English Diary 2

[admin]

6th. Rations, one pint of meal and two or three spoonfuls of beans and two ounces of bacon; prisoners almost crazy with hunger; there is a gang of men in here this morning selecting a place to build a scaffold upon which to hang the six raiders; I think they are only doing this to frighten the balance of them.

[admin]

8th. It is reported this morning that one hundred and twenty-five have died in the last 24 hours; it is comparatively quiet here now since the raiders have been arrested; and we have a good strong police force of about four hundred men, who are divided into squads with a captain in command of each; two-thirds of the prisoners cannot stand or walk, but lie around in all positions.

[admin]

9th. Men came in to put up the scaffold today, and to their great astonishment there was no lumber; the prisoners carried it off during the night for firewood and this morning not a stick could be seen; when the news reached Capt. Wirz he was as mad as a hornet and drove all through the camp with twenty of his guards, but could not find any of the lumber; he carried four revolvers.

[admin]

10th. One hundred and fifty-two prisoners have died within the last 24 hours; they say almost as many die in the hospital as here. It is said the raiders will be hanged tomorrow, and that is the chief topic of conversation. It is awful hot here now; the sun almost melts us.

[admin]

11th. About twenty men came in this morning to put up the scaffold; rations served at nine this morning; the rebels say the raiders are to be executed this afternoon, as soon as the scaffold is finished. It had become known about that we were going to hang some of our own men. When the appointed time arrived, a large crowd of citizens — men, women and children, gathered on the high ground between the principal forts and the prison to witness the hanging. Capt. Wirz was alarmed and excited, fearing we had some Yankee trick on hand to get up a commotion and all break out and capture the place. He had the whole rebel force under arms and the cannon of all the forts loaded with grape and canister and trained on the prison. Everything was ready to fire at the signal. But this act created an exciting scene, which Captain Wirz thought was the expected break. He ran to the signal battery yelling "Fire! fire! — shoot! shoot !" The Captain of the battery being a man of cool judgement, did not obey Wirz. The citizens and guards who were in the way of the cannon stampeded into a regular panic, injuring many of the citizens. Had the Captain of the battery obeyed Wirz, there would be 24 cannon loaded with grape and canister opened upon that human mass in the prison. The 35,000 lives in the prison hung on the firing-cord of that signal gun.

[admin]

LATER, — 5. GO P. M. The six raiders were hanged this afternoon; it was an awful sight; the judge, jury, etc., were all prisoners, no rebels participating at all. At about half-past four, Captain Wirz rode into camp at the head of the guards who had the condemned men in charge to the scaffold, and delivered the sentenced men to our police, who stood around with clubs. One of the condemned men escaped through the crowd to the swamp but was soon brought back.
He knows that he has gong astray.
And sees the danger of his way.
And to the right would turn again.
If a pardon he could gain.
Not for the crime he would repent.
But much he fears the punishment
The spoils he got among the throng,
He had hoped would serve him long.
The six men were hanged together; after hanging about twenty minutes, they were taken down and carried out to the dead-house, I was one of the six who carried Mosby, the leader, out, and was glad to breathe fresh air for a few minutes.

[admin]

July 12, 1864. All the talk in camp is about the hanging of the raiders. The scaffold upon which they were hanged was all carried away in an hour by the boys; I have a piece of it which I want to lake home if I ever get out alive. The raiders were buried this morning; the number of deaths in camp reached its highest mark yesterday, one hundred and eighty-five having died. I don't wonder, as everything is composed of dirt and filth; the stench from the swamp is sickening and the water full of maggots and all kinds of vermin, which we must use or die of thirst; there is a spring inside the dead-line, but cannot get to it without running the risk of being shot.

[admin]

13th. We are suffering very much from heat, as we have no shelter of any kind to protect us from the scorching sun; we are almost all barefooted and hatless. Have not heard how many died yesterday, but think from the heat there must have been a great many; the wagons have been busy all day hauling away the dead; they use a regular hay wagon, and when thev throw in one body upon the rest, you can see it shake the whole load. Oh! what a horrible sight!

[admin]

14th. One of the guards shot at a man this morning but missed him and struck a prisoner who was sitting smoking his pipe, hitting him in the upper part of the jaw, passing out at the opposite side, cutting his tongue in two. Ten detachments get one load of wood per day for twenty-five hundred men. Oh! only God in heaven known how we are treated.
We suffer much, we suffer long,
Beneath their vile oppression.
Nor could they say we did them wrong,
Theirs was the first aggression.

