When they’d finished their drinks the two prisoners were escorted to the bunk room of a nearby barracks. McCubbin and Clackner made sure they were comfortable, procured some food from somewhere and then bade the pair a friendly good night.
The next morning, Friday, February 28, Lewis and Scully took breakfast with the soldiers. There was no hostility; one of the men even entertained them with his banjo over a pot of hot coffee. At ten o’clock the pair were collected by George Clackner.
Clackner was far more relaxed than he had been the previous night. As he escorted the prisoners to Henrico County Jail he talked freely with Lewis, reassuring him that they would be well treated in the jail. Lewis asked if they could obtain books there. Yes, replied Clackner, who added that most things could be got, for a small price. Clackner was in his midthirties, a tall man, just under six feet, with a dark complexion and a long face with a high forehead. He told Lewis he was from Baltimore, where once he’d worked as a clerk, but in the years leading up to the war he’d been a policeman in New York. Clackner didn’t reveal why he’d joined the Confederacy, but the more he talked the more Lewis sensed he was ambivalent about the Southern cause
Henrico County Jail, also known as the City Jail, was on the corner of Marshall and Fifteenth streets. The Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad passed a couple of hundred feet to the south. The jail was the smallest of Richmond’s many prisons* It was enclosed by a twelve-foot-high stone wall with a thick wooden gate the only entrance. Clackner banged on the gate. It was opened by an elderly man named George Thomas, one of Henrico’s five turnkeys. Thomas took in hand the prisoners, marching them across an outer courtyard toward an iron door that led to an inner yard. Once inside this yard Lewis and Scully were led into a rectangular two-story building made of granite and iron.
On the first floor were two cells, one occupied by Negroes, the other by three white men.
Thomas ordered Lewis and Scully to climb a heavy stepladder to the second floor. Here were two more occupied cells, and the pair were directed to the one above the Negroes’ cell. It measured about ten by sixteen feet. There were two windows, each one foot by two, latticed with four iron bars. A bench lay against one wall, and a number of collapsible cots were stacked in a corner, on which was a pile of neatly folded blankets. There were five other men in the cell.
Once Thomas had slammed the door shut, one of the men came forward and introduced himself as George W. Twells, formerly a lieutenant in the Ben McCulloch Rangers. One by one the other inmates stepped forward and made the acquaintance of Lewis and Scully: Charles Stanton, a New York sailor suspected of being a spy; a Mississippi River pilot named J. M. Seeds charged with disloyalty; a German baker accused of the same offense, and a Richmond blacksmith by the name of Saunders, indicted on theft.
Some of the men were garrulous, eager to pump Lewis and Scully for news from the outside. Was it true about Nashville? Had McClellan launched his offensive? Lewis said little, claiming to be an Englishman ignorant of American affairs. In reality he suspected “that probably one of them had been placed there to note my actions and conversations.” Instead he coaxed his new companions into telling their own stories. Twells hailed from Philadelphia. Before the war he’d worked for Charles Morgan’s Southern Steamship Company, the line that operated between New Orleans and the Texas ports. When war broke out he’d enlisted in the Confederate army only to desert a while later, the reason for his incarceration.
Stanton described to Lewis how he and Twells had escaped from the jail six weeks earlier by working a hole through their cell wall, then scaling the wall and stealing out of Richmond. They’d been recaptured as they tried to cross the Chickahominy, the river that ran east to west above the city, as effective a defense as a moat to a castle. But Stanton appeared unperturbed by their failure, promising Lewis that the next time he would get across over the Chickahominy.
Seeds and the German baker said little, but Saunders explained without bravado that he had previous spells in prison for theft and for forgery, though the latter was a clear case of injustice as he’d swallowed the evidence—a handful of dollar bills—while Winder’s men searched his smithy. This time Saunders was in for stealing, and though he made no secret of the fact he supported the Confederate cause, he bore no animosity toward the North.
Someone produced a pack of cards, and they killed time playing whist in the long minutes before lunch. When the time came to eat, the prisoners were escorted one at a time from their cell to the kitchen on the first floor. A bored jailor named Staples, a stout and jolly-looking man, supervised the collection of the food. It was the same fare every day, a mug of soup and a plate of pork, vegetables and bread.
