by Alan Huffman
After the largest bits of debris were removed, Tolbert’s wound would have been sewn up with a needle whose thread had been wetted with saliva, then wrapped in gauze overlaid with plaster. Debris was almost always left behind: Bits of cloth, lead, dirt, gunpowder—even pieces of thread, skin, or bone from other soldiers, if the bullet had passed through them first. Such alien particles were anathema to the body. Even if the wound did not become infected, a fragment of debris could easily move into the bloodstream and cause an aneurysm in the heart, lungs, or brain. When the soldier awoke from surgery—assuming he had been put under, and perhaps even if he had not—he likely suffered from severe headaches, fever, vomiting, and painful swelling. Either way, by the time he was fully conscious, Tolbert would have been acutely aware that major things were going wrong in his body.
As an enemy soldier in a military hospital Tolbert probably received treatment only after the injured Rebels. One woman who served as a nurse in the Union Army reported that after the battle of Gettysburg, “It took nearly five days for some three hundred surgeons to perform the amputations that occurred here, during which time the rebels lay in a dying condition without their wounds being dressed or scarcely any food.” The injury to Tolbert’s neck, mouth, and jaw was clearly the more serious, but the wound to his shoulder was dangerous, too. Minié balls—thimble-sized cylindrical bullets of soft lead that were commonly used during the Civil War—were particularly damaging because they spun during their trajectory and tumbled and deformed inside the victim after impact. If the injury did not kill the person outright, or cause brain damage or paralysis, the ragged wound soon began to enlarge and swell, sometimes to many times the size and depth of the original point of entry.
Bandages were changed infrequently and sometimes reused, which added to the potential for infection. Infected wounds generated copious amounts of pus and sometimes became infested with maggots. Civil War surgeons referred to draining wounds as producing “laudable pus” because of their misunderstanding of bacterial infection, knowledge of which would be developed only a decade or so later—too late to benefit the wounded of the Civil War. In some cases they allowed maggots to remain because they consumed dangerously rotting flesh, a process believed to promote the growth of new tissue. One surgeon recalled treating a wound scarcely larger than the bullet that made it, which become larger and larger until, as he described it, he could have inserted his fist inside. Gangrene also spread rapidly through hospitals, particularly after a few days of cold rain, which required windows and doors to be closed, and one surgeon reported observing a wound on the inside of a man’s upper thigh become enlarged so dramatically that it exposed the femoral artery “until the pulsating vessel stretched like a red rope across the chasm.” Treatment of hospital gangrene called for isolation and exposure to fresh air, which was not always possible, as well as local application of nitric acid, nitrate of mercury, or bromine if they were available. If a patient survived and the infection was arrested, the tissue would slowly grow back. One Wisconsin soldier who was captured and held in the officers’ prison at Macon endured three successive amputations from one leg as a result of spreading infection before he died.
In Hawes’s case, by the time an actual surgeon arrived to tend his wound, it had become so swollen that “one could easily lay his hand in the opening. The surgeon proceeded to sew it up, which operation was a good deal like trying to draw the mouth of a well-filled sack together, and caused me the greatest pain and agony.” Hawes was then loaded onto an ox-drawn wagon, part of a caravan of injured prisoners, each wagon driven by an old man. “At almost every house we came to a halt was made and more wounded added to our number. The heat was intense. The sun poured down its burning rays upon our unprotected bodies like a ball of liquid fire, while the green flies swarmed around our festering wounds like bees around a hive.” Hawes and his fellow prisoners were eventually loaded into a boxcar, but because the railroad tracks were in such bad repair, the train derailed. The car he was traveling in overturned, throwing the injured men against the ceiling, and rolled down an embankment. Men began to wail as a result of new injuries and reopened wounds. “Help was slow in coming,” he wrote, “as the guards had their own killed and crippled to attend to first.” Finally a surgeon and his assistants began working on the injured prisoners, “but when the car was opened some were already past all help, while others soon bled to death from having their wounds torn open.”
