Sultana

by Alan Huffman

  When food ran short, the men were reduced to consuming ever-shrinking portions of cornmeal—delivered raw and riddled with partially ground-up cobs—and rancid meat. Bad as the food was, it was not unusual for prisoners to trade articles of clothing or interesting trinkets to the guards for extra rations. A prisoner had hope as long as he kept his mind and body comparatively sound, and hope had enormous potential to keep a person going. Even when circumstances were bleak, it was possible to nurture hope, to feel a kind of camaraderie peculiar to people enduring shared travail, and to benefit from the kindness of strangers.

  No stranger was kinder to them than Amanda Gardner. Though she was a staunch Rebel and had lost a son to the Yankees at the battle of Seven Pines in Virginia, Gardner could see firsthand what was going on inside the stockade and found it impossible to stand idly by. When the prison’s rations ran low, she emptied her pantry and sent her daughter Belle to pass food through the stockade wall to a group of cooperative guards. When she saw jaded prisoners staring blankly at the sky for days on end, she opened her late uncle’s library to them, lending them Dickens novels, world histories, biographies, poetry, travelogues, and scholarly works on science, philosophy, and religion. Occasionally prisoners sent notes to her by the guards requesting specific books, including accounts of inspiring, legendary wars and comparatively quaint travails. Gardner also donated all her extra bedding and clothes, and after those ran out, she had her draperies and carpets cut into squares for blankets. She also enlisted items from some of her neighbors. Melvin Grigsby, a prisoner from Wisconsin, described Gardner as “of good family and in every sense a lady of culture and refinement. She is a fluent talker and uses elegant language.” She was, he also noted, “a thorough rebel.”

  Hawes wrote that an unfriendly guard eventually saw Belle Gardner passing something through the stockade and reported her to Jones, after which the gifts of food were halted. Amanda Gardner, who saved all the notes written to her by the prisoners, likewise irked Jones by protesting the cruelty of disciplinary actions against some of the prisoners, which she could see from her windows. By the time her second son entered the Confederate service late in the war, her role at Cahaba was well known, and he was returned to her unharmed after his capture by Union troops. But as conditions worsened, Gardner’s ability to help diminished. By then, she lamented in a letter to her daughter, everything was going wrong.

  Still, as Melville Cox Robertson observed, “I have my seasons of light and shade here as I have had under more favorable circumstances.” On the last day of December 1864, when Robertson had been in the hospital for most of the month, he noted that the patients were given a turkey dinner for Christmas, which made him long for home. “The end of ’64—an eventful year—to me at least what will ’65 bring forth?” he asked in his journal. “Will I see home before it ends?” In another entry he wrote that after attending a sermon delivered by another prisoner, he felt hopeful that better times lay ahead. “Then came thoughts of home, followed by a flood of pleasant memories of old associations.”

  IF ANYONE HAD WHAT it took to survive, it was George F. Robinson. Cocksure, with a reputation as a bit of a rogue, he had a stylish sweep of auburn hair and what one friend described as “a small mustache.” His defining trait was independence, which did not dovetail with captivity.

  Robinson had served in various arms of the military, starting with the infantry, then as a second lieutenant in the Corps d’Afrique, part of the U.S. Colored Troops, with which he sailed to New Orleans aboard a ship named the Wild Gazelle. While stationed on a malarial island for six months he had caught fever, resigned his commission, and returned to Charlotte, Michigan, to live with his brother-in-law. After a few months he joined the 2nd Michigan Cavalry and fought across the deep South until his capture at the age of nineteen during a skirmish at Shoal Creek, Alabama.

  Robinson endured his share of close calls as a soldier, but he went into true survival mode as a prisoner of war. In his first stop, Meridian, Mississippi, a fellow captive stole his stash of rations from beneath his head as he slept, which Robinson later wrote was “experience No. 1 as a prisoner.” He said he was “much surprised” by the theft and within two weeks decided to cast his lot with five others in an escape attempt. The men tunneled out of the camp and made it sixty miles before being cornered, as Robinson wrote rather petulantly, “by an old woman and fifteen dogs.” He was returned to the Meridian pen, covered in mud.