After lunch the prisoners were conducted into the inner yard for half an hour’s exercise. The yard was bare save for a small tobacco shed in one corner and an ash heap in another. Lewis took Scully to one side and confided his fears about there being a spy in their midst. Scully just shrugged and began complaining about the food. Lewis told him to get a grip, but Scully wandered away across the yard “very much downcast.”
Later that afternoon Winder’s men arrived at the jail and removed Scully. Lewis shouted after his colleague to keep his spirits high. Then he watched from the window as Scully was led across the courtyard and out into the street.
Over the next few days Lewis settled into prison routine: awoken in the morning at seven thirty for a roll call; breakfast of corn bread and coffee; confined to cells for the morning; lunch around one o’clock; half an hour’s exercise; back to the cells; roll call at five o’clock; half an hour’s exercise; supper; back to the cells. The evening was when the prisoners deloused themselves. Lewis watched perplexed on his first night as his cellmates pulled off their shirts and began examining the seams with great care. The ritual eased his fears about a spy; clearly they had all been rotting in Henrico for several weeks and were who they said they were.
To his fellow prisoners Lewis remained an enigma. All they knew, all he told them, was his name, his nationality and the fact he’d been arrested in Richmond. He said nothing about the reason for his arrest. His skill at cards led some of his cellmates to speculate that perhaps he was a professional gambler, but on Tuesday, March 4, the mystery ended.
Lewis had been badgering his jailors for several days for a newspaper, waving one of his gold coins under their noses. George Thomas took the money and returned the next day with a copy of the Richmond Enquirer. He tossed it into the cell, along with a quip that the prison now had an infamous inmate. Lewis found the story under the headline yankee spies.
The report, a mix of fact and fabrication, described how “John Scully and Pryce Lewis were arrested at the Monument Hotel on Friday last [sic], and are now in prison … officers in pay of our Government were immediately put upon the track, and discovered them in a private house [sic] … they became so much confused that they hastened away to the Hotel, leaving their overcoats behind … it is clearly shown, by evidence not prudent to detail in this place, that they are paid hirelings of the enemy.”
The Enquirer explained that the arrest came about because of the actions of a true patriot, a young woman from Washington, who recognized Lewis and Scully as she passed them on the street, and went at once to tell General Winder. What the men were doing in the Monument Hotel, the paper didn’t say. Nor was there any mention of the name Webster.
The Enquirer also revealed to Lewis the whereabouts of John Scully. He was in Castle Godwin, which the paper described as a “snug institution, hitherto known as McDaniel’s negro jail … located in an obscure alley on Franklin Street … it contains thirteen clear and well ventilated rooms, which have been provided with comfortable beds and other conveniences, far surpassing in cleanliness and in comfort, the accommodations offered at nine-tenths of the cheap boarding houses of Richmond.” However, added the Enquirer, despite the impressive amenities available, the spy Scully can expect to “receive all attentions due to his calling and position.”
/>
Lewis was now “a big man” in the eyes of his cellmates, the leader of the group and allowed to choose the best spot for his cot. His status as a daring spy soon reached the ears of those in the other cells, and in the exercise yard the following day Sam Tatum, an oyster fisherman in Baltimore before the war, took Lewis to one side and revealed that he and Charles Stanton, the New Yorker whose first escape attempt foundered in the Chickahominy River, had a plan drawn up. Back in their cell Stanton whispered to Lewis that the difficulty wasn’t so much escaping from the jail, nor getting past the city line, it was surmounting what lay north: the Chickahominy, the pine forests, the swamps and the flat meadows. When they had bust out in January, Stanton explained, it was during one of the wettest winters in recent memory. The Chickahominy had been swollen fit to burst and impossible to ford. But the rains had abated. In a couple more weeks it should be possible to negotiate the Chickahominy. With that done, they would head north until they encountered the Union army.
