Point Lookout is the southern extremity of St. Mary’s County, Md., and at the mouth of the Potomac; it is a low narrow tongue of sandy land, washed on one side by the waves of Chesapeake Bay and on the other by the waters of the Potomac. It is about ninety miles from Baltimore, and almost the same distance from Norfolk, Va., and by the Potomac River route it is about ninety miles from Washington. The prison proper covers about twenty acres of ground, and is only some four or five feet above high tide. The prison wall is a tight board fence about fourteen feet high, with a sentry walk on the outside three feet from the top. Eight feet from the wall on the inside is a furrow ditch eight inches wide and six inches deep, which constitutes the dead line, and any prisoner who at any time steps across that line is liable to be shot by the sentinels on the wall without any further notice. There are twelve sentinels — all negroes — on the wall, walking their post all the time day and night, with loaded guns, ready and anxious to shoot the first Rebel that violates the rigid regulations of the prison camp. Large lanterns near the wall on the inside throw a brilliant light along the wall, and on both sides of the dead line all night.
The prison is laid off into ten streets, and the prisoners are divided into ten divisions, and the divisions into ten companies. The divisions are numbered from one to ten, and the companies are designated by letter, as in a regiment in an army. Each division occupies one street and bears the street number; I was assigned to Company A, Ninth Division. Every company has an orderly sergeant and a sick sergeant, both Rebels. The sergeant’s duty is to form the company and call the roll twice a day, evening and morning, superintended by a Yankee sergeant in each division, who looks over the roll and sees that the men answer to their names promptly. A while after morning roll-call our company sergeant forms us in double ranks and marches us to the cook-house, where we draw our day’s ration of meat, already cooked. A day’s ration of meat is four ounces, and as the meat is cooked the day before, we always get it cold.
When the company arrives at the cook-house the sergeant of the company and the landlord of the cookhouse, one on each side of the door, count us every time we go in. That is done to keep stray sheep from flanking in and nibbling each other’s pasture. In the cook-house dining-room is a table about fifteen inches wide, in shape a long hollow rectangle, with a few cooks scattered in the hollow to watch and see that we do the clean thing and act courteously toward each other, and especially to keep us from snatching our neighbor’s meat.
The sole furnishing of the breakfast table is about one hundred tin plates, placed about two feet apart, and when the table is ready to be acted on each plate contains a day’s ration of meat.
After we get in the cook-house we march up along the table, and that is the time the cooks in the hollow square watch us like hawks to keep us from stealing, for they know that we are always hungry and apt to snatch somebody else’s meat, especially those of us that do not belong to the church. By strict regulations we are not allowed to touch a ration of meat until the cooks or table managers have assigned each man to a plate; after the assigning is completed and a momentary silence reigns every guest, without any sign word or command, grabs up a ration of meat and leaves the hotel. Occasionally a man tries to flank in with a company not his own, but he is generally caught at it, and thrust aside, then put out, with little wailing and no picking of teeth.
About nine o’clock in the forenoon a detail from each company goes to the cook-house and draws the bread for the company. The bread is first-class, regular baker’s bread, nicely baked in twenty-eight ounce loaves, one loaf being a day’s allowance for two men; after the bread arrives at the company every two men draw one loaf, and the man that divides the loaf always gives his comrade first choice of pieces, which makes the divider very careful to cut the loaf as near the middle as possible. There are no messes here like there are in the army; every man has his own rations and keeps them separate, and eats what little he has when he pleases without calling in his neighbor, his bed-fellow, or his brother. Selfishness rules the hour and sways the whole camp, as everyone receives the same rations in quantity and quality. At twelve o’clock noon we are again formed in company and marched to the cook-house and ushered in by being counted; this time the table is furnished with tin cups full of what is here denominated bean soup, but it hardly deserves the name of soup, for by actual count on an average there are only six beans in a pint of thin bean water. A day’s rations all told is four ounces of meat, fourteen ounces of bread, and one pint of bean water. The rations we get are all good in quality, but much too diminutive in quantity; I have been hungry ever since I was captured. The meat we get is mostly pickled pork; twice a week we get fresh beef, and sometimes we get pickled beef, and that is salty enough to make a hound yell by biting in it. About once a week we get vegetable soup made of. a mixture of dried cabbage, pumpkin, carrot, and some other ingredients too tedious to mention. Once every two weeks we get a gill of vinegar to the man. This is done to keep our appetites whetted to a keen edge, so that if we get back to Dixie before the war ends we will be well prepared and able to clean up Jeff Davis’ whole commissary department in a few days; and the way I feel right now and the way everybody else around me feels, we could engulf all the edible resources of the Southern Confederacy in a few short weeks. The only remuneration the sergeant gets for his duty is double rations, and the soup he gets has more beans in it than we poor privates get; that alone is worth a considerable consideration in this lowly pen of starvation in a land of plenty.
The sick sergeant’s duties are very light. All he has to do is to report the sick in the company every morning after roll-call and draw their rations if they are too sick to walk to the cook-house.
