by Alan Huffman
Gardner did not have the luxury of living in studied ignorance. She saw the prisoners meting out their last reserves of energy, lying in the dirt, hovering over their tiny fires, waiting in line at the awful latrines, stepping over each other and the accumulation of filth. Sometimes they fought. They were tormented by mosquitoes, maggots, and flies.
Somewhere amid the rabble was Romulus Tolbert, who arrived at Cahaba in October from the military hospital in Montgomery, after the Rebels had done all they could for his throbbing shoulder and jaw. By a strange twist of fate, his friend John Maddox arrived at about the same time, after being captured near Draketown, Georgia, as did Perry Summerville, hobbling on his swollen, unset broken leg. For Tolbert and Maddox it must have been a bittersweet reunion. They were in prison, but they had each other for support as Tolbert nursed his wounds and both were afflicted with diarrhea (Maddox eventually came down with scurvy, too). A man who had a friend at Cahaba, or a company of fellow soldiers, was comparatively fortunate. Friends could look out for each other, watch over whatever possessions they could still claim while the other waited in line for rations or at the latrines, help defend against the depredations of thugs, and tend to their respective needs when they were sick. A lone man was completely dependent upon the kindness of strangers and vulnerable to predators, who were numerous in the prison population.
Cahaba was run by Captain Howard H.A.M. Henderson, a Methodist minister, who maintained generally good relations with the prisoners. As winter set in Henderson arranged for a steamboat load of clothing, blankets, medicines, and other supplies from the United States government to travel to the prison under a flag of truce. Its cargo included two thousand coats, hats, and pairs of pants, shoes, and socks; fifteen hundred blankets; medicine; envelopes and writing paper; and one hundred cooking tins. Unfortunately, most of the clothing was soon traded off to the guards for food, leaving the men almost as bereft as before. A far less compassionate man, Lieutenant Colonel Sam Jones, headed the military post at Cahaba and was second in command of the prison. By late 1864 Jones was in charge most of the time, as the comparatively benevolent Henderson was frequently away, procuring needed supplies or trying to effect a prisoner exchange.
According to Jesse Hawes, who ended up at Cahaba after his third and final capture, “It was often in the power of Henderson to extend kindnesses and courtesies to prisoners, and we are glad to note that the opportunity was not infrequently embraced.” Henderson even bought a pair of shoes for a barefoot young prisoner whom he escorted to Memphis to be exchanged, and he openly wept over the death of another young Union soldier.
Jones was another story. A bitter man who scoffed at the prisoners’ suffering, he had been assigned to Cahaba after being court-martialed for falsifying military records, and he was later suspected of the murder of a prisoner alleged to have been behind a failed uprising. Jones would be remembered darkly by the prisoners.
At Cahaba, as at other prisoner-of-war camps in both the North and the South, a man could die of almost anything. Hawes wrote in his journal of the death of “a tall young boy” from Illinois of chronic diarrhea, the result of “miserable, polluted surface water, the coarse meal, poorly cooked, the exposure to the cold rains.” He watched the boy make frequent trips to “the sinks,” as the latrines were called, and noted a few days later that “his journeys were fully as frequent, but his steps were slower, his face more hollow, his eyes more dull. He growled at first, then complained in a hollow voice; the lines of pain and long-suffering deepened upon his face; his steps grew slower, weaker, sometimes staggering; he neglected to fasten his clothing; faeces ran from the bowels as he slowly dragged himself to the ‘sink.’ A day later he sat all day resting his chest upon his knees, his head falling forward. The next day he lay upon his side on the ground; some one gave him all he had some boughs of pine for a bed. He was too weak to go to the ‘sink’ now. The drawn, haggard, suffering face showed less of the agony he manifested a few days before, and more of weakness, dullness. The eyes grew more sunken, the discharges from the bowels were only a little bloody mucus. He could answer questions if one asked him anything; he asked occasionally for a sip of water, never for food. He was getting more and more stupefied. During the day we placed over him whatever we could to render him as comfortable as possible. I went to him in the night he was only a few feet away from us and found him dead.”
The next day, Hawes wrote, “A cold rain started in before morning, and at daylight some one pulled off his ragged garments to cover his own suffering limbs.” A detail of the boy’s friends was permitted to remove him from the stockade for burial.