So what was the plan? asked Lewis. Stanton presumed that Lewis had already seen how lax security was in the jail; how the jailors frequently wandered off to a saloon for an hour or two, leaving them in their cells; how it was possible to pick the lock of the inner door of their cell with a knife; how the jailors, if asked courteously, would leave the thick iron outer door of their cell unlocked at night to increase the ventilation; how once the outer door was left open, the jailors would head home for the night.
Lewis admitted that he was rather surprised by the blasé attitude of the jailors. Well, said Stanton, that just leaves one obstacle, “the main entrance to the jail, consisting of two doors, the interior one made of thick round iron bars and fastened with a Chubbs English patent lock, celebrated for its security, [and] the exterior door … a heavy wooden one fastened on the outside with an ordinary padlock.”
Stanton continued, explaining how Seeds, the Mississippi pilot, had examined the wooden door and declared that if they sawed through one of the bars at a certain place they “could wrench it off leaving an opening large enough for all of us to creep through.” And the outer door? No problem, said Stanton, grinning. During the afternoon exercise a prisoner would “cover himself up in the ash heap in the corner of the inner prison yard … and remain hidden there until night when he would unlock and remove the padlock of the wooden door.”
Stanton finished describing the plan and looked at Lewis. Well, what did he think? Lewis thought it foolhardy but worth a try. They had nothing to lose, after all. The prisoners had already purloined a number of table knives, and Saunders the blacksmith had got his hands on a small file. For nearly two weeks they worked every night on the main door, sawing at the iron bar in a relay system while another man on his hands and knees removed all trace of iron filings from the stone floor. As dawn approached they hid all evidence of their industry with “a lump of soap mixed with ashes rubbed into the cut on the bars … the lump was the same color as the iron and completely concealed the work.”
During the day when they were confined to their cells, the prisoners discussed what they would do once they were over the wall. The newspapers had told them about the declaration of martial law, warning that anyone found on the streets after ten o’clock at night without a pass would be arrested. The location of the jail, however, was in their favor. It was in the northeast of the city, close to the railroad. All they had to do was run along the tracks until they were outside the city line, then head cross-country, using the darkness to slip past the fortifications that encircled Richmond.
On Saturday, March 15, the job was nearly complete. A few minutes more the following night, and the bar would be severed. They agreed to go on Sunday, though Saunders the blacksmith and another prisoner named Pitcher announced they wouldn’t be going. Pitcher didn’t feel strong enough to make the bid, and Saunders had learned he was soon to be paroled. The Negro prisoners asked if they could come. Lewis didn’t see any reason why not as they’d helped in the sawing. Are you mad? retorted one of the white prisoners, who “asserted that if we took them with us and were recaptured, we would certainly all be hanged as John Brown was.” Lewis accepted the wishes of the majority and apologized to the black prisoners. One begged Lewis to let him go with them, saying he could act as their guide through the rebel lines, but Lewis turned him down.
They were in luck! Staples was on duty on Sunday, and even among a herd of bovine jailors, his stupidity was special. Under a cold drizzle he took the roll call in the inner yard, then told the men that as it was the Sabbath they could exercise for an hour. The prisoners crowded around the guard, and old man Seeds spun Staples a complicated story about being owed money by General Winder. Can we talk about it in private, he asked the jailor, in the outer yard away from the other inmates? As Seeds maneuvered Staples out of sight of the ash heap, “Stanton wrapped himself in a blanket, lay down in the excavation and was covered up by the others.” Earlier in the day Tatum had given Staples a few cents and asked him to buy a new straw tick for his cot as his present one was worn out; now he appeared with his old tick and threw it ostentatiously on top of the ash heap.
Lewis, meanwhile, slipped back inside the jail and “rigged up a broomstick in blankets so as to resemble the figure of a man and placed it in a corner to deceive the jailor in case he should come to the door and count us.”
When the exercise hour was over, Staples ordered the men inside for their supper. It was dark and drizzling when he locked the prisoners in their cells. As usual Staples agreed to leave the outer cell doors open to increase the flow of fresh air. Lewis heard Staples pull the main door to the jail shut; then he and Twells stepped on the bench in their cell and watched him walk across the moonlit inner yard. Suddenly “the jailor’s eye caught sight of the heap of straw in the corner, and going over to it he took a match from his vest pocket.” Lewis stifled a curse as Staples scratched the match against the wall, once, then again, until the match broke. The brickwork was too damp and Staples too tired for a second match. The straw could wait till the morning.
