part 2 chapter
25
i ’m scarcely able to tell the difference between night and day, submerged as i am in
a nightmare that regularly ambushes me now. every sound reminds me of the past. even the
creek, my beloved creek below the house, is driving me mad. it assaults my hearing as it spills
over its banks, flooded with rains from the fall hurricane off the distant virginia coast. clapping
my hands over my ears makes the torment no less. the creek in its passage is chillingly similar
to waves beating against pea patch island, where i was imprisoned for thirteen months.
after a six-day hike from spotsylvania, union soldiers prodded us into cavernous freight cars
waiting in washington. the cries of wounded men drowned out the thrum of spinning metal
wheels as we rolled first toward baltimore, and then to the union fort mchenry. there, blue-
uniformed officials stood behind wooden tables and piles of documents. with a sharp thwack of
a red rubber stamp, they changed our identities from soldier to prisoner.
a packet steamboat that stank of recently transported livestock was moored at the end of a
long dock jutting out from fort mchenry. our little group, along with hundreds of others, was
forced into the lower hold. the space was foul with manure. envy gnawed at me as our
confederate officers boarded in a separate line headed for upper decks where there was fresh air.
we were packed together upright, not able to even crouch, for a twelve-hour journey in an
airless enclosure with the rank scent of human illness everywhere. beards and jim blue, already
in ill health from lack of nourishment, were overwhelmed. tears involuntarily drained from
beards’ eyes.
“boys, step aside or you’ll be fouler than you already are,” he muttered weakly and swayed.
john bibb, jim blue, and i strained away, but there wasn’t an extra inch to spare. as those near
beards cringed, splatters of vomit added another indignity to our clay and bloodstained rags. by
now, i was largely indifferent to unpleasant body fluids—from my own chronic diarrhea to
liquids from others’ bodies. being transported in an animal packet steamer struck me as an
appropriate continuation of the foot soldier’s life. i prayed we weren’t headed to slaughter,
surely the previous passengers’ fate.
when the boat began to sway more heavily from side to side, we knew we’d left the river and
had entered the broad and turgid chesapeake bay. exhaustion, injuries, and jolting waves would
have toppled many by this time but for the pressure of bodies on all sides. men around me
fainted, and bibb was one of them. i supported his weight, his arm limply across my shoulder
and my hand on his belt. it was a small price for what i owed him. the ever-present moaning
and stench of seasickness made this leg of the journey interminable, until we finally entered the
mouth of the mile-wide delaware river. there we were herded off a gangplank to our future
home.
wobbly-legged, i stepped onto an island of barely reclaimed swamp. before us loomed a
high- walled brick and granite fortress, crowned by one hundred cannons. our company of
common prisoners, however, would never see the inside of that pentagonal structure. stretching
before it was an immense twelve-foot-high wooden pen, capped by a walkway on which blue-
uniformed men patrolled with weapons. this was where we were herded.
high on the wall, three officers stood, waiting for the hundreds of new prisoners to surge
through the gate and fill the square below. the commanding general, a man named schoepf,
nervously toyed with the medals on his blue jacket, revealing the white handkerchief stuffed in
his cuff. his pants were crisply pressed and without stains. he withdrew the handkerchief and
held it to his nose as he waited for the crowd to settle. then, with a thick european accent, he
introduced himself and his two deputies. “you’ll answer to different commanders now. i’m
charged, along with my two deputies, captain george w. ahl and sergeant abraham wolf,
with the execution of president lincoln’s orders. you will unwaveringly follow them. any
violation of prison regulations, and you will pay the price.” he paused and took stock of the
scraggly crowd. “but if you heed my warnings well, you’ll have no trouble here.” his shiny
boots thumped across the walkway to a ladder leading down to the separate officers’ pen, as he
left his underlings to oversee us. i felt an urge to better see what these men were made of.
“excuse me. coming through,” i muttered as i pushed through the crowd standing nearest the
wall.
maybe it was my height or bold movement, but i attracted ahl’s notice as i finally stood
beneath him. i was close enough to see that his shirt strained across his bulging stomach and
remnants of former meals marred his trousers. his army jacket was sloppily thrown across both
bulky shoulders, and he gripped the crooked handle of a cane in his right hand. i could also see
the glinting, soulless eyes that revealed the true man. when i looked up, those eyes locked on
mine and fiercely glowered. i glared back, refusing to look away. a current of fear rippled
through me from head to toe, and i shuddered.
separated into groups of one hundred, we filed through a crude door in one of the two very
long, flimsily constructed wooden barracks that stretched along the sides of the pen. inside were
tiered, six-foot wide shelves on which lay rows of thin wool blankets. the guards commanded
us to empty our pockets and what rucksacks men still carried onto the rough wooden boards.
they then confiscated everything we’d brought with us, including any extra clothes. beards
nudged my arm. “we better pray we’re home by winter. i bet a cold wind blows off the water
through these plank walls.” he gestured to the daylight streaming between the boards.
