CHAPTER IV.

COMMITMENT TO FORT WARUEN.-Horrours of the Yankee Bastile.-Torture of "A Brutal Villain."-A Letter to Secretary Welles.

I was taken from a sick bed to my granite prison and sack of straw. I had been suffering many months from nervous prostration; and so much had it been aggravated, by the anxieties of my situation, that I had taken myself to bed. I was lying there, the morning of Sunday, the 29th of May, when a deputy of the United States marshal entered my room, and ordered me to accompany him to Fort Warren. There was no explanation of this harsh and immediate summons, except that "orders had come to that effect from Washington." In vain I plead the confines of sickness, and sought the delay of a single day. "Could I see the marshal?" "No.. The orders from Washington were to imprison me forthwith.'” "What was I accused of? Why was it that the other passengers on the Greyhound were so graciously liberated, and I alone sent to Fort Warren?" The officer did not know. So, without explanation, without notice, without process of any sort, I had been selected, the single victim, to suffer for. the Greyhound, while her master was off for Canada, and the other passengers had been permitted, without a whisper of investigation, to proceed in the same direction. Perhaps my imprisonment, under these circumstances, was a complimentary distinction; but I must confess that, at the time, I could not, as the Yankees say, (6 see it."

In the beautiful Sabbath-day, full of sunshine, through the sparkling water, and along the green islands of the bay, I was carried to my prison-house, the sight of whose solid masonry, rising above the bright water, smote my heart with a strange agony. What mockery all this flashing and picturesque scenery of Boston bay, as I passed through it on the way to prison. Through it all I could see the horrid maw of the jail that a waited me, and the black veil that was to fall over my hopes, and drape them in mourning.

I was presented to Major Cabot, commandant of the fort, "registered," and was then asked to surrender my money and give an account of my effects. The latter proceedings were undertaken by Lieutenant Parry, the officer "in charge

of prisoners," who dispensed with all that was unpleasant in them, and took my word that I had "neither weapons nor documents" in my baggage. This officer was very civil, and not only spared me the indignity of a search, but addressed me some polite common-places, kindly intended I thought, to compose my mind. He inquired when I had left Richmond; and asked with an appearance of great interest, after the condition of General Longstreet, who had been wounded before I had taken my departure from the Confederacy,

Here let me say, once for all, that I am satisfied the officers of Fort Warren showed, to the prisoners in their charge, all the kindness they could venture; but at the same time I am forced to declare that this disposition could do but little to mitigats that system of punishment of prisoners of war demanded at Washington.

I was consigned to a casemate, and a sack of straw for

my bed.

As I passed the sally-port, in charge of a corporal, my name was called out, and one of a melancholy group of men advanced to meet me. It was V. of Richmond, but I scarcely recognized him, for his hair had turned gray, and his prison attire made him a trange spectacle. "You here!" I exclaimed; "how long have you been in this prison?" Eighteen months!" was the solemn reply. I had never heard in Richmond of his arrest. But there were other terrible disclosures for me, which I had never heard in Richmond; which the people had never heard in Richmond; but which the Government in that Confederate city, had assuredly heard, and had kept to itself in silence and submission.

Kidnapped under a neutral flag, on the high seas; brought as human prize into the shambles of Boston; dragged from a sick bed into prison, when once I' had passed through the sally-port of Fort Warren, I found a catalogue of misery that I never could have supposed to exist even in that most famous of Yankee bastiles.

Here in this fort, companions of my misfortune, were one hundred and sixtyodd men, the majority of them prisoners for more than a year. In a place facetiously called "the gun-boat," I found these men packed in three apartments, fifteen by sixteen feet.

Here, entombed in solitary confinement, were seven brave soldiers of the Confederacy, taken in Virginia and Tennessee..

Here, sentenced by a Yankee court-martial to fifteen years imprisonment, were two Confederate officers, Major Armesy and Lieutenant Davis; thus punished for recruiting Confederate troops in Western Virginia.

Here, in the quarters allotted to solitary imprisonment, brought here in dou

ble irons, was Captain Brattle, of Wheeler's cavalry, conveniently designated as a guerrilla, and treated as a felon.

Here I found starvation the uniform discipline of the prison; our rations these: one slice of bread for breakfast, one slice of bread and a morsel of pork for dinner, one slice of bread for supper-the slices so thin that one could almost see through them-these and a tin-cup of stinking cistern water comprising the entire bill of fare.

I did not learn these facts without a shudder. How long was I to continue here, and the words "how long?" seemed to reverberate in my heart like a knell. I was too sick to eat, and did not go to the cook-house, where, I was already informed, another horrour of my prison awaited me. I had learned enough for one day.. As I laid upon my wretched bed at night, and watched the thin slice of moonlit sky, that shone through the grating, my nature seemed absorbed with unutterable horrour.

The hardships of a prison, its physical restraints, its beggar diet, are, after all, but slight evils, compared with the mental distress (aggravated, in my case, by a nervous constitution and diseased body), occasionally taking the form of a morbid agony, as the spirit wrestles for LIBERTY. For the first time in my life I felt the meaning of this precious word—no longer now the mere decantatum of poetry and sentiment. I had often used it as an idle ornament in language, but I little knew the sweet and hidden meanings of this noble word; how it signified the vital passion of man's nature, and contained the richest jewel of his inheritance from God.