That was the way it sometimes worked. Of the nearly two hundred thousand Union troops held in Confederate prisons during the war, more than thirty thousand died. The rate was only slightly better among Rebel prisoners held in the North: More than twenty-six thousand dead among the more than two hundred thousand incarcerated. The fatalities at Cahaba were a fraction of the total—a few hundred. But for people like Amanda Gardner, each one was a sadness and an affront.
Cahaba, sometimes known as Castle Morgan, was the most crowded prison in the Confederacy, perhaps of the entire war. Despite Henderson’s efforts, medicine, food, clean water, and firewood were sometimes in short supply. Captive officers fared better than enlisted men; they were housed in town and were free to move around upon their pledge not to escape. But the stockade was dismal. Originally designed as a holding pen for Union soldiers captured in battle or cavalry raids who would ostensibly be transferred to established prisons elsewhere, it quickly became overcrowded after the two armies’ exchange program broke down. Afterward, men continued to arrive even as other prisons filled, which meant there was no place for them to go. Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry was particularly adept at catching Yankees and was largely responsible for the Cahaba overflow. Soon the population swelled to the point that each man had, on average, only about six square feet of space during the day, and even less at night, when the prisoners were sequestered within the warehouse. By the time Tolbert and Maddox arrived the place was starting to implode.
It is hard for anyone who has never experienced loss of freedom to fathom the insult of it: The deep disappointment, the uncertainty, the claustrophobia, and the fear—to be locked up by a stranger who cares little about you and may even loathe you, to finally lose control. At meal time hundreds of prisoners crouched in the bare dirt, cooking mush in tin cups and broken pans over their fires. Smoke shrouded the compound and burned their eyes as they tried to cook, so that they had to bury their faces in their sleeves or call for someone to relieve them. Many of the men wore ragged blue uniforms that had gone unchanged for months and were stained with sweat, shit, and blood. Some were barefoot. The sick lay on the ground drawing the thin warmth of the sun, clutching pained bellies, or nursing fantastic, infected wounds. Many were oblivious—moaning, groaning, talking to themselves, cursing at anyone who stumbled over them. Here and there men sat with their shirts in their laps, methodically picking lice for hours, their sunburned arms and heads mismatched to their bony white torsos. Now and then a prisoner would go high-stepping through the crowd toward the privy, where there was always a line because there were only six stinking holes for three thousand men. Maddox, and eventually Tolbert, ended up spending their share of time there, too.
Gangs of criminals roamed the stockade, many of them bounty jumpers, the majority purportedly from New York City. There was little policing of the prison by the guards, aside from the no-go zone known as the deadline, which extended around the inside perimeter of the stockade, so for long periods of time the muggers ruled. Hawes wrote that solitary prisoners—the most vulnerable to the raiders, as the thugs were called—were fortunate when the man known as Big Tennessee arrived. Big Tennessee, whose exact identity would later be debated (though there was general agreement that his last name was Pierce), arrived at Cahaba at about the same time as Tolbert, Maddox, and Summerville and made his presenc
e known almost right away. A blue-eyed, illiterate farmer, he was nearly seven feet tall and a “mountain of muscle” before he grew emaciated like the rest of the prisoners, his arms and chest “enormous even for a man of his gigantic dimensions. He brought to mind old pictures of gladiators,” Hawes recalled. In one perhaps embellished scene—for Hawes, like J. Walter Elliott, was sometimes prone to exaggeration, though he had a remarkable eye for detail—he described Big Tennessee dispatching two muggers with a right and a left hook, then grabbing two more by their hair and cracking their heads together. After the initial fight, all Big Tennessee had to do was show up to right a wrong, according to Hawes. When prisoners went to him to report a robbery, he would escort them to the perpetrator, confront the man, and force him to make amends.
Big Tennessee could not be everywhere, though, and fear of the raiders led the prisoners to form their own police force and eventually to seize and try a group of offenders, after which the ringleader was sentenced to be chained to a log each night. The police force became less effective after its leaders were transferred to other camps, and eventually the raiders infiltrated its ranks. Some semblance of order was restored only after the bulk of the raiders joined the Confederate Army and left en masse.