“it’s mid-may. we’ll be gone by then,” i said. we’d all heard that the system of prisoner
trades meant incarceration for only three months or so.
jim blue, beards, and i staked places side by side on the second berth. zeke skinner and the
rest of the augusta fellows were close by, and john bibb claimed a spot on the tier across the
aisle.
these sleeping shelves were also our living accommodations. it was impossible for more
than a few to stand in the narrow aisle between. on each side, fifty men slept with heads to the
outside wall and feet to the center, shelved as common logs without bedding or even straw. the
single federal-issue blanket was little protection from the splinters and would be none at all from
the weather. i quickly learned to place half on the shelf and to wrap the other half around my
body.
directly below the barrack floors and bisecting the pen were watery canals. twice a day as
the tide rose there should have been sufficient flow to lift the waste that would then spill through
sluice gates into the river. but nine thousand overcrowded inmates produced so much garbage
and filth that the canals were clogged. the tides had no power to dislodge the accumulation.
they thus became incubators for slime and animalculae. any open wound festered after canal
contact.
luckily, in the morning’s crowd of veteran prisoners i’d spotted frank armstrong, a member
of the 5th virginia infantry. company d had belonged to the 5th. several years older than i, the
stocky, curly- bearded fellow from brownsburg had taught sunday school classes at new
jerusalem church. my parents had spoken admiringly of this young man who took the bible so
seriously, and ma had suggested that i should emulate him. this, of course, meant i stayed far
away from him, but now i approached with hand outstretched. “frank, it’s good to see you alive
and with all your limbs. when did these yankee devils catch up with you?”
at first his expression was blank, but then he recognized me. “i’ll be darned. tom smiley,
isn’t it? praise be to the lord, although i can’t say it’s good to see you here.” his mouth set in a
grim line. “i’ve been in this place for a month, but it feels like years.” he looked around to see if
there was a guard nearby. “let me tell you, you have to figure this place out on your own.
otherwise, you’ll be gunned down. there’s no second chance.”
my stomach clenched. “how can i avoid that fate?” i asked.
“well, you need to know that the guards take curfew very seriously. don’t dare mess with the
barrack lantern after 8:00 p.m. lights out. if you do, they’ll shoot you on the spot. stay alert, take
your time and watch, and do everything the guards tell you as quickly as you can.”
he then added, “here’s another piece of advice. choose a second-tier bunk, not an upper or
lower one, whatever you do. the leaky roof soaks those on top, and the ‘floor men’ on the
bottom get the canal vapors and any fluids from both tiers above.” i felt some satisfaction that,
with the exception of tayloe, our group had chosen well. i would warn him to switch shelves.
“what about the commander and his sidekick ahl? ahl looks particularly dangerous.”
frank motioned me to move even farther from others and spoke softly. “schoepf’s not so
bad. but he’s very peculiar about health and cleanliness. very peculiar. fellows say he was
driven mad by the death of his infant daughter shortly before the war, before he came over from
austro-hungary. he blames ‘foul vapors,’ and there are surely plenty of those around here. it’s
why he’s so pale. he rarely comes outside.”
“that sounds like you don’t see much of him.”
“true. ahl is the one who keeps an eye on us, and between you and me, he’s the one really in
control. he watches us like a hawk watches mice. no one can get to schoepf unless they go
through him, not even other officers or the guards. he and his flunkies censor all mail, incoming
and outgoing.” all mistreatment, frank believed, originated from ahl. “i hear he gained power
over schoepf by ratting him out to washington as being too soft on us. now he threatens to do it
again if the commander shows any humanity. believe me, stay far away from ahl for your own
good.”
“what about sergeant wolf?”
“he’s not any better, but he’s not as much of a threat. he’s responsible for the officers’ pen.
he’s too fond of his whiskey, which makes him meaner, but also keeps him out of action.”
“it sounds like schoepf is the pawn of his two junior officers,” i said. frank nodded.
after the boys and i claimed our spots on the boards, we filed out into the vast pen. it teemed
with thousands of idle men standing in knots talking or squatting against the walls. a gray-
haired prisoner with a wheelbarrow struggled by, parting the crowd with his burden of corpses
piled like so much corded lumber. he wearily called, “make way, make way.”
i searched for frank and found him standing in the pen where i had left him. “what’s this?” i
asked, gesturing toward the grim scene.
