The next day the party encountered several travelers. Judge Devine met them on his way to court. He expressed mock dismay at Charles Anderson’s predicament, telling Eliza that he was “astonished” to hear that her husband had been detained. He was hardly an “alien enemy” and had the judge been in San Antonio at the time, he maintained, the capture would not have occurred. Even if he was considered an enemy of the Confederacy, the judge claimed, it would be his duty to send Anderson out of Texas as soon as practical. But the judge was not shooting straight with the Andersons. He, Quintero, and Henry McCulloch were on the same page. Once his artful evasion with Eliza had concluded, the judge had a private conversation with Quintero. The Cuban insisted that the family should stay in Brownsville and await the certainty of Anderson’s release; he urged the Andersons not to worry. His friends would keep an eye on them.
On Thursday, October 17, the anxious family woke shortly after midnight. They were too excited to sleep, knowing that this part of their long trial was nearly at an end. The water in the arroyo was only about a foot deep, so the party crossed and made their way to Victor’s, a popular inn, where they were given comfortable rooms for the night. They were greeted by a steady stream of visitors, including Edward Gallagher and Robert McCarty, the family’s escorts in their first attempted emigration. Also calling was San Antonio dentist and fellow refugee William G. Kingsbury, a man who proved to be one of the Andersons’ most loyal friends. The next morning, they moved to their new lodgings in one of Mr. Latham’s boardinghouses. No sooner had they arrived than Quintero and Ford called to check up on them. Kingsbury arrived later that day. He had been across the river in Matamoros, Mexico, meeting with friends sympathetic to the Union cause. There was an English brig set to sail in eight to ten days for New York with a possible stop in Havana. They might be able to secure passage. The competition for berths on any vessel leaving Texas at that time was fierce.
On Saturday, after breakfast Eliza, Kitty, and Belle went out to buy letter paper. Upon their return, Kingsbury called, quite agitated. Colonel Ford was downstairs under orders to inspect their baggage. Ford came up to their rooms in a flurry of apologies and examined the few papers the Andersons had in their possession. His young wife called minutes later and expressed her displeasure with this imposition on their privacy.1
Kingsbury returned in the afternoon with two other gentlemen to take the ladies on a tour of Matamoros. The town was unlike anything Kitty had ever seen. She was used to the Mexican culture and people of San Antonio, but Matamoros was so different, so foreign in aspect. She welcomed this small bit of leisure during an otherwise tumultuous time. Ferrymen rowed the Andersons and their tour guides from the wharf across the river in two skiffs. The party climbed aboard carriages for their city excursion. They soon came upon an enclosed square with grass and trees. Kingsbury said that a band played there on Sundays and Thursday evenings. Fine two-story brick mansions with iron railings and balconies fronted the square. Wealthy ladies could be seen “airing themselves” through the tall, grated windows on the second floor. They visited the small but luxuriant gardens of Doña Anna Domingo, landscaped with Spanish bayonet palms, citron, and other fruit trees. Like most cities in Europe or America, Matamoros was a city of contrasts.
Most of the dwellings were one-story structures. Traditional “jacals” composed of mud, sticks, and thatch roofs were interspersed among modern residences, giving the town a picturesque, exotic look. The Central Market House was the largest building in town, surrounded by paved courts and other buildings of various designs and functions. Most of the houses they saw had iron spikes on their windows, suggesting to Kitty “a town of prisons.” The town was alive with short Mexican soldiers with red caps. The visitors soon learned that the soldiers were going off to quell an insurrection in some interior village. It appeared that most of the inhabitants of Matamoros were expecting an attack any day from forces loyal to Cipriano Guererro, who had recently lost a hotly contested race for governor of Tamaulipas. The Andersons passed about forty armed cavalry troops, followed by a tiny piece of artillery guarded by a few smallish soldiers in gray uniforms and red caps. This force did not compare favorably to the militia that Kitty and her mother were used to seeing back in Texas and Ohio. The tour complete, Eliza and her daughters returned to Brownsville and called it a night.