Hawes observed a group of raiders molesting a young man, stripping him naked and dousing him with cold water. The episode drew the attention of Big Tennessee, who pulled the men off and helped the young man back into his clothes. Afterward, Hawes recalled, the boy was allowed to return to “his little nest in the sand,” though he died the next night. Hawes also recalled a “smooth-faced, handsome boy, a gun-boat man belonging to the monitor Chickasaw,” whose eyes “were large and full” and whose manner was “pleasant and captivating.” The handsome young man attracted attention, some of it unwelcome. According to Hawes, a prisoner informed a randy ruffian named Perry—who had deserted the Confederate Army and joined the Union Army, only to be captured and sent to Cahaba—that the young man was actually a woman in disguise. This may have been a euphemism—sex was never openly discussed in the accounts of Cahaba survivors—but for weeks afterward, Hawes said, “the boy, who was informed of the fraud, was the recipient of numerous gifts and more numerous smiles from his uncouth admirer, his reticence and coyness when speaking with Perry only adding to the ardor of the suitor.”
Sickness, hunger, cold, and the attention of greedy and occasionally horny thugs were not the only menaces. The men faced soul-sapping ennui and aggressive, even sadistic guards. The compound was surrounded by a wall of wood, which blocked out everything but a rectangle of sky. The prisoners might catch the scent of the river or the murmuring of the town, the occasional neighing of a horse, the ringing of a bell, the passage of hushed voices or shouts, or the singing in the church on Sunday. Now and then a few were allowed outside to gather wood, or on some other supervised detail, or to be treated for what ailed them at the makeshift hospital in the nearby Bell Tavern Hotel. But for the most part, the prisoners suffered from a lack of mental stimulation. The days were marked by the changing color and light of the square of sky, which brightened and dimmed, glared or crackled with lightning, and was traversed by clouds and the arcing sun and moon and stars.
Melville Cox Robertson, a prisoner who was also from Jefferson County, Indiana, wrote in his diary that “prison life is rather the most monotonous thing yet. But where there is so many together as there is here it can hardly be dull to most of those confined but to myself it sometimes becomes almost intolerable. There is so little of congeniality of spirit among those with whom I am associated that I often feel myself almost completely alone in the midst of 500 men.”
Jutting into the sky above the stockade, alongside the gables of Gardner’s house, were guard towers where old men and boys watched with guns resting on the rails, waiting for a prisoner to step across the deadline. Anyone who set foot across was subject to being shot, and many were. In one diary entry, Robertson wrote, “A shade of gloom is cast over all this evening by the sudden death of one of our beloved prisoners. Shot by the guards for stopping a moment in the passage from the entrance to the yard.” Less than two weeks later Robertson wrote that another prisoner was shot by the same guard.
The number of prisoners ebbed and flowed as new captives arrived and others died or were shifted to different camps, and exchange was such a perennial subject of discussion that some prisoners eventually found it tiresome.
Robertson, who was assigned as a nurse at the Bell Tavern Hotel, wrote in his diary, “I am sensible that the best thing I can do is to make the best of my condition and I am trying to do it. I eat my corn-bread, smoke my pipe and look forward to something better.” The hotel, whose bar, elaborate ballroom, billiard hall, and poker room had, before the war, been a favorite meeting place for area planters, politicians, and river travelers, was appropriated by the Confederate government and outfitted with cots. When the number of patients grew to two hundred, additional beds were set up in a neighboring house.
A report by Confederate surgeon R.H. Whitfield on March 31, 1864, when Cahaba contained only about six hundred fifty men, noted that the spring that provided water to the camp was polluted before it entered the stockade by “washings of the hands, feet, faces, and heads of soldiers, citizens, and negroes, buckets, tubs, and spittoons of groceries, offices and hospital, hogs, dogs, cows, and horses, and filth of all kinds from the streets and other sources.” As a result of Whitfield’s scathing report, Cahaba was ordered closed and its inmates transferred to Andersonville. Many were transferred, but Cahaba never closed, partly because of the halt in prisoner exchanges. Soon the population of inmates began to grow again, by leaps and bounds.
