XXI.

THE GREAT MILITARY PRISON OF SOUTH CAROLINA.

D

WITHIN THE STOCKADE, FLORENCE, October 19, 1865.

OES it seem affectation that I date my letter from "Within the Stockade"? At least I write it there, write it in my note-book, on my knee, sitting on a block of wood, in one of the hut houses built by the hands of those who served the cause of Union and Liberty in the prisons of secession and slavery, write it to the accompaniment of glaring lightning and crashing thunder and driving rain. Will these mud walls shelter me through the storm of this hot afternoon? I cannot forget that they have sheltered men who perilled vastly more than ease and comfort; and as I look through the hole that they called a "door," and see the acres of such barbaric but sanctified habitations, I lift reverent heart of thanksgiving to Him who gave us the victory, and blessed the struggle and suffering of that great army through whom we have national unity and the assured promise of universal freedom.

Florence is a name rather than a place; or, say, a point at which three railroads centre, rather than a town. There is a hotel, and a church, and a machine-shop, and two socalled stores, and three bar-rooms, and twenty-five or thirty residences, and a great pine forest. There is a long, broad street; at one end of which is the hotel, a somewhat pretentious two-story wood building, with a wide and lofty piazza in front, and an ungainly tower in the centre. At the farther end of the street are the stores and the machineshop. Midway are the apothecary's, and the hospital, and a vacant law office. Back of this street, in the pines, are the

dwellings which constitute the town. The three railroads have a common starting-point just in front of the hotel. Passengers from Wilmington to Charleston reach here about seven in the evening, and leave about three in the morning, after paying two dollars each for supper and lodging of a passably good character. Passengers from Charleston to Wilmington reach here at the same hour, leave at the same time, and pay the same tax for the support of the landlord. Those from Columbia get supper here, and are taxed one dollar. Those for Cheraw are obliged to disburse three dollars for supper, lodging, and breakfast. The town is, therefore, a railroad eating-house, with sleeping-rooms attached.

Situated at the intersection of the great cross-line of railroad with the great coast-line, about one hundred miles from either Wilmington or Charleston, and about seventy-five miles from either the coast or Columbia, it was peculiarly adapted for the location and safety of a prison.

The stockade is about a mile and a half north of east from the hotel, about a third of a mile from the railroad, and near the centre of a great opening in the pine forest, which is locally known as "the old field." The field is a sandy, rolling, fenceless, irregularly-shaped tract of five hundred acres, more or less, which probably at some time formed the tillable portion of two or three plantations mostly given up to turpentine and rosin making. The stockade is about thirtyfive rods wide north and south, and some seventy rods long east and west; containing, perhaps, fifteen or sixteen acres. Through the middle of this enclosure, from north to south, flows a little stream of water, five or six feet in width and four or five inches in depth. It is a swiftly running stream, and the water has a not unpleasant taste. From either end the prison-pen slopes off to this brook, making five or six acres of low, marshy ground, lying principally east of the stream, full of sink-holes and stagnant waters and mias

matic odors and malarial influences, the breeding-place of agues and fevers and typhoids and rheumatic complaints, the rank and pestiferous home of disease and death, than which hellish malignity could scarcely have fashioned one more fit to the purpose of that foul treason which laid its foundation in slavery and sought to enthrone Rapine and Anarchy as twin deities in the land of law and liberty!