The cooks in the cook-house are all Rebel prisoners. I have not seen a Yank in any of the cook-houses since I have been here, although there may be somewhere behind the scenes a Yank overseer who is directing the machinery of the cooking establishment and keeping his eye on these wily Rebel cooks.
To be a cook here is a position of considerable distinction. I would rather be a cook than a company sergeant, from the simple fact that a cook has good warm quarters to sleep and stay in, and they take good care of number one and help themselves to all the rations that they can devour.
I can tell a cook in camp anywhere I see him. They are all fat and greasy, and some of them are even a little saucy, and seem to be satisfied with prison life.
The prison is plentifully supplied with clear but bad water, obtained by digging holes in the sandy ground some ten or fifteen feet deep anywhere in the enclosure, the water seeping in from the river and bay. Nearly all the water is deleterious, rendered so by percolating through drifts of impure vegetable matter in the alluvial sand. The water is not fit to drink, as it produces a diarrhoea which sticks closer than a brother, and has already killed hundreds of our prisoners. The second day after I arrived here the water made me sick, with a violent diarrhoea that clung to me like a leech for several days, but I learned to do without drinking a drop of water, and by that means alone I survived the evil effects of its unwholesomeness.
The prisoners are domiciled in tents of all sorts and sizes, good, bad, and indifferent, old and new, Sibley, wall, and A tents, a regular assortment of all kinds.
The regulations for keeping the prison clean are of the first order, and are strictly enforced. Every weekday morning a detail of forty men is made in every division, for street-cleaning duty. The men are supplied with brooms, shovels, and wheelbarrows, and are required to sweep and clean the streets from side to side and end to end every day, and remove every speck of dirt of every kind and wheel it outside of the prison camp along the shore of the Bay, where the waves wash it away. On the Bay side of the prison are two large gates in the wall, which are thrown open every morning at sunrise and stand open until sunset. There is a strip of sandy beach about forty feet wide between the prison wall and the Bay, where we are allowed to roam at will from sunrise to sunset.
Every Sunday morning all the prisoners in camp are formed in single line on both sides of the streets for general inspection by the provost marshal general of the camp. Every prisoner is then required to appear in ranks, with a washed face, newly cleaned hands, and looking in general as sweet as circumstances will permit.
When all is ready for inspection the provost general and his staff make their appearance, mounted on horseback, and ride through every street in a sweeping gallop. They do very little actual inspecting, but let the virtue of the formality do the rest. At other times, however, when the weather is favorable the inspector is a little more circumspect, and occasionally finds a Rebel in ranks who greatly needs a powerful dose of soap and water, and the cleansing application is ordered to be applied immediately. Since I have been in prison I have already lived and survived whole weeks without washing my hands or face, yet I always wash for Sunday morning inspection. Washing hands and face is no small matter here, especially when the weather is cold and a man has to use Chesapeake Bay for a washbowl and utilize his house roof for a towel. The inconvenience is no trivial affair, even if we are spending our days in pure idleness and reveling in the luxuriant comforts and ingredients of a Yankee hotel, well supplied with an abundance of scarcity, the products of a rich country filled with hospitable and generous people.
We have preaching in prison every Sunday, the preachers being all domestic, made of local material, and raw at that. According to my poor judgment some of the sermons are as devoid of interest as old straw, and as dry as a fresh lime-kiln. However, I am too young to know much about sermons, and perhaps they are better than they seem under difficulties. Some of the men that try to preach are very young and are putting in their first shots in gospel gunnery. Their range is good and their aim first-class, but the ammunition is a little defective from the fact that the explosives used are too old and were damaged in their manufacture. However, if these gunners keep on shooting until they learn that the gun and ammunition both need a little improvement they will strike something after a while.
The house the preaching is held in is a long plank building and looks almost like a copy of our cookhouses. At one end is a little raised dais-like pulpit, which constitutes all the furnishing; there are no seats in it, and we have to take in the heavenly food just as we do our bean soup — take it standing.
The negro sentinels on the wall as a general thing are not meddlesome nor conspicuously insolent, yet some few of them occasionally manifest a spirit of low-grade tyranny which they ignorantly think naturally belongs to the dignity of the position they occupy — that of lording it over and governing the white folks. Several times I have seen sentinels strutting on their post, with a large yellow-backed pamphlet, perhaps a blood-and-thunder novel, conspicuously sticking under the cartridge box belt; but that did not hurt us. A yellow-backed novel backgrounded by a blue uniform crammed full with the raw material of a United States soldier draped in the midnight hue of Ham produces a wonderful color combination, and puts an innovation of recent evolution on the American sentry-beat to watch de white folks which was never dreamed of in the philosophy of our Revolutionary forefathers.
When I entered the prison gate I partially dropped dates of occurring events, as a life like this ought to be, in a man’s career, a hiatus that may fittingly be termed the “dark ages.” When the pangs of gnawing hunger are incessantly raging within and the scurvy and itch, accompanied with a numerous colony of low-grade parasites, creeping and crawling over the outside, with freedom’s sweet light blotted into blackness, and a man’s every movement watched and noted under the strict surveillance of a dark sentinel, what more appropriate term could be applied to these weary days and slowly dragging months than dark ages?
