XII.

THE GREAT MILITARY PRISON OF NORTH CAROLINA.

SAL

SALISBURY, September 29, 1865 ALISBURY,-of hateful notoriety, of sharp and painful memory to a hundred thousand hearts! Salisbury, cursed of men dying of cold and starvation, cursed of men driven mad by fiendish torture! Salisbury, one of the horrible names an unclean and infamous usurpation carved on its sinful and loathsome monument!

It is a comely enough little town, lapped in a pleasant country, but one can never forget its slaughter-yard. You see its site from the car window as you come up from the south. Its southwestern corner came down to within fifty feet of the railroad track. Its northwestern corner came up to the town line, and is scarcely eighty rods from the principal hotel.

The Salisbury military prison was established in the summer of 1863. At first, and for more than a year, it was occupied as a penitentiary for the confinement of what were called State prisoners, Southern Union men, captured naval officers, deserters from the Union armies, and Northern men held on suspicion or as hostages. It was first used as a place of confinement for soldiers captured in battle in the fall of 1864. Previous to that time persons confined here were treated much better than at the majority of the Rebel prisons; but some time in the summer of that year Major John H. Gee, of Selma, Alabama, a coarse and brutal wretch, was made commandant; and his cruelties not only soon balanced the account, but made the prison the terror of our army, and only less dreadful than Andersonville.

The prison proper was a brick building, forty by one hundred feet in size, and four stories in height, formerly a cot

ton factory. Connected with it were six small brick buildings, formerly offices and tenement houses, and a small frame hospital, large enough for no more than fifty or sixty beds.

At a later day these buildings were enclosed in a yard of about six acres, and, after the fall of 1864, were entirely used for hospital purposes. The stockade wall was a stout board fence some twelve feet in height, on which sentinels were stationed fifty feet apart. Inside the wall was a ditch, varying in width from six to ten feet, and in depth from three to six feet.

In the spring and summer of 1864 respectable citizens were allowed to visit Northern men confined here, and the condition of the prisoners at that time was comparatively good. I am satisfied that there were some genuine Union people resident in the town, and many more in the counties to the westward. These never wearied in good offices to the prisoners, and for a while they did much to mitigate the rigors of confinement. All this was changed, however, when Gee became commandant, and particularly after the Rebels began to confine soldiers here.

In the fall and winter of 1864 not less than fourteen thousand men were herded within this small enclosure like sheep, tortured with infernal malignity, cheated of food when the storehouses half a mile away were bursting with rations, cheated of shelter when fifty or sixty thousand feet of lumber originally intended for this use was lying useless at the upper end of the town, cheated of fuel when magnificent forests were almost within rifle-shot! The poor wretches fought for bones like dogs. One boy went crazy, and ate nearly all the flesh from his arm below the elbow! To save themselves from storm and cold, they burrowed in the earth like wild animals; and the keeper went round of a morning and stirred up the mass in each hole to see how much of it had died during the night! It is beyond all human comprehen

sion why Divine Mercy permitted these things to be. The number of deaths ran as high as seventy-five per day; in one period of eight days, five hundred and twenty-six were tumbled out for the dead-wagon; for three months the daily average was not less than forty. In the aggregate the Rebellion murdered here over seven thousand men !

The prisoners, thanks to the tender mercies of their captors, came to the place generally without shoes or blankets, rarely with overcoats, and often without blouses. The buildings in the stockade were soon overflowing with the sick. For those not admitted to the hospital there was very little shelter, though it is said by negroes that the prisoners. begged again and again for the privilege of going out under guard to cut logs to use in building barracks. The winter of 1864–65 was unusually severe in this latitude, and snow fell here to the depth of three inches on several occasions between the 1st of November and the 1st of March.