[admin]

15th. Rations, one pint of corn meal and about twenty beans and three or four ounces of bacon, all raw and no way to cook them.

[admin]

16th. The rebels are engaged in throwing up breastworks and making rifle pits all around the stockade; we can see them at work. They are evidently afraid of Sherman's raid or Kilpatrick; they would as soon see the devil as the latter general. Deaths average about one hundred and twenty per day, and the rebels say it will take us all away in August, as that is the hottest month in the year in Georgia.

[admin]

17th. It it terribly hot here. Another prisoner was shot by the guards this morning; he was taken sick while near the dead-line and was vomiting, and had hold of the railing to support himself when the guard, who was only twenty feet from him, shot him, the ball passing clear through his breast; he belonged to a New York regiment. They say when a guard shoots a prisoner he gets thirty days furlough. I guess that accounts for the shooting of so many prisoners. We are truly in a wretched condition, and the gigantic, the proud, the boasted republic of the world, America is allowing its citizens, its soldiers, its volunteers to remain here to starve, to rot, and to die.

[admin]

18th. Captain Wirz drove through the prison today; the men hooted at him, but he paid no attention to them.

[admin]

19th. Upwards of seven thousand prisoners have died in the stockade since I came here, not including the number who have died in the hospital.

[admin]

20th. One hundred and thirty prisoners died yesterday; it is so hot we are almost roasted. There were 127 of my regiment captured the day I was, and of that number eighty-one have since died, and the rest are more dead than alive; exposure and long confinement is doing its work among us.

[admin]

21st. The rebels have erected large forts and breastworks around the camp, to keep us from making a break to get out. There are thirty-seven thousand men crowded into a space of thirty-six acres. There are in this place active young and middle aged men from loving northern homes, clinging to the last spark of life, wallowing in their own filth, many of them reduced to idiocy and some cannot speak, the ground under them giving off the most suffocating stench to mingle with that of bodies decaying in the hot sun. Sometimes we would go and carry them water, of which they would drink, but the stench would drive us away before we could serve all. They would stretch out their wasted hands and implore us by word and signs to give them water, but the glassy stare of their eyes telling us they would soon be out of misery, we leave them to die; we have all the sick comrades we can care for and we must not neglect them for those we cannot save with the means at hand.

[admin]

The churches of all denominations except one solitary Catholic Priest, Father Hamilton, ignore us as completely as they would dumb beasts. Father Hamilton was the only religious minister that I ever knew to come into this place, and I certainly believe he is a true Christian. He would minister the Catholic and Protestants alike. Some of the rebel doctors were kind-hearted and shed tears over our distress, but they were powerless to give relief under the Management of "Jeff" Davis and his assistants Winder and Wirz. This starving strain on the weakened constitutions of the prisoners carried them off by the hundreds day after day. Wirz was a low, illborn wretch of the most brutal type. He seemed to delight in, and took pride in showing the guards how he could knock down and kick the poor helpless imbecile prisoners, who were so idiotic that they could not understand him, and would stand and stare vacantly at him when he spoke to them. He practiced the most brutal and barbarous cruelties on this class of helpless prisoners. A large number of those who had been in prison over a year were now insane. They seemed to lose all power of speech and memory; they could not tell their own names, and did not know whether they had been in prison one day or one year. If spoken to, their only answer would be a far-away look, as if they were trying to recall something beyond the reach of their memory. They wondered aimlessly about and kept their comrades constantly watching to keep them from the dead-line. Many were murdered at the dead-line. The gangrene is terrible; prisoners are rotting and falling to pieces from its effect. God save us poor fellows!

[admin]

22d. Nothing of any importance to state today; it is comparatively quiet since the raiders were hanged and the police were organized. Jeremiah O. Mahany, of my company, is Chief of Police. A great many men get sun struck, and men who lie out in the sun sick are tortured to death by flies and vermin.

[admin]

23d. Excitement in camp over the rumor of an exchange of prisoners; I will not believe it until I am inside our lines — we have been fooled so often.

[admin]

24th. There are about two thousand sick in the hospital, just outside the stockade; five or six legs and arms are amputated every day, which gives the physicians great practice.