The first day after I arrived here the whole prison camp experienced the hability of a shrewd Yankee trick, in all its freshness of duplicity and dissimulation of the first water. About nine o’clock in the morning a Yankee sergeant passed through the streets, making the announcement for all the prisoners to report at the gate with all their baggage. In about four minutes I was at the gate and ready to step on the boat and sail away for fair Dixieland, with all my personal effects packed in a little haversack, my blanket on my shoulder, and my hopes away up at blood heat and still heating. When the prisoners were all assembled at the gate a squad of Yankee soldiers filed in through the gate and went all through the camp gathering up all the sick, the lame, and the playing off poorly that remained in the tents; in fact, they swept the camp clean of Company Q in general, marched them out right before our eyes, and sent them to Dixie on exchange. After they were out we were told to go back to our tents; then my hopes tumbled down and crept way below zero and remained there pondering for days on the depths of human trickery.
A few days after I arrived in prison I heard a negro soldier read from a Northern newspaper the following sentence: “General Sheridan has converted the Shenandoah Valley into a waste and howling wilderness.” That may be glorious news to a Northern editor or newspaper man, but if his wife and children lived in the Shenandoah Valley he would dip his pen in blacker ink and turn on quite a different light to promulgate the barbarous deed. Just when the severe weather set in, some time about the last of November, all the prisoners were formed in line for the especial purpose of holding a blanket show. We were told to be sure and have all our blankets on exhibition, good, bad, and indifferent. When the parade was ready for the judges a Yankee squad passed along the line and, without much ceremony, took every blanket from us, save one to each man throughout the whole camp. I have often read and heard about the inhumanity of man to man and the cold charity of this world, but on shell-out blanket day was the first time that I ever saw the priceless virtue frozen up in solid chunks.
I never heard of any plausible reason assigned for the cruel performance, but I suppose that it was done in the true spirit of might makes right; or perhaps such inhuman treatment is what some of the pure and pious psalm-singing Puritans call freezing out the fires of rebellion. But for aught I know, Jeff Davis’ benighted heathens may be practicing the same kind of meanness on Union prisoners this very day, but then our good people of the North ought to remember that they pronounce us Southerners “barbarians.” Therefore exalted civilization and pious enlightenment ought to blush with shame to hang its priceless diadem so low that its kindly light still leads its sanctified devotees to the shrine of the great transgression of returning evil for evil. Whenever and wherever enlightened civilization willingly retaliates and gives like for like with barbarism, the transaction never fails to put Christianity, with all its cherished virtues, on the sick list.
The true aspects, experiences, and characteristics of prison life in general can never be described, even by the most impressive writer, so that he who has never experienced its realities can form the faintest conception of the melancholy gloom that settles down like eternal night on the spirit of man and crushes hope to the dark recesses of its lowest stage, so that life itself becomes a burden that may be dragged, but too wearisome to bear. No painter’s palette ever held a color black enough to truthfully delineate the shadows that constantly hang around and overarch the pathway that a prisoner of war in these United States is forced to tread. Many of the prisoners are thinly clad and all of them are scantily fed. I slept on the damp sand for two months without any sign of blanket or bedding under me, and nothing but my shoe for a pillow. Old Boreas fiercely sweeps and howls across the prison walls, with his front, center and rear whetted to a keen edge by gliding across the icy waves of Chesapeake Bay, and the searching blast with frosty needles creeps through every crack and crevice in the habiliments of a shivering prisoner and chills to the very marrow in the bone. Every cold morning I see hundreds of prisoners walking briskly back and forth through the streets and along the edge of the Bay trying to warm themselves by active exercise in the rays of the rising sun.
Every cold night some few men freeze to death in bed, one of the direful effects of robbing us of our blankets when the cold weather set in. Even wood seems to be a scarce commodity in Uncle Sam’s vast realm, as we get a very scanty supply, and that is mostly green pine, which never fails to make more smoke than fire., The wood allowed each tent is not enough to keep a little fire more than a day in a week, and actually I have not seen nor felt a good fire this whole winter, and I have become so inured to the cold that I can endure it like a horse or dog.
There are about ten thousand prisoners in our pen, and in that vast crowd I have not seen one man smile or heard a hearty laugh since I have been here. Everyone moves around in almost sullen silence, with a sad countenance, and the whole crew looks as if they had just returned from a big funeral. No more does rollicking song or laughing merriment cheerfully ring with gleeful mood among the tents of the camping host, like it does around the bright evening camp-fires that blaze and dance on the leas of Dixie’s fair land, but all is hushed in grievous silence, for the austere discipline and rigid rules that govern this dismal prison life has dried up the very fountain of song; hunger, cold, and privations, in connection with bullets in the bottom of negro sentinels’ guns, have thoroughly quenched the spirit of merriment and laughter. Oh, had I the wings of a seagull I would fly and speed away from this wretched existence, to new feeding grounds, and once more gather around a happy camp-fire where Rebels rule the ranch.