The next day was Sunday, and Kingsbury took the Andersons to the Presbyterian Church to hear Reverend Hiram Chamberlain preach. The celebrant was “sensible and plain,” according to Kitty, but the music “horrible.” No matter. This was their first opportunity for formal worship in more than two weeks. Eliza and her girls prayed ardently for Anderson’s deliverance. The very next day their prayers would be answered.2
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Escape
THE DAY THAT HIS FAMILY left San Antonio, Charles Anderson was remanded to the custody of Captain William T. Mechling, whose artillery brigade was camped six miles east of town at a place that came to be known as Camp Van Dorn. He was supplied with two wall tents facing each other with a sun shade in between. He slept in one of the tents and had his study in the other. Anderson was under guard twenty-four hours a day. His movements were strictly circumscribed during his first few weeks of captivity, and he ate all his meals with Captain Mechling’s family. At first he was allowed no visitors, but as he and Mechling became better acquainted, these rules were somewhat relaxed. Eventually most of the prisoner’s officer friends were permitted to visit him and he seemed to be in pretty decent spirits. Of course, Anderson was eager to hear of his family’s arrival in Brownsville. One day he remarked to his good friend and fellow captive Lieutenant Zenas R. Bliss that “no bride ever waited more anxiously for the coming of the groom than I do for the return of Lt. Leigh.” After a few weeks, Leigh returned with the news that his family was safe, allowing Anderson to plan his next move.1
Men frequently escaped from military prisons in the nineteenth century. Suitable facilities for the detainment of large numbers of prisoners often did not exist and certainly could not spring up overnight. Under the European tradition of a parole of honor, prisoners were given some freedom of movement while awaiting exchange. Once incarcerated, however, soldiers were no longer bound by the conditions of their parole. The first escape from a Civil War prison occurred in Texas just weeks before Anderson was arrested. Three sergeants from Reeve’s command who had been captured at San Lucas Spring in May 1861 arrived in Washington City on October 20. T D. Parker, Franklin Cook, and R. E. Ellenwood of the Eighth Infantry Regiment said that the Confederates had violated their parole agreement by placing them under guard and severely reducing their clothing, blankets, and rations. They made their escape through West Texas and Mexico, eventually boarding a steamer to Havana and thence to New York. They made use of detailed military maps to guide them to safety, the same kind of maps that most of Anderson’s officer friends possessed.2
Anderson’s friends in San Antonio knew that he would rather die than be away from his family for the course of the war, however long that might be, so they began conducting secret meetings to affect his liberation. It was a dangerous business. The escape plan they settled on involved three unlikely accomplices: Ann S. Ludlum, Jean-Charles Houzeau de Lehaie, and William Bayard.
Ludlum was a forty-nine-year-old widow of humble means. Born Ann Manson in Baltimore, she married her first husband, a man named Barry, sometime before 1836. After his death, she wed Cincinnati house painter Wesley Ludlum and lived for many years in the Buckeye State. She moved to New Orleans with her husband and family around 1850, where he died a few years later. By 1860, Ann Ludlum had divorced her third husband, Joseph Coker, and was running a small boardinghouse on the Goliad Road just north of downtown San Antonio. Ludlum barely knew the Andersons. In fact, she had made her first visit to their home just weeks before the family’s hasty departure. She was unhappy that her eldest son, Thomas H. Barry, had ignored her wishes and had run off to Houston to enlist in the Confederate Army. Ludlu
m knew that she ran a terrible risk in even talking about springing Charles Anderson from the military camp, but she was a dedicated Union woman and had to do something. She devised the plan.3
One of the renters at the Ludlum boardinghouse was an eccentric, brilliant Belgian astronomer named Jean-Charles Houzeau de Lehaie. The forty-one-year-old Houzeau, as he preferred to be called, was born in the small city of Havre, near Mons. His distinguished career as the director of the Brussels observatory was cut short after he aired his strong political views once too often and was dismissed from his job. His interest in geology led him to Texas, where he settled in Uvalde and organized scientific expeditions to the borders of Indian country. Indian attacks forced Houzeau to abandon his fossils and cherished books and flee to Austin, just as Texas was seceding. Local leaders needed intelligent recruits and offered Houzeau a commission in the Confederate Army. He refused, saying that he “would sooner cut off [his] right hand than serve that cause.” Houzeau was a radical abolitionist and decided that San Antonio, with its large contingent of Union supporters, might afford him a safer haven. Naturally, this Renaissance man had become a fast friend of Anderson, whose interests in all things scientific knew no bounds.4