  A month later he was on his way to Cahaba when the train derailed and he and a friend, John Corliss, escaped through an open window. They may have actually been thrown through the window—Robinson’s account is not clear—but either way they were presented with an opportunity and they took it. As he tumbled down the rail embankment Robinson became “badly mangled” and received a serious cut on his head. The weather was cold, and he was wearing only a shirt, underwear bottoms, and now one shoe. For the next five days he and Corliss eluded the hounds that tracked them, eating raw corn and wallowing through a swamp where icicles hung from the trees. They were recaptured, shivering and hungry. Sent back to Meridian, he and Corliss were transferred to Cahaba, from which they escaped after only a month by cutting a hole in the stockade wall. They were recaptured near Selma and held in an elevated building, from which they escaped by digging through the soft brick wall with a knife and a piece of an old poker. Again recaptured, they were returned to Cahaba, where they remained for four months, until the end.

  There were few escape attempts at Cahaba, and Robinson’s attempt was among the more bold. The stockade was closely monitored, and the men were crowded together in public view, which made it hard to do anything without detection. Remarkably, most of the prisoners who tried to escape, including Robinson, came through the episodes unscathed. The glaring exception was Captain Hiram Hanchett of the 16th Illinois Cavalry, who was alleged to be a spy at the time of his initial capture, and later as the ringleader of an attempted uprising at Cahaba. Although Hanchett and his men overpowered nine guards, the prison was quickly locked down and the uprising quelled by a cannon trained on the compound. The cannon was never fired, and no one on either side was killed, but afterward Jones forced the prisoners to pass naked between two files of guards, holding their clothing above their heads, in the hope that a man reportedly injured by a bayonet during the uprising could be identified (he was not). In his report of the incident, Henderson described Hanchett as “an exceedingly dangerous and bad man.” After languishing for a while in the dungeon of the county jail, Hanchett vanished. It was said that he was told he was being paroled, escorted out, and never heard from again. Most of the prisoners believed he was murdered, and they pointed the finger at Jones.

  Hawes also escaped Cahaba with two other prisoners by squeezing under the floor of the privy and following the sewer ditch to the stockade wall, which they scaled while a companion distracted the guard. In his account, Hawes wrote that he hatched the scheme with three prisoners, one of whom—a man whose name he gave only as Grimes—was a hotheaded, poorly educated, but otherwise likeable Virginian. Grimes had deserted the Confederate Army following an altercation that left a fellow Rebel dead, changed his name when he reached the Union lines, and joined the other side. He had a similar altercation with one of his Union compatriots, deserted again, and joined the Missouri cavalry. Not surprisingly, after his capture he was terrified of being identified by either side. “The quality that commended Grimes as a companion in a contemplated escape was his unchanging, earnest determination to secure his freedom,” Hawes wrote. The other two conspirators were both from Ohio: E.A. Gere and D.E. McMillan. Gere was a restless spirit, who chafed more than most under the constraints of prison life, and Hawes considered him courageous, vigilant, prudent, and tough. McMillan was much younger than the rest, the greenest of the bunch, and ended up backing out at the last minute.

  The group concluded that tunneling out of Cahaba was not really a viable option. Rumor had it that the Rebels had planted torpedoes outside
the stockade, and in any event, there was no way to dispose of dirt without being noticed, either by the guards or by the prisoners, some of whom would betray another for an extra ration of food. So the decision was made to escape through the sewer.