Hawes and his fellow survivors were put aboard another train bound for the Confederate prison at Cahaba, Alabama—the same pen where Tolbert ended up after he was released from the military hospital in Montgomery.
The fact that Tolbert was in the hospital in Montgomery for six weeks indicates that he was not doing particularly well, and he had to be stabilized before he could be transferred to Cahaba, where blockades and raids—by men such as him—led to periodic shortages of food and medicine. Clearly, his situation was going to get worse before it got better.
Tolbert’s conditioning, his youth, and his spirit may have helped prepare him for the challenge. If nothing else, he was still alive. There were possibilities.
THREE DAYS AFTER TOLBERT’S CAPTURE, a group of foragers from the 2nd Indiana Cavalry ran into a similar ambush near Stilesborough, Georgia. Perry Summerville had enlisted in the 2nd three years before, at age fifteen, and had seen battlefield action in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia, including some of the bloodiest conflicts of the war: Shiloh, Perryville, Stone’s River, and Chickamauga. The 2nd had also participated in McCook’s disastrous raid and a few drowned in the frigid river when a ferry overturned in Tennessee. Summerville had come through each trial to fight another day, but on September 13, 1864, as his cavalry patrol fled a Rebel ambush, he jumped from a speeding wagon and into the abyss. He fell beneath the wagon wheels, felt his leg snap, and was unceremoniously left behind. He then became a prisoner of war.
Summerville was an alert and affable young man, with hawkish eyes and a musing, slightly frowning mouth. He reacted to captivity by drawing upon both his personal charms and his powers of concentration. After his capture the Rebels put him on a mule, which he rode for a few hours in what must have been excruciating pain, until he was loaded into a wagon. Two days later the wagon pulled to a stop in Jacksonville, Alabama, where Summerville was placed in a hospital for a few more days, and where his physician took pity on him. As Summerville later wrote, “The man at the hospital gave me a fine comb, which was the means of catching at least fifty thousand inmates at the prison, and his lady gave me a ten dollar bill.” The “inmates” were the scourge of Civil War soldiers—body lice, which were a nuisance in camp but a plague in the prisons, where the crowded, filthy conditions provided an especially productive habitat.
Throughout much of the war, prisoners were routinely paroled in the field, pending an official exchange. Technically, they were not to fight again until a corresponding enemy prisoner was released, and sometimes their captivity lasted only a few hours. But not everyone was paroled, and the prisoner exchanges had been suspended by the time Summerville was captured. Most soldiers, including Summerville, had been on the other end of the transaction, having captured their share of enemy soldiers, so everyone knew the drill. The prisoners were stripped of their weapons, their mounts, and their personal possessions, which often included items of no monetary value that their captors kept as souvenirs. As soon as possible they were sent to a holding camp. Sometimes the prisoners were treated roughly; at other times they conversed with and even befriended their captors. They were almost always robbed, which was not only an affront but limited their ability to bargain or even to perform routine tasks such as keeping a supply of drinking water on hand.
After being captured in North Carolina, Thomas Newton wrote that he and his fellow Yankee prisoners were “deprived of all that was on our horses, including haversacks, blankets, canteens, tin cups, etc. so we had no cooking utensils or anything to get water in.” This f
orced Newton to be resourceful. “While marching through Goldsboro, I saw an oyster can in the street and stepped out to get it. The guard, not knowing my intention, ordered me back to my place, but I requested the next guard to get it for me when he kindly went and brought it to me, and still farther along I picked up a piece of wire to make a bail for it, all of which seemed to be providential, for undoubtedly the little pail was the means of saving my life.”