It is beyond all question that the wretch Gee deliberately starved many of the prisoners. Men who were Rebels during the war admit as much. I am told that the commissary warehouses were full of provisions, which the commandant again and again refused, in shockingly profane terms, to issue even to the poor creatures in hospital. Much of the time only half-rations were allowed, and on more than one occasion hundreds of men got nothing for forty-eight hours. The sufferings of the prisoners were so great that efforts were constantly making to escape. That many of them did escape we all know. Golly, I seed a-many of 'em come down fru ole Mas'r's fiel' to Pete, hes cabin," said an aged negro man whom I met yesterday. He lived thirty miles west of the town last winter, and had been horsewhipped for feeding the Yankees. That the prisoners were sometimes aided in escaping by officers of the prison is at least believed by not a few persons living hereabouts.

Concerning the insurrection which took place here last

November, one can learn but little. That a small body of prisoners rushed upon the guard for the purpose of overpowering them, that they succeeded in this endeavor, that they failed to get out of the stockade, that the gun of the fort at the corner was turned upon the prison and fired, that at least one hundred men were killed or severely wounded, SO much my persistent inquiries seem to establish.

"Does ye call dis yer hor'ble?" said a negro man whom I met this morning as I walked over the stockade; “I calls it beautiful since Stoneman polished it up." Indeed, flame and wrath did their work well, and the Salisbury military prison is a thing of the past, which man nevermore can see.

The walls of the old factory building stand intact, but roof and floors and windows are all gone. The small brick buildings exist only as half a dozen irregular piles of rubbish. Some of the hundred great oak-trees within the stockade are already dead and others are dying. The fence shows only a line of post-stumps and post-holes. The ditch has been partially filled. The well which supplied the prison is no more used. Three fourths of the great pen is covered with a sprawling fireweed, offensive alike to sight and smell. There is satisfaction in all this; yet signs many remain of the dreary days of last winter. You find, in strolling about, the broken bowl of an earthen pipe, the well-worn blade of a belt knife, even the regulation button of a soldier's coat. Here is where the earth was scooped away to make a bank in which bricks could be laid so as to give draft for a fire; there you see where other bricks were laid to furnish a heated surface for cooking purposes.

Treading at random over ground on which there is neither grass nor vegetation, you seem often to find yourself walking on yielding soil. Here were the holes in which men lived. They were all filled by Stoneman's troops; but the filling of a few was done so imperfectly that it is easy enough to see what they were. From three to five feet

deep, irregularly circular in shape, from two to six feet in diameter on top, with sides so scooped under that the bottom diameter was generally half larger than the other, this is what they were. In them lived all the negro and many of the white prisoners, for months. They were in the lower part of the stockade, and could scarcely have been dry even in the dryest season of the year; while one shud-* ders at the thought of what they were in the stormy months of winter and spring. It was in such mud-holes as these that Rebellion murdered our soldiers.

Night and morning the dead wagons came. "I saw'd three and four and five big wagons loaded of a mornin' right often," said the barber under whose hands I sat; " and they dragged 'em about by the legs and arms just like as if they'd been dead hogs; and none on 'em had much clothes on; and their hair was all full of red mud; and their heads swung over the sides of the wagon; and the fellers they'd crack a head with their whips, and say out loud, 'Lie still there, you d-d Yankee,' and then laugh; and they did n't take no more care on 'em than 's if they'd been dead hogs."

Down the road where those poor bodies were thus hauled I walked to the place of their burial. There is a good view of the pleasantest part of the town, as you go, and full sight of hundreds of acres of very heavy forests. It is a long slope to the southwest, a little muddy brook, a sharp ascent of forty or fifty feet, and there they were tumbled out into the trenches. "I heerd how 't was done," said an elderly white man who came along while I sat on the fence, "I heerd how 't was done, an' I cum over yer one Sun'ay to see was it so bad as the soldiers said 't was. "T was a cold an' nasty evenin', sir, an' they jist caught 'em up, one man to the arms and one to the legs, an' slung 'em in from the wagon; an' some on 'em said one man was n't dead, but they jist flung him in with the rest. I never cum yer no more, sir, till the Yankees got this yer fence built."