The third conspirator in the planning of Anderson’s escape was a little-known visitor with important family connections. Twenty-year-old William Bayard was born in New York to a wealthy family with a rich military pedigree. He had been living with his uncle, Dr. J. Yellot Dashiell, since the summer of 1860. Dashiell was not only a wealthy stock raiser but an important town leader who had been mayor of San Antonio. He became adjutant general of Texas during the rebellion. Dashiell’s daughter was married to Confederate Captain William T. Mechling, the Confederate officer holding Anderson at Camp Van Dorn. When the war broke out, Bayard declared his Union sympathies and was placed under a sort of house arrest by his cousins. Later he was transferred to the same camp that held Anderson. The two became friends. One day over backgammon, Anderson proposed that Bayard join him in an escape. He readily agreed. With Anderson’s young friend on board, the three schemers then resolved to put an escape plan into action.5
The first step was communicating the plan details to Anderson. Ludlum decided to trust her neighbor, twenty-six-year-old German saloon keeper Charles Kreische, with this mission. Kreische and many of his German friends were in sympathy with the Union cause. Although not privy to the specifics of the plan, he agreed to pass a coded letter to the prisoner in camp. Kreische and Anderson discussed the philosophy of Kant for a time before the two settled into a game of backgammon. While the guard was busy polishing his saber, Kreische passed the note to Anderson and left at the conclusion of the game. Anderson read the letter, memorized the details, and destroyed it. The plot was simple but dangerous.6 Anderson was instructed to leave on the first cloudy night of that week and make his way to Ludlum’s house, where horses and supplies would be waiting for him. He intended to stay secreted at the boardinghouse for two or three weeks. When the excitement surrounding his escape died down, Anderson would depart to meet Bayard down the road in their mutual escape to Mexico.
If Anderson assented to this plan, he was to exit the tent and bow three times. He waited several minutes after Kreische left his tent, then walked out into the yard. He looked at the sky as if examining the weather, stroked his beard and lowered his head. He paced and bowed inconspicuously, repeating this slow and seemingly innocent behavior two more times. Then he walked back inside the tent, taking care not to look away at any time. Bayard observed the signal and the game was on.
One clear night followed another. The conspirators grew anxious. Kitty Anderson’s fiancé, Will Jones, passed the tent one morning and, when the guard was not looking, tossed a satchel into Anderson’s study. The purse contained several hundred dollars. The money was collected by Jones from his fellow officer prisoners. Anderson stashed the money and a pair of shoes in a hole under his bed and awaited a change in the weather. His asthma had returned, though not in as serious a form as he had led his captors to believe. The illness gave Anderson the excuse to opt out of the nightly games he had been playing with some of his guards and focus on planning his escape. He sent money to Dr. Ferdinand Herff one day to secure some stramonium, more popularly known as “Jamestown weed.” He often smoked the plant to relieve his symptoms and help him sleep. A strong narcotic, stramonium is lethal in large doses.
On the first cloudy afternoon of that week, Anderson approached Captain Mechling with a request. He told the captain that he was supposed to take only small puffs of the intense weed, but that he had smoked an entire pipe full in his desire to get a good night’s rest. He asked Mechling to let him sleep undisturbed if he was not up by breakfast. The captain honored the request. Anderson placed his boots outside to be blackened as he had done every night during his confinement, and he retired for the evening.
Anderson waited until everyone in camp was asleep except the guards. He slipped unseen into his study tent with his shoes, money, and little else. When the sentry passed to the side of Anderson’s bedroom, Charles crept out under the tent wall of the study. Clouds and rain blotted out the stars and most of the light from the half moon. Anderson was thankful for the darkness but afraid of losing his bearings. As he sneaked away from the Confederate soldiers, he paused each time the lightning flashed, hoping to catch a brief view of his surroundings. Soon he was completely lost. After wandering for a few hours, Anderson saw some lights and decided to approach them so as to determine his position. As he walked toward the illumination, a sentinel challenged him. Anderson remembered that the only other brigade encamped nearby was that of General Henry B. Sibley. Sibley’s troops were stationed on the Salado River, preparing for a campaign into New Mexico territory. Some of these troops would ultimately clash with forces commanded by Anderson’s son Latham at the Battle of Val Verde.