Everything remains as the Rebels left it when they evacuated Florence, - remains almost as it was when these hillsides swarmed with our soldier prisoners. On the east and on the west, outside the stockade, twenty rods or so distant from the walls, are the long lines of earthworks reaching away to the timber on either side, and far down in front of these again are the numerous rifle-pits commanding the advance for nearly a hundred rods. The main entrance to the stockade was at the northwestern corner. Near this corner were the log-houses of the guard and half a dozen small ovens. The barracks stand almost as they did when last occupied, but the houses over the ovens have been burned. Just north of this entrance is a handsome little grove of a dozen trees, among which yet remain the benches and stools of the officers of the guard. Fifty feet in front of the middle of the western wall was the flag-staff whence floated the banner of treason and slavery. Its stump only remains, and loyal and disloyal alike cut chips of memento therefrom. Across the pestilential quagmire, beyond the northeastern corner, is another deserted village of log-houses, - houses of the guard for the rear of the prison-pen, not one of which has been touched. I went among them with the wonder if some long-haired, lean-bodied, leering-eyed Johnnie might not spring out with ready musket and bid me halt; and, sure enough, from one of them suddenly emerged a fellow in gray, who looked at me a moment, and then strode away with a swinging and defiant step. In the southeastern corner of the pen was the rear entrance. thence the prisoners

went to fetch wood, a dozen cords of which yet lie piled only five or six rods away.

The walls of the stockade are sixteen feet high, built of unhewn logs some nine or ten inches in diameter, set deeply in the ground. This solid wall of oak and pine logs is unbroken, except by the gate openings and the quagmire, -the marshy ground necessitating the substitution of a stout board fence for the wall of logs. Outside the wall is, of course, a wide and deep ditch, the earth from which is thrown against the logs and forms a narrow path about three or four feet below their tops, whereon the guard walked and overlooked this prison-pen, and from whence fiends in human shape shot half-crazed boys who straggled over this dead-line, which runs just behind the hut within which I sit. A ditch could not be dug through the quagmire, and so there are picket platforms built on the fence there, one, noticeably, on each side over the brook.

Inside the stockade there has been very little change save such as time makes. In the northwestern corner, near the main entrance, was the hospital, seven log-houses, each some forty feet long and twenty feet wide. These the guard partially burned when they left. Through the centre of the enclosure from east to west is a narrow graded road; the bridge over the creek has partially fallen in, but the roadbed is as hard and smooth as it was six months ago. The Rebels attempted to burn the stockade wall by firing piles of wood thrown against it on the inside, but the fire refused its work, and only scorched the logs at seventy-five or a hundred points of the long line; and the half-burned sticks of wood and the little bundles of pitch-pine remain in their places to show how the most destructive of the elements enlisted in the service of the Union, and saved this prison-pen as an eloquent token of the cost of liberty.

Does any man, horrified by the stories told concerning it, believe that the famous and infamous "dead-line" was a

myth? However it may have been elsewhere, here it is a hateful reality. It is about twenty feet inside the stockade walls. Part of the way it is marked by a light pole laid in crotches; elsewhere it is only marked by the line which distinguishes trodden from untrodden ground, — of earth rank with grass and of earth bare of grass. Just back of this hut, in the northeastern quarter, there is only this line of grass and no-grass. Doubtless this was the best of the Southern prison-pens; but even here, if current report among such of the towns-people as can be induced to speak at all of the stockade is true, the guards indulged in that very pleasant and exceedingly humorous amusement which consisted in tossing pieces of meat or bread into the stockade, between the wall and dead-line, in order to get a shot at some Yankee boy who was so hungry as to thoughtlessly rush for it. These fellows would have their joke, you see! Shall we mudsills complain thereat? If they serve who stand and wait, did not these also serve who died between the wall and the dead-line?

Go no more, even in dreams, to Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried cities of the Old World. Here is the city of the living dead, - city as populous as those, as fruitful as those in the signs and tokens of a life that was and is not. On these ten or eleven acres there were at least 2,500 houses,

perhaps 3,000 would be a more correct figure; and not less than three fourths of them are nearly as good as they were on the day of their sudden evacuation, and in hundreds of them are memorials of that life of want and woe which 13,000 men knew here, and from which 4,000 passed out through the door of the dead-house to the slope way yonder by the timber, and laid themselves down in long rows for the final sleep and for the glorious reward due unselfish souls.

In the construction of these habitations there is almost infinite variety on a common, general plan. This one in which I sit, and through which the still driving storm begins