Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 3.djvu/892

832 for duty and was assigned to Gen. John H. Winder as acting assistant inspector general, with duty at Richmond. In the following May he was ordered to Goldsboro, N. C., and thence in June to Andersonville, Ga., where he arrived about the same time as did General Winder. The condition of affairs there, 24,000 prisoners confined in an area of 28 acres, guarded by 1,200 militia, led to his being sent with dispatches to Adjutant-General Cooper, urging the establishment of another prison and that no more prisoners should be forwarded there. On July 21 he was ordered to take charge of the prison at Macon, Ga. On account of a brief parole he granted a prisoner he was relieved and returned to Andersonville, where he relieved Captain Wirz, who was seriously ill, about August 14th. On Christmas day, 1864, he was in Richmond and accepted an opportunity to be the bearer of important dispatches through the United States to Canada. These dispatches, consisting of a manifesto from President Davis that John Beall, of Virginia, had been ordered to make the attempt to capture Johnson's island, and a copy of Beall's commission in the Confederate States navy, he carried safely through Washington and thence to Toronto, without exciting suspicion; but on his return, at Sandusky, Ohio, he fell in with a party of returned Federal prisoners from Andersonville, who instantly recognized him, and he was put in jail at Newark, Ohio. There he was able to remove the dispatches for the Confederate government, which had been executed on white silk and sewed in the lining of his coat, and burn them in the stove. Accused of being a spy, he was taken to the "McLean Barracks," at Cincinnati, and confined there in a small room, wearing a ball and chain, and furnished with a block of wood for a pillow, which he was not to raise his head from until called in the morning, on pain of being shot by the sentinel. He was tried on the 17th and 18th of January and, though he made, according to the Cincinnati papers of that date, a most eloquent and forcible argument that he was a bearer of dispatches but not a spy, the case was prejudged and public sentiment clamored for his death. To his accusers he said: "I know I have only done my duty. I have done it as best I could. God knows what I intended and He knows I do not deserve death; but if I die I go without asking pity, as a soldier should die." About February 1st a gentleman called upon him and promised to advise his friends of his situation, but he soon learned that he had been condemned to death by hanging February 17, 1865. He was taken to Johnson's island and soon was advised that his friends were working for him and had secured some influential help; but beyond the mysterious assurance of a strange visitor that he would not be executed. he heard no word as to his fate. On the morning of the 17th he was aware that his gallows had been completed; he had perceived the arrangements for his execution, had given up all hope, and was in fact already dead to the world, though unmoved and undaunted, when, as the band was playing the dead march, the commanding officer announced that the sentence had been commuted to imprisonment for life. He started at once for Fort Delaware prison, passing a train load of people on an excursion to witness his execution. At Fort Delaware he was put in irons and treated with inhuman brutality by General Schoepf, the officer