Maintaining his composure, Anderson answered the sentry, stating that he had important business with Sibley and asking for directions to his tent. The ruse worked, and Anderson walked calmly in that direction. As soon as he was out of the guard’s sight, Anderson quickened his pace and headed for the river. After struggling for countless minutes while wading away from Sibley’s camp in water up to his neck, Anderson heard the drums beat a general alarm. Since he had failed to show up at Sibley’s tent, he was now being hunted. On and on Anderson walked through the driving rain, his cheap, borrowed shoes disintegrating in the process. His feet and hands were bleeding from encounters with the briars and brambles of his trackless flight. The featureless landscape and poor visibility led him to crawl on his hands and knees at various points, trying to feel for a road or a way marker of some kind.
Anderson had been stumbling along until well after midnight when he found himself at the old powder house on the outskirts of town. This was good news. He was in widow Ludlum’s neighborhood. Unfortunately he had never been to the house, so he was unsure precisely which of the nearby dwellings was hers. Finding a small abode that seemed to match the description, he took a chance and crept into the courtyard. He saw two horses that appeared out of place in such a small enclosure. He suspected that he was at the right address. Houzeau and Ludlum had been ready for several nights to receive their secret guest. The scientist placed a large book on his bedroom windowsill each evening. Anderson pushed the window open as instructed, and the book fell to the floor. Houzeau sprung from his bed and was dressed in sixty seconds. He went into the courtyard and felt for Anderson’s hand in the gloaming predawn darkness.
“He is here, he is here,” Houzeau whispered to awaken Ludlum, “and he wants to leave.” The escapee was in no condition to travel, however. Ludlum disposed of Anderson’s wet clothes and put him to bed. When he woke in a few hours, the widow explained that there had been a change of plans. Some of the bread and meat that Ludlum had hidden away for Anderson’s journey was missing. She suspected that her servant, a Frenchman named Esau, had taken it. She went to the servant’s room while Anderson was
sleeping and found the goods in his possession. Ludlum was convinced that Esau would surely betray them if a substantial reward were offered. Rather than stay a few weeks as planned, Anderson had to leave at once. The widow gave him some of her son’s clothes and a revolver. She trimmed the fugitive’s red beard close, cut his hair, and dyed both with lamp black. Houzeau assembled the necessary supplies: a pencil and paper, compass, candle, matches, powder, bullets, map, a gourd of fresh water, and a six-day supply of biscuits. He fitted Anderson with a belt containing twelve-hundred dollars, including the money from Jones. Anderson gave Houzeau a few business papers he had somehow hidden from his captors and the October 4 letter from McCulloch. The pair mounted their horses before dawn and vanished.
On the morning of October 23, Anderson failed to show up for breakfast. Captain Mechling thought little of it. Around ten o’clock, the captain stopped by the prisoner’s tent and spoke to him. Anderson did not reply, so the officer let him sleep. Finally, fearing that his prisoner had overdosed on stramonium and might be dead, Mechling attempted to jostle a life-sized dummy of Anderson awake. Infuriated by what he discovered, Mechling and a couple of other soldiers on horseback galloped into town.
Mechling spied Zenas Bliss and shouted at him. “Where is Charley Anderson?” he bellowed. “I am sure I do not know,” replied Bliss, who figured that Anderson must be back in Mechling’s camp as the captain had charge of him. Bliss was not privy to details of the escape plan. Mechling continued in a heated voice, “Well he isn’t in my camp, but has violated his parole and escaped. My whole company is out after him, damn him. If they catch him,” he added, “they will hang him to the first tree.” Bliss calmly replied that the whole town knew that Anderson had never been on parole, having steadfastly refused it when it was offered to him. This appeared to stymie Mechling’s aggressive approach, so he tried another angle. He may not have escaped, the captain claimed, but was probably intoxicated by the stramonium he has smoked the previous night. He probably had drowned, Mechling speculated. He ordered his troops to drag the river. They did and found nothing.
The Lost Gettysburg Address Page 10