Page:FourteenMonthsInAmericanBastiles-2.djvu/29

 29 "Fort, 8th October, 1861.

"His Excellency, the President of the United States,

"The undersigned, prisoners confined in Fort La Fayette, are compelled to address you this protest and remonstrance against the inhumanity of their confinement and treatment. The officers in command at Fort Hamilton and this post, being fully aware of the grievances and privations to which we are obliged to submit, we are bound for humanity's sake, to presume that they have no authority or means to redress or remove them. They in fact, assure s that they have not. Our only recourse therefore, is to lay this statement before you, in order that you may interpose to prevent our being any longer exposed to them.

"The prisoners at this post are confined in four small casemates, and two large battery-rooms. The former are about fourteen feet in breadth by twenty-four or thereabouts in length, with arched ceilings about eight-and-a-half feet high at the highest point, the spring of the arch commencing at about five feet from the floor. In each of these is a fire-place, and the floors are of plank. The battery-rooms are of considerably higher pitch, and the floors are of brick, and a large space is occupied in them by the heavy guns and gun-carriages of the batteries. They have no fire-places or means of protection from cold or moisture, and the doors are large, like those of a carriage-house, rendering the admission of light impossible without entire exposure to the temperature and weather without. In one of the small casemates, twenty-three prisoners are confined, two-thirds of them in irons, without beds, bedding, or any of the commonest necessaries. Their condition could hardly be worse, if they were in a slave-ship, on the middle passage. In each of two, out of the three other casemates, ten gentlemen are imprisoned; in the third there are nine, and a tenth is allotted to it; their beds and necessary luggage leaving them scarce space to move, and rendering the commonest personal cleanliness almost an impossibility. The doors are all fastened from six or thereabouts in the evening, until the same hour in the morning, and with all the windows (which are small) left open in all weathers, it is hardly possible to sleep in the foul, unwholesome air. Into one of the larger battery-rooms, there are thirty-four prisoners closely crowded ; into the other, thirty-five. All the doors are closed for the same period as stated above, and the only ventilation is then from the embrasures, and so imperfect that