Newton was aware of one of the basic truths of surviving captivity: You had to start from scratch. Men who bemoaned their circumstances and failed to adapt typically did not fare well. Those who made use of their limited control did better. Some men wasted away in the dirt of the prison yard, nearly naked and starving, while others set up rudimentary business enterprises, carving utensils from roots to trade, cutting soldiers’ hair on barter, hoarding and then selling food. At his next stop on the way to prison, Newton secreted the pail he had fashioned from the oyster can, along with a few other possessions he had managed to conceal from the guards. “They took everything in the shape of money and valuables that they could find or thought was worth something, with some exceptions,” he wrote. “One of the boys had a good watch that he refused to give up. He told the guard he could not have it unless he was stouter than he. Mr. Reb gave it up saying he would see the lieutenant about it after examination, but we heard no more about it.” As for himself, Newton wrote, “I had a watch, jack-knife, wallet and two or three dollars in money, all of which I put in my little pail and slid under the cell door, which was open at the time, so he did not find it.”
After arriving at a temporary prison in Charleston, South Carolina, Newton and the other prisoners received nothing to eat for sixty hours (he apparently timed the lapse with his treasured watch). “We had become so weak it was with difficulty we could walk across the floor; in making the attempt we would be so dizzy that we would almost fall over. I never knew what hunger was before, but thought I knew then.” In fact, as was the case with many prisoners, the worst was still ahead. Soon Newton was sent to Andersonville, the most notorious prison in the Confederacy.
Jesse Hawes had been captured the first time near Guntown, Mississippi—the result, he later said, of his troops’ “overweening confidence” in their repeating Spencer rifles. Advancing hurriedly through a dense bramble, Hawes had tripped on a vine and simultaneously “a thousand bullets flew hissing into the thicket.” Trees began to splinter around him, and smoke from the Rebel guns blew into his face. He realized that his fall may have saved his life. Many of his comrades were killed or injured. Soon he was on his feet again, rushing toward the Rebel line, but when he emerged into the open he found himself alone in the face of the enemy, with perhaps a hundred guns leveled on him. “For a moment I stop in confusion,” he recalled. “A score of Confederates yell, ‘Don’t shoot that man; surrender, d—n you, surrender!’” So he did. “Running so actively that hot day, for a few moments I was breathless and a passive subject in their hands while they stripped me of my arms, a dozen men swearing at me most roundly during the act. The instantaneous change from a pursuing, exultant freeman to a roughly handled, roundly cursed, humble prisoner, presented a ludicrous side to my mind, and as soon as I could get breath suggested to my captors that the change was a rough joke to their unwilling guest. But they were in no joking mood. Indeed, they were never more serious in their lives.” He later escaped, was recaptured, again escaped, and was again recaptured.
There was no hope of escape for Summerville, since his leg was broken. After Jacksonville he was taken to Talladega, where he was locked in a small cell with a dozen Rebels, who, he assumed, were captured deserters. At some point he was given a pair of crutches, and a few days later he was transferred to a jail in Selma, then moved to Cahaba prison. It was now the end of September 1864. He would spend Christmas and his eighteenth birthday there.
Cahaba was an unfinished cotton warehouse, partially roofed, on the banks of the Alabama River, surrounded by a small wooden stockade. As Summerville entered the stockade gates he heard other prisoners hollering “fresh fish,” the army slang for new arrivals. He spent the day scoping out the situation and looking for an older man named Brown with whom he had been taken prisoner in Georgia. At nightfall he had no blanket to ward off the cold and fell asleep on the ground, using his crutches for a pillow. The next morning he spent several hours trying to clean the dirt from his uniform, unwilling to give in to the squalor of the prison. Meanwhile his leg was getting worse. He was taken to the Confederate hospital housed in the nearby Bell Tavern Hotel, a few blocks from the prison, where he managed to surreptitiously fashion a knife from a piece of iron hoop he had found. He was unable to mentally endure the hospital, though, writing, “to see the dead carried out every morning was too much for me and I went back to the stockade.” He eventually found Brown, and the two formed an alliance, Summerville with his knife and Brown with a railroad spike, which they used for splitting wood. This meant, he said, “We were better fixed than the average prisoners.”
It would not be long before wood became scarce and Summerville was reduced to whittling away one of his crutches for firewood, to stay warm and to cook the meager rations the prisoners were issued raw. He burned all of the first crutch and started in on the second, which left him with a cane. When the cane was stolen, he observed, “That left me in a bad fix.”
