Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 18.djvu/433

 I'rison Life at Point Lookout. 433

heartless man. His whole conduct toward the prisoners impressed me that he enjoyed two things immensely first, the suffering and humiliation of the prisoners ; secondly, the fact he was their despot.

The prison was enclosed by a strong stockade of heavy plank fourteen feet high. Four feet from the top on the outside was a parapet extending all around. On this the guards walked by day and night. They were all negroes, commanded by white officers. The night police inside the prison were negroes, but their barbarity was so great that through the earnest entreaties of the prisoners they were removed some time in January, 1865. I recollect one sick man who had not been carried to the hospital. His complaint caused him to leave his tent about 3 o'clock A. M. While out he was set on by a large negro guard, who double-quicked him, in his night clothes and weak condition, up and down the streets between the tents for an hour. When the brute ordered the sick man back to his tent he made fifteen other prisoners come out in their night clothes and run up and down like a herd of cattle.

The greatest cruelly perpetrated while I was in prison was on thirty-two inmates of one of the cook-houses. At the side of the prison, next to the gate, was located a number of long cook and eating-houses, where all the cooking except baking was done. There was only a street or roadway between these houses and the stockade where the guards walked continually. Between two of these houses, a little nearer one than the other, one of the negro guards fell from the parapet and was found dead. A contusion was on his head and a piece of brick near him. This discovery took place about sunset. No one saw him when he fell. No one saw who hit him.

The following night after taps, when every prisoner was in bed, a file of soldiers rushed into the nearest cook-house to the scene and hurried the thirty-two inmates out in the night. The weather was intensely cold thermometer below zero. They had on nothing but shirt and drawers two of them had on socks. They were placed in a block-house which had a door and a hole a few inches wide, without food, water or fire. They were told that one of them killed the negro guard, possibly all of them knew of it, and when the fact was so made known, then all the others could go back to their quarters, but if they did not come out and confess who killed the guard that the day following the next had been fixed as the time when all thirty- two of them would be shot. So in that bitter weather these innocent helpless men (not all men, for two of them were boys) passed that fearful night and next day in the block building, where they were