Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 18.djvu/337

 Prison Pens North. 337

RATS AS FOOD.

In regard to the scarcity of food, Mr. Keiley says :

" It often happened that the same man got only bones for several successive days. The expedients resorted to were disgusting. Many found a substitute for meat in rats, with which the place abounded, and they commanded an average price of four cents apiece. I have seen scores of them in various stages of preparation. Others found, in the barrels of refuse fat, which accumulated in the cook-house and in the pickings of the bones which were thrown out in a dirty heap behind the kitchen to be removed once a week, the means of gratifying the cravings of hunger. I have seen a mob of starving ' Rebs ' besieging the bone-cart and begging of the driver fragments on which the August sun had been burning for several days."

Of the brutal treatment of prisoners Mr. Keiley gives the following instances : " A sick boy having inadvertently stepped across a mark made by one of the officials, he was compelled to leap back and forth across it until he fell exhausted. Another brute would lay about him with a tent-pole among the crippled and helpless prisoners. A man named Hale, one of the Stonewall brigade, having refused to com- promise others by telling where he had obtained a little whiskey, instead of the usual confinement in the guard-house, had his thumbs tied together behind his back and the rope drawn up across a beam overhead until his whole weight rested upon them, causing excruciat- ing agony. Still refusing to ' peach,' he was gagged with a piece of wood, and struck in the face with an oaken billet, which knocked out his front teeth and covered his face with blood.

THE NEGRO GUARD, AGAIN.

The negro guard would, almost without warning, fire among the prisoners, and this at last culminated in the murder of a poor, feeble old man named Potts, a prisoner, one of the most harmless creatures in the pen. He was hailed by one of the guard while approaching his ward, ordered to stop, and shot dead while standing still.

In August the surgeons' consolidated report announced eighteen hundred and seventy scorbutic cases among ninety-three hundred prisoners the result of the restriction to a bread and salt-meat diet.

" One of the men who died to-day told his brother, with almost his last breath, that he died of starvation."

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