FOR J. WALTER ELLIOTT, the pivotal event of the war came around the time Tolbert and Maddox were setting off on Rousseau’s raid, in early July 1864, when he was promoted to captain in the 44th regiment of the U.S. Colored Troops. Elliott, who had graduated from officer’s training school six years before, finally got the recognition he wanted, but it carried immense challenges and risks. Racism was common in both armies, and the use of black troops was controversial. The white officers who commanded them were often ridiculed within their own army, and the troops were typically undersupplied and given few opportunities to prove themselves in battle. They were also largely unschooled and received less pay than their white counterparts. More significantly, according to Confederate law they and their white officers were subject to execution as illegal combatants if captured.
In the movie Glory, which is based upon the journals and letters of Robert Gould Shaw, the protagonist accepts a promotion to lead the colored troops of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. His best friend reacts incredulously, saying, “I know how much you’d like to be a colonel, but a colored regiment?” A contemporary article in the Indianapolis Journal was even more blunt, observing that the practice of arming blacks was tolerated only because “no white soldier could be found who would not sooner see a Negro with one arm off, than to have one off himself.”
Elliott’s promotion unleashed a series of calamities. Though he did not mention his black soldiers by name in his numerous wartime accounts, nor the fact that almost all of them were returned to slavery after capture, he used their shared travails to portray himself as a brave, well-connected leader who endured great adversity. Like the majority of officers in the U.S. Colored Troops, Elliott was white, though his dark complexion perhaps opened him to insults along the way. The Elliotts were a staunchly Unionist family. His uncle Robert was involved in the Underground Railroad, and two of his younger brothers, Simeon and John, also served in the Union Army. One of his cousins, James H. Elliott, served alongside him initially in the 10th Indiana Infantry. While in the 10th, Elliott was involved in some of the war’s bloodiest conflicts. He participated in the siege of Corinth, Mississippi, in the pursuit of Confederate cavalry under General Braxton Bragg into Kentucky, and—more or less—in the battles of Stone’s River, Chickamauga, and Missionary Ridge. After joining the 44th U.S. Colored Troops he was posted to Chattanooga and saw limited action, mostly in and around Dalton, Georgia, and Nashville, Tennessee. At Nashville his troops came out on the short end of one engagement, though not, apparently, for lack of trying.
The 44th was organized in Chattanooga in April 1864 by Major General George H. Th
omas and placed under the command of Colonel Lewis Johnson. After the fall of Atlanta, the 44th was primarily used for manual labor and picket duty. Like other black regiments, the men were aware of the special perils they faced, but their willingness to fight was bolstered by a profound fear of capture. On September 24, 1864, soldiers of the 110th Colored Infantry were captured by forces under the command of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest near Athens, Alabama, after their commanding officer, Colonel Wallace Campbell, set fire to his own supply stockpiles and ordered his troops to seek refuge in a block-house, or stockade, beside the railroad tracks. Campbell had sent two couriers with a request for reinforcements, one of whom was captured and killed, while the other escaped, injured, and returned to the fort. Just after dawn the next day, the Rebels began shelling the fort, and after a few hours Campbell received a surrender ultimatum from Forrest.
“I have a sufficient force to storm and take your works, and if I am forced to do so the responsibility of the consequences must rest with you,” Forrest wrote. “Should you, however, accept the terms, all white soldiers shall be treated as prisoners of war and the negroes returned to their masters. A reply is requested immediately.” After Campbell sent a message declining to surrender, Forrest replied, “I desire an interview with you outside of the fort, at any place you may designate, provided it meets with your views. My only object is to stop the effusion of blood that must follow the storming of the place.”
Campbell wrote that Forrest subsequently informed him that “if he was compelled to storm the works it would result in the massacre of the entire garrison. He told me what his force was, and said myself and one officer could have the privilege of reviewing his force. I returned to the fort, when, after consultation with the commanders of various detachments in the fort, it was decided that [if] after reviewing the force of General Forrest I found he had 8,000 or 10,000 troops, it would be worse than murder to attempt to hold the works.”