his son, nephew, Wirz, and others, performed their horrid task, with full license to do as they pleased, with alacrity and awful effect. At one time more than thirty thousand human beings-the fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, of anxious, waiting, watching women in desolate homes hundreds of miles away, were confined on that twenty-seven acres of land, reeking with generators of disease and death; sometimes parched with the sun, at

Spencer's Narrative of Andersonville.

2 It is with extreme reluctance that the writer puts on record in this work, the coarse and profane language of one of the agents of the Conspirators, in the business of the starving of prisoners. It is only given to show the manner in which efforts to relieve the sufferings of the Union captives were met. It is but one of many instances, at Andersonville and elsewhere, and may account for the fact that no woman was ever seen in the prison camp at Belle Isle. The incident here given is related by Mr. Spencer, in his Narrative of Andersonville. He says a humane physician of Americus, în Georgia (Dr. B. J. Head), and his wife, moved to pity by a knowledge of the sufferings of the prisoners, attempted to furnish them with some food and clothing. Mrs. Head interested other women, and in the face of insults and discouragements, they collected a quantity sufficient to be of real service. A clergyman (Mr. Davies) told General Winder what the women were about, and the latter promised to allow them to give the relief. A little party soon afterward proceeded to Andersonville with supplies, and a permit was asked of the provost-marshal, Lieutenant Reed, for them to be passed in. Reed, with an oath, refused, and when told by Dr. Head that General Winder had authorized it, said that he did not believe it-that he "was not such a damned fool as that." Some rebel officer sitting there, said the doctor ought to be hung for his Yankee sympathies, and that he was ready to put the rope around his neck. office, the doctor went to General Winder, when the following conversation, reported by Mr. Spencer, occurred, in the presence of the benevolent women who accompanied him :

Driven from the

- It's a

from

The doctor requested a pass to take the things to the hospital. "I'll see you in hell first," returned the general. "You're a damned Yankeee sympathizer, and all those connected with you." "You are mistaken, general," said the doctor. "You know that I am no Yankee sympathizer, sir. I do sympathize with suffering humanity, and this is a mission of mercy." "God damn your mission of mercy!" cried the general. "I wish that you, and every other damned Yankee sympathizer, and every God damned Yankee, too, were all in hell together!" "But, general," rejoined the doctor, "we are here by your express permission, given to Mr. Davies." damned lie!" he replied. "I never gave him or any one else permission to keep the damned starving, and rotting, too, if they choose." "Well, general, will you allow the provisions to go in this time. now that they are up here?" "No, by God, not the first damned morsel shall go in," returned the general. At this moment the little provost-marshal, Reed, entered the office hastily, and said, "Give me an order to have these goods confiscated." "I don't think I've got the power to do that, Reed," replied he, "but I've got the power to prevent the damned Yankees from having them, and, by God, they sha'n't!" Fearing the women and biruself might be subjected to personal violence, if he pressed the matter further, Dr. Head advised the relinquistament of the attempt to do an act of mercy. The load of necessaries which they brought, filled a four-mule wagon, and

were seized and used by the Confederates.

THE CONFEDERATES HAD SUFFICIENT SUPPLIES.

601 others flooded with filthy water; exposed to frost and heat; to the bullets of brutal guards used in wanton sport; beaten, bruised and cursed; driven to madness and idiocy; starved into skeletons; and, worse than all, tortured by the false declaration, made only to lacerate, that their Government had forsaken them, thus leaving them no other hope for relief from misery, than death. To nearly fourteen thousand sufferers, that everlasting relief came.. The graves of twelve thousand nine hundred and twenty of the victims tell the dreadful tale. Of these only about four hundred and fifty are unknown.' It was pleaded, in extenuation, that the Confederates had not the means. for feeding the Union prisoners, and that the lack of food for them was caused by its great scarcity. The Committee of the Sanitary Commission say that, after collecting all testimony possible to be obtained, "it appears. that the Southern army has been, ever since its organization, completely equipped in all necessary respects, and that the men have been supplied with every thing which would keep them in the best condition of mind and body,. for the hard and desperate service in which they were engaged. They knew nothing of famine or freezing. Their wounded and sick were never neglected. So do the few details of fact that could be extracted, without suspicion of their object, from the soldiers of the Southern army, confirm the reasoning which accounts for its efficiency.

"The conclusion is inevitable. It was in their power to feed sufficiently, and to clothe, whenever necessary, their prisoners of war. They were perfectly able to include them in the military establishments, but they chose to exclude them from the position always assigned to such, and in no respect. to treat them like men taken in honorable warfare. Their commonest soldier was never compelled, by hunger, to eat the disgusting rations furnished at the Libby to United States officers. Their most exposed encampment, however temporary, never beheld the scenes of suffering which occurred daily and nightly among United States soldiers in the encampment on BelleIsle. The excuse and explanation are swept away. There is nothing now between the Northern people and the dreadful reality."

To this conclusion of the Committee may be added the fact, mentioned on page 414, that throughout Georgia, the State in which the Andersonville prisoner-pen was situated, and where starvation was most rife, General Sherman found a superabundance of food..

It was pleaded that the Conspirators and military officers nearest to them, were ignorant of the cruelties inflicted by these subordinates. And General Robert E. Lee,-"a greatly over-rated military leader-a man of routine— cold, undemonstrative, ambitious, the pet of the Virginians because he was a member of one of their 'first families'-without the moral courage to take the responsibility-so popular with the army that he might have ended. the war any time after the capture of Atlanta," as one of the most success

1 Dorrance Atwater, of Connecticut, was a prisoner at Andersonville, and, in June, 1864, was detailed as clerk in the Confederate Surgeon's office, to keep the daily record of deaths. While there, he secretly copied the entire list of the dead, which he furnished to the Government after his release. In the cemetery, not far from the prisoner-pen, and which contained fifteen acres, a stick was placed at the head of each grave, on which was inscribed the name of the occupant, his rank, regiment, and company, and the date and cause of his death. By this means Miss Barton, and Government officers sent for the purpose, were enabled to identify the graves of nearly every dead soldier there. Mr. Atwater accompanied Miss Barton on her visit to the Andersonville prisoner-pen.