February 2015

February 26 — The lengthening days are beginning to furnish a little more sunshine and of a warmer brand, that has a slight touch of beautiful spring. According to expectation a boatload of prisoners was called out to-day for exchange, and as usual the call missed me all over.

There are acts and scenes transpiring within these prison walls which necessity rightly claims as its own true children, the divulgence of which may some day cause a blush of shame to creep over the cheeks of those who are directly responsible for the seemingly incongruous innovation of American usages in the steady light of this nineteenth century, even on the light and North side of the Potomac. Right now as I am writing these words there is a rat vendor going along the street carrying three large rats by the tail, and every few steps I hear him cry: “Here are your rats, fresh and fat! I just now caught them at the commissary department, and I warrant them to be in fine order. Three for five cents, cheap! here are your rats!” Talk about the heathen Chinee eating dogs,— here men buy and eat rats to satisfy craving hunger right under the shadow of the proud Star-Spangled Banner and in a so-called Christian country and in a land of plenty. I have been hungry for six months now, and I could and would eat rat or snake on toast if I just had it. Only he who has been hungry for a long period knows what hunger is. I saw a man fish a scrap of beef from a slop barrel and devour it as if it were a morsel from a king’s table.

One day I drew for my meat ration the upper part of a sheep’s head, his eyes still holding their old position and the eyelids decorated with cleanly washed hairy-like wool, cleansed nicely by boiling the meat. I shaved off the wool and ate the eyes, lids and all; the eyes were certainly delicious. Oh, you fastidious epicureans that love to feast on rich and rare delicacies dressed in the livery of champagne sauce, try sheep’s-eye boiled in bad well water and garnished with wool, and see whether it is not fit for a king! There are a great many prisoners here who are tobacco chewers, and the weed is a scarce article inside of prison, yet there is some little in the camp. I see it every day for sale, cut up in small square blocks about twice the size of a common dice. The little blocks are nicely arranged on a board and offered for sale at retail, a small slice of bread, weighing about an ounce and a half, buying one chew of tobacco. I have seen men walking along the street gathering up chewed cuds of tobacco for smoking purposes. They pick the little ground-up quids to pieces and spread them in the sunshine until dried, then smoke the virtueless debris. There is a great deal of scurvy in this prison all the time, and the direful effects of scorbutic blood is apparent all through the camp. I have seen men with their gums swollen even with their teeth. Scanty diet, diarrhoea superinduced by the use of deleterious water, and scurvy from the use of salty meat furnish the drift that floats constantly away from here on the stream of Death.

Oh, I wish Harriet Beecher Stowe would come here and spend a few weeks with us, and dip her able pen in the essence of human misery and privations that prevail here! The dear old lady could write a very interesting volume about Uncle Sam’s Starvation Shop, a volume that would make a fitting companion for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Nor would she have to browse so dangerously near the precipice of pure fiction to find an extreme case in gathering thrilling material, as she did when she gathered up the “Cabin,” for there is an abundance of acts played here, subdivided into scenes, and conditions existing that would furnish some very interesting subjects and themes for a true delineator’s pen. The work would make a very readable book, although it might not prove to be as good fuel for an “irrepressible conflict” as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” but it would give an impressive lesson for thoughtful reflection on how cruel barbarism still revels in the lap of civilization, even in this so-called highly enlightened Christian land.