The U.S. Army burial records list ten deaths among the Cahaba prisoners from gunshot wounds or other injuries, which could have been inflicted by guards or by soldiers before or during their capture. The roll lists only two men dying of scurvy, the disease that killed hundreds at Andersonville. Because fruits and vegetables were also scarce at Cahaba, the lower toll probably stemmed from better treatment of the disease. In general, the prisoners appeared to have had decent access to medicine most of the time, because Cahaba was situated between Alabama’s medical supply depots at Demopolis and Montgomery, but there were periodic and significant interruptions. The disruption of the supply lines deprived everyone, including the citizens of Cahaba, their slaves, and the Rebel army, of food and medicine, and when the precious commodities were being doled out, the prisoners were last in line. Extended deprivation weakened everyone. Weakness and parasites rendered them vulnerable to disease. The proliferation of disease begot more disease. Dysentery flowered. When a person is measuring out his last remaining energy, something as minor as an infected mosquito bite can drain away the last of it like water from a busted barrel. By then the body has burned all its fat and begun consuming muscle and tissue. It is only a matter of time until vital organs begin shutting down. The greatest causes of mortality at Cahaba were pneumonia, dysentery, and diarrhea. Some prisoners during the Civil War died of simple homesickness, or “nostalgia,” which surgeons actually listed as a cause of death.
Many of the problems associated with Cahaba and other prisons, both in the Confederacy and in the Union, were brought on by lack of planning for such large numbers of captives. In many ways, conditions were better at Cahaba than at other camps in either the North or the South, and the inmates’ chances of survival were only slightly worse than on many battlefields, but that would have provided cold comfort at the time. They were enduring the worst living conditions they could have imagined, and no one knew how or when it would end. For the most part, their world consisted of the same dirty prisoners corralled inside the dreary compound, which alternated between dusty and muddy, depending on the weather, and was filled with smoke day in and day out. As Hawes wrote: “I had entered the prison in the most vigorous health, and blessed with an appetite that made no discrimination among foods that were edible. Like the rest, I divided my day’s ration into eq
ual parts, consuming them one in the morning, the other in the afternoon; but as soon as I had gone to sleep I nearly always began to dream of being home, and as soon as I would enter the house I at once went to the pantry and began to eat…Oh, what delightful lunches I used to get in those dream journeys to the home pantry!”
In later descriptions of the Bell Tavern hospital, Hawes judiciously left out that after being admitted there he was officially diagnosed with “nothing,” apparently during a severe cold snap that made the prospects of a heated ward more attractive. Even in the deep South, the cold could be severe enough to give unprotected men frostbite. Hawes recalled one particularly cold morning when a popular young prisoner known as Little Eddie failed to show up for roll call. When Hawes asked about Little Eddie, he was told that the boy was breathing his last, so he and a group of five friends went in search of him. They found Little Eddie curled in a fetal position in the dirt, shivering and unable to speak. It was not the first nor would it be the last time they observed a prisoner wasting away, but Hawes and his friends were not ready to give up on Little Eddie. They gathered him in their arms and dragged him from the shadows into the warmth of the sun, wrapped him in blankets borrowed from more fortunate prisoners, and took his hands and feet in their own hands and exhaled their own warm breath onto them, rubbing them and holding them close to their bodies. They dribbled warm water into his mouth, trying, as Hawes recalled, “to coax back the ebbing tide of life.” Slowly, Little Eddie came around. His friends had bought him some more time.
Initially, the prisoners slept in bunks in the warehouse stacked up to five tiers high—essentially shelves of rough boards spaced about thirty inches apart, with no bedding. There were only enough bunks, or roosts, as the prisoners called them, to accommodate four hundred men, so the rest had to sleep on the ground unless a roost came open as a result of a transfer or the death of its former occupant. Because there was no way to heat the partially walled and roofed building, aside from a single fireplace, the prisoners had to build their own open fires if wood was available, and the resulting smoke was suffocating on cold nights. There was only one wheelbarrow to be used in removing rubbish and waste, and the stench was horrendous. The entire stockade was filthy, like the men, and overrun with lice, fleas, flies, and rats, which buzzed or nosed around them and kept them awake at night. Hawes found the lice particularly disgusting and wrote that they “crawled upon our clothing by day…crawled over our bodies, into the ears, even into the nostrils and mouths by night.” He was also disturbed by the rats, which he wrote “were a source of much annoyance to us who slept upon the ground.” He was at first fearful the rats would bite him, but over time he became mostly annoyed that they kept waking him up.