  Guards stood sentinel at the privy as well as over the space between the brick wall of the warehouse and the wooden stockade, so Hawes and his crew persuaded sympathetic prisoners to distract the two who might see them escape. One engaged the guard stationed at the wall with negotiations for the trade of a fancy knife; another did the same with the guard at the latrine, using an embroidered blue-and-gold band from Hawes’s hat. “If one thing more than another was pleasing to the eyes of the Confederate guard, it was some such gewgaw as that band,” Hawes observed. They had to wait until no one was coming or going from the privy—no small feat considering that it served three thousand men. The idea was to slip into the eroded gully beneath the front of the privy, but with the guard only a few feet away, Gere decided it would be safer to slip through the toilet hole, which proved a bad idea. Not surprisingly, the Rebels had ensured that the hole was too small for a man to go through, so Gere got stuck. A frantic moment followed, but Hawes and Grimes succeeded in extricating him, and they went back to their original plan. “It was but the work of a second for Grimes to glide as noiselessly as a cat to the opening, to glance eagerly at the guard, to place his feet in the opening, to glide under the floor on which Gere and I were standing,” Hawes wrote. He and Gere followed. There, in the muck beneath the privy, they listened for a moment to see if they had been observed, but heard the hat-band negotiations continuing uninterrupted. They then crawled into the open area between the privy and the stockade wall. Peering nervously up, they saw the guard still dickering with their accomplice over the knife. Without further hesitation they scaled the wall. “When we jumped to the ground we observed a negro a few rods away looking at us; but we were each dressed in gray, and sauntered along leisurely through the portion of town nearest the prison.” Hawes assumed the man thought they were Confederate soldiers taking a shortcut over the wall.

  From there they strolled through the town before slipping into the Alabama River, hoping not to leave tracks that a bloodhound could follow. Their plan was to find a boat and paddle to Mobile, then into the open Gulf of Mexico to Pensacola, Florida, which was held by the Union. It was a far-fetched scheme, but they were desperate. The never found a boat and so traveled cross-country, intentionally stepping in cow manure to confuse any hounds that might pursue them—a Grimes suggestion. They encountered a few slaves, who were bewildered by their presence but chose not to get involved. They told the slaves they were lost Rebels on their way to Cahaba. At night they slept in the woods.

  Eventually they encountered a black plantation overseer, who was clearly suspicious of them. “He was very obsequious,” Hawes wrote, adding that “his fawning, servile manner made Grimes suspicious of him.” After they departed, Grimes wanted to go back, waylay the man, and either make him accompany them or tie him up for the night, but Hawes and Gere disapproved. They were faint from lack of food and sleep, confused about where they were, and increasingly uneasy, but they felt they had no choice but to forge on.

  Apparently the overseer reported them. “Just as we had nearly passed through a large field of corn, Gere halted and listened; he said he could hear the cry of hounds,” Hawes recalled. Everyone’s hearts dropped. Soon the sound seemed to grow more distant, and they resumed their march. Then the sound was suddenly close, and the men, “pale with fear and sickening despair,” began to run. The cries of the dogs grew more excited as they burst on the scene. The three men ran as hard as they could across the cornfield and barely managed to climb atop a tall fence before the dogs were upon them, barking and growling. A short distance behind they could hear the voices of men on horseback. When the first man arrived, he pointed his gun at them and asked if they were armed. He did not seem to believe them when they said they were not, and asked again. Then he ordered them down from the fence. They hesitated until he shooed away the dogs. “Did you come from Cahaba?” the man asked. Hawes began his spiel about being lost Rebels, but he was interrupted by Grimes, who admitted they were fugitives from the prison. “That put a full and irreversible quietus on my story,” Hawes lamented, though he had to admit that their accents would have given them away.

  After two days of freedom, Hawes and company headed back to Cahaba, arguing with their captors along the way about the war, their respective equestrian skills, and no doubt whatever else came up. That night they were inside the stockade gates, where they were welcomed back by their disappointed friends, less one fancy knife and Hawes’s blue-and-gold hat band.

  Chapter Eight

  ANDERSONVILLE

  DURING THEIR IMPRISONMENT IN AUGUST 1864, COLONEL Harrison, General Stoneman, and Colonel Joseph Dorr, all of whom had been captured during McCook’s raid, wrote to President Lincoln to give “a heartrending account of the conditions of our private soldiers now prisoners of war at Andersonville, Ga.” The letter asked Lincoln “to use every honorable effort to secure a general exchange of prisoners, thereby relieving thousands of our comrades from the horrors now surrounding them.”