After waiting fifteen minutes Stanton burst from the heap. He brushed the ash from his eyes and then ran across the yard to the prison door. There Stanton discovered the extent of Staples’s ineptitude: he’d failed to lock the padlock’s hasp into its body. Stanton waited while Lewis and the other prisoners picked the locks of their cell doors, and soon they were facing each other on either side of the iron door. It took just a couple of minutes to cut through the bar and wrench it off, and they were all but free. Seeds had the honor of going first, as it had been his idea to saw through the bar. He plunged his head through the gap, squeezed through one shoulder, then the other, but no, his second shoulder “positively refused to follow his body.” Seeds wriggled like a fish on the end of a hook, but it was no good, he was stuck. For several minutes there was “cursing, intermingled with expressions of disgust and indignation … at our own folly.” Eventually they tugged Seeds’s “foolish head back into the prison where it now seemed all of us were to remain until Mr. Jailor came along the next morning.”
A voice from behind spoke up, a calm, rather amused voice. It was Saunders the blacksmith. Don’t worry, boys, he said, he’d soon have the door open. He asked for some tools—a knife, the file and a leg from the stove—and then set about unlocking the door. While Saunders worked, the Negro prisoners sang and clapped and praised the Lord, drowning out the bangs and thumps as the blacksmith broke the lock. In a few minutes the door was open. Lewis thanked the Negroes for their spirit of true camaraderie, shook hands with Saunders and then joined his fellow escapees in the inner yard.
Tatum and Stanton set the heavy stepladder against the tobacco shed, and one by one the nine men climbed up onto its roof, pulled themselves onto the top of the prison wall and dropped down over the other side. It was now nearly ten o’clock at night, and the drizzle had stopped. It was a clear, frosty, moonlight night, far from ideal for a gang of fugitives. But Richmond was deserted, and soon Lewis and his friends h
ad “passed the last house in the suburbs and were making our way across the fields.”
*The exact number of prisons at the time is almost impossible to determine as the city’s authorities often used converted warehouses to hold prisoners, sometimes for just a few weeks, but an official report into the condition of Union prisoners in Richmond in 1863 listed nine prisons. However, this figure didn’t include jails in which civilians or Confederate soldiers were imprisoned.
C H A P T E R S E V E N T E E N
“Trust for a Favorable Outcome”
PRYCE LEWIS AND HIS EIGHT ACCOMPLICES were traveling north, hoping to soon encounter the advance parties of General McClellan’s Army of the Potomac on their way south. Unfortunately for the prisoners, the only soldiers moving in their direction in the first half of March 1862 were elements of General Joseph Johnston’s Confederate army.
For months Johnston’s men had been entrenched in Manassas, thirty miles southwest of Washington, and for most of that period an increasingly despairing Abraham Lincoln had been exerting pressure on McClellan to go on the offensive, drive the rebels from Maryland and then, as the popular cry went, “On to Richmond!” An assault planned for the start of the New Year had to be canceled when McClellan was stricken with typhoid and spent a month in bed. The general’s critics in the government—and there were many—accused him of malingering, of avoiding a battle because his Democrat principles aligned him more with the government in Richmond than with the one in Washington.
Lincoln rose above the squabbling, waiting until McClellan was on his feet before telling him he expected a spring offensive. The plan the president was finally presented with wasn’t one that inspired much confidence. McClellan intended to ferry his army south across the cold waters of Chesapeake Bay as far as the mouth of the Rappahannock River, seventy-five miles southeast of Manassas and sixty miles east of Richmond. Then, predicted McClellan bullishly, it would be a question of either capturing Richmond before Johnston’s rebels had time to rush south, or taking the capital once the Union army had surprised and smashed the retreating Confederates. There was a flaw in this plan, however, which Lincoln was quick to point out. What if Johnston, on hearing of McClellan’s move south, chose to head north? Who would defend Washington from the rebels?
Double Death Page 18