I found in the morning newspapers the announcement of my incarceration, coupled with such comments as might be expected from the cowardly malignity. of a Yankee, where its object is a helpless prisoner. The announcement in one paper was entitled "A Brutal Villain." Another administered the following warning:

"Some stronghold like that in which he has been placed is the safest quarters Pollard can find, as he is a doomed man among the surviving prisoners who have been released from Richmond."

But the following in a Pennsylvania paper (Pittsburg Dispatch) was a complimentary notice, especially to be preserved:

"To this man's course, unfeeling brutality our men attribute no small share of the indignities and hardships heaped upon them in Richmond, and his voice was never heard but against them

--never raised save to inculcate the justice or expediency of some newly devised brutality. He is one of that little band of malignants who have been engaged, heart and hand, for three years, in spreading among the ignorant masses of the South, the most villainous misrepresentations of the Government and the Northern people, and who have done more, as journalists, to sustain the rebel cause than regiments of soldiers in the field. For his exertions in this line, however, we could afford to trust him to the vengeance of the Government, but for his unwarranted and unmanly efforts to oppress the already overburdened prisoners in Richmond, we look, to another source for punishment. Our townsman, Colonel Rose, and a score of ethers, well known and dear to us, have had a taste of this man's quality, and we ask for no other satisfaction than that chance may favour any one of them with a momentary meeting. There will assuredly be one educated villain less to labour in the rebel cause."

Of course, one's flesh might be expected to tingle at this foul and cowardly. abuse. The next minute a sensible man would be inclined to laugh at it-especially the valiant threat of Colonel "Rose" and other flowers of Yankee. chivalry. In another moment, reflection would teach him that he was compli mented by such evidence of his personal importance, and decorated, as every true Confederate is, by the libel of a Yankee newspaper.

The sufferings I was to endure were to be terrible enough; but added to them was the constant smart of Yankee falsehood, which, ignoring the victims of its own cruelty, was incessantly publishing the imaginary misery of Federal prisoners in Richmond and elsewhere in the Confederacy. One can have an idea of the smart of this misrepresentation, if he will imagine a Confederate cut off from the world by the walls of a prison, and compelled to chew his indignation in silence, reading every day in Yankee newspapers some new version of "the barbarities of the rebels," and left to conjecture that the world is induced to believe these vile slanders, scattered to the ends of it, without the opportunity of any contradiction on the other side. But there is some possible comfort in the reflection, that Yankee falsehood in this war has overleaped itself. A people who, ravaging the country of their neighbours, burning their houses and property, and stripping the shelter over the heads of women and children, yet entitle their adversaries as savages, and assert themselves champions of civilization; who, fighting for the fourth year an unconquered country, have, in the entire", history of that war, represented every event as a Yankee success, and a mortal blow to the Confederacy, are no more credble witnesses in these particulars than when they parade before the world their nursery dramas of the horrours of "rebel" prisons.

A few days before I left Richmond, I had had an accidental occasion to visit the Libby Prison, and was politely shown through all its apartments by Major

Turner, the superintendent. I little imagined then that I would have occasion soon to be instituting a comparison between my observations there and my experiences in the casemates of Fort Warren. I found the inmates of the former place, which has obtained such fearful notoriety in the North, somewhat restricted in space-the necessity of which restriction may be easily understood when it is known that there is such lack of house-room in Richmond, that every building in it is packed from cellar to garret, and entire families are often found to live in a single room; but the prisoners had comfortable bunks and long aisles stretching through the building, gave them the opportunity of exerercise. These aisles were neatly swept by negro servants, who, broom in hand, were going through the building cleansing it, and thus relieving the prisoners of a disagreeable office. I learned that the prisoners were constantly receiving comforts and delicacies from the North; that they drew their pay regularly from the Washington Government; and that traffic in "greenbacks" being prohibited in Richmond, and, it being necessary for the prisoners to convert their funds into Confederate money, our Government had, by a strained and punctilious generosity, put itself in the anomalous position of rating the enemy's currency in prisoners' hands at eight or ten times its own. I was struck by an abundance of pastimes in the Libby, that I was not prepared to see in a prison. Here were Northern newspapers and pictorials strewn around; cards, cribbage boards, dominoes, setts of games and other expedients to "kill time." The walls were garnished with sugar-cured hams, jars of pickles and delicacies long since forgotten in the homes of Richmond. I was amused to see prisoners sopping sweetmeats out of glass jars. I remember the remark I made on leaving the Libby and parting with Major Turner: I said to him that I had not been aware that there was so much luxury inside of Richmond.

I am not attempting extravagance, but fairly stating the results of personal observation, when I declare that I found many of the prisoners of the Libby living better in point of creature comforts, than some of our cabinet ministers in Richmond. Yet these men invariably go back to the North with stories of martyrdom in their mouths. A committee is appointed to make a report of their sufferings to Christendom. It gives a general invitation to those who will tell the hardest lies to indulge themselves without the fear of contradiction or cross-questions. It offers a premium for "raw-head and bloody-bones" stories, which may be told entirely at the pleasure of any liar or would-be-martyr, and with unlimited freedom in his vocation. It selects from sick prisoners returned to them, those consumed by fever or attenuated by chronic disease, bolsters them up on their beds, takes their photographs, and binds them in an official

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