  About thirty-three thousand Union soldiers were held inside the twenty-six-acre stockade at Andersonville, and the three officers estimated that perhaps twenty thousand had no shelter of any kind, or even shade. “Thousands are without pants or coats, and hundreds without even a pair of drawers to cover their nakedness,” they wrote.

  The United States government had ceased its prisoner exchange program after the Confederacy refused to trade U.S. Colored Troops, although there was believed to be an ulterior motive: The desire to reduce the beleagured Confederacy’s manpower, even at the expense of Union prisoners of war. Harrison and company alluded to the impasse, writing, “We were told that the only obstacle in the way of exchange is the status of enlisted negroes captured from our armies, the United States claiming that the cartel covers all who serve under its flag and the Confederate States refusing to consider the negroes soldiers, heretofore slaves, as prisoners of war…Is it not consistent with the national honor, without waiving the claim that the negro soldiers shall be treated as prisoners of war, yet to effect an exchange of the white soldiers?” Captured black soldiers, the three contended, were routinely distributed by the Confederates as slaves and so were rarely imprisoned, and “their slavery is freedom and happiness compared with the cruel existence imposed upon our gallant men.”

  Lincoln, apparently, was unmoved. Official exchanges did not resume. Harrison, Stoneman, and Dorr, who did not likely spend much time at Andersonville before being quartered in the Macon officer’s prison, were transferred to a Confederate military prison in Charleston, South Carolina, and in late September paroled.

  IN THEIR LETTER TO LINCOLN, the three officers may have exaggerated some aspects of Andersonville. There is no evidence to support their contention that thousands of prisoners were kept naked. But conditions there were undeniably bad. Everything that was wrong with Cahaba was worse at Andersonville. Every threat was amplified. The sickness, hunger, and ennui were more intense than in the most desolate army camp, the environment was hopelessly defiled, and violence was common. It would have been bad enough if all the prisoners had to contend with were bad food, diarrhea, and hostile guards, but the stockade walls delineated more than the limits of their freedom. They also described the boundaries of their physical, mental. and emotional stamina, and their willingness to do what was necessary to make it out alive. Men who put their trust in God, who persevered because of concern for loved ones back home, who steeled themselves with anger or pride or honor or even greed—for all of them there were limits, and the odds were that they would reach them at Andersonville.

  Andersonville existed on the far fringes of human civilization. It was overcrowded, contaminated, poorly supplied, and often brutally violent. Law and order, food, and medical care were in perennially short supply. Most
of the prisoners were enlisted soldiers or captive officers of black troops; other officers, including Elliott (on account of his ruse), were held in Macon. No one had it all that good, but officers of black troops, along with their enlisted men, were in many cases treated more harshly. As New Jersey Private George Weiser observed, “There were four or five hundred colored prisoners in this prison and nearly all of them were lame or wounded.” Black prisoners also suffered the highest death rate: Of the approximately eight hundred held at Andersonville, two hundred eighty-four died—about 35 percent.

  Elliott may have spent some time inside the stockade for brief periods, because it was not unusual for prisoners to be shunted around to more than one prison camp. Tolbert’s brother Mathew, who was captured at Chickamauga and reportedly spent eighteen months at Andersonville, was eventually transferred and released in North Carolina. In his published accounts after the war, Elliott wrote that following his capture he was transported to Chattanooga; then to various holding pens in Mississippi and Alabama, including Cahaba; and finally to Andersonville. He wrote of being confined to a crowded boxcar ankle-deep in horse dung for a day and a night, during which “indignities and humiliations” were heaped upon him. “Shall I tell of the march over ice and snow; the wading of deep streams from Nashville to Dixon…suffering from cold and exposure in the dead of winter, and from hunger…” he plaintively asked his readers.