“these poor souls are from the hospital. it’s in the pen over yonder by the wall. the place
overflows with men at all hours—plagued by loose bowels, measles, the pox, or whatever
wound gnaws at them since the battlefield. most of ’em will be dumped headfirst into trenches
dug by inmates across the river.” he explained that lime would break down their flesh, and then
there will be room for more of us to join them in days to come.
not long after, tayloe, who hadn’t followed my advice and was still berthed above me,
couldn’t muster out for morning drill. he murmured that he wasn’t well enough to rise. beards
hollered out in tayloe’s place during roll call and did so for the week that tayloe lay wasting of
what looked like typhus pneumonia. he turned a deaf ear to our pleas to visit the surgeon’s
window in the pen wall where, once a day, men waited in long queues for a consultation.
“that damn doctor dispenses nothing but bread pills and some mysterious powder boys
swear is flour,” he said. “a stay in the hospital will surely kill me.” he breathed in gasps but
continued. “i’ll take my chances right here with you fellows.” i gently patted his arm and tried
to smile for his sake.
as the days passed, we helplessly listened while he moaned feverishly on the boards above.
five of us sneaked bits of our cornbread and meat to share, but he pushed them away as his
fever mounted. there was nothing to do but pray he wouldn’t suffer for long. in the meantime,
he lay in a puddle of excrement and vomit. nights were the worst. he thrashed his arms about
and called out words in a ragged voice that none of us could understand. “tayloe, what is it?”
i’d ask, hoping to ease his discomfort. but if he responded, it was only to moan in the dark. we
took turns dipping a rag in tepid water and holding it to his forehead, but he remained clammy
and feverish. finally, on the sixth day in the late afternoon, zeke, who had been resting below,
noticed there was an unnatural silence from tayloe’s shelf.
“tayloe, tayloe, answer me,” he called out. when there was no sound, he pulled himself up
to tayloe’s level and held his hand beneath tayloe’s nostrils. no breath crossed his fingers. a
palm to tayloe’s chest told zeke what he dreaded. he ran into the yard where i was squatting in
the shade of the wall.
“i think tayloe is gone,” he choked out. “come see for yourself. i can’t feel a heartbeat.”
i leaped to my feet, crossed the barrack threshold, and stood next to the pale body curled on
the shelf. zeke was right. the whites of tayloe’s eyes were visible under half-closed lids and his
mouth gaped open. when i put my head to tayloe’s chest, there was nothing. pulling up the dry
flesh of his lid, his eye stared unblinking at a place far beyond my reach. i paused for a moment,
my hand on his shoulder, and looked long at what was left of my friend so that i might never
forget. during those days as barely more than children in staunton, neither of us could have
predicted his death this way.
this was different from sam’s dying. the blood drained from my face, and my knees were
weak. throbbing pain behind my eyes made my head feel huge. but deep feelings of loss had
been out of reach ever since we’d laid sam in the ground. zeke yelled to the other boys in our
company to come in from the yard. we stood in a wordless row before tayloe’s body, each of
us forming an inner farewell. beards and i finally eased his emaciated corpse down from the
boards, wrapped it in his blanket, and bade it farewell as the wheelbarrow man hauled it away. i
spent the afternoon slumped against the pen wall with my head in my hands until the dinner
signal was given.
three weeks had passed since our arrival, and the prison was due for a visit from the federal
health inspectors. schoepf was obsessed with demonstrating that he ran a clean operation. two
days before inspection, ahl appeared on the wall above the pen. “all men muster out of the
barracks!” he hollered.
we poured out of the doors and waited in the yard from the time the sun was highest and
hottest until it was mercifully lower in the sky. guards trooped in with mops and buckets
sloshing with lye soap, and then with buckets of whitewash and brushes. afterward, we were
marched to the river where, under the close watch of rifle-toting guards, we scrubbed off months
of grime and stink, as well as more than a few lice. it was a glorious time. i’ll never forget the
sensation of glistening hair and a scrubbed body.
on the tenth of june, after an early morning visit to the sinks, beards returned to the barracks
to rouse jim blue and me with a rumor he’d heard in the yard.
“hey you fellows, wake up. there’s going to be a big announcement before morning drill.
men are already out in the pen. do you think old abe or jeff davis, either one, has come to his
senses about our release? that prisoner trades are starting up?”
bibb propped himself up on his elbows, suddenly alert. “lord, could it be true?”
we sprang to our feet and lined up behind other stragglers for the usual eight o’clock drill.
after roll call, captain ahl and sergeant wolf appeared above on the wall. we maintained our
lines, each man savoring images of homecoming. with a smirk at our upturned faces, ahl then
recited loudly from an order clutched in his hand.
“i hereby inform all enlisted prisoners of fort delaware that as of today, anyone who risks
public health by committing a ‘nuisance’ in or about the barracks will be given three verbal
warnings to cease, and then will be shot or die by bayonet. this directive is straight from
commander schoepf and will henceforth be known as special order number 157.” the sun
gleamed white off the official paper as he read it. at the conclusion, his lips twisted as he
relished the effect of his announcement.
oh, how i suddenly hated this man. rage and resentment made my chest feel it might
explode. straight from commander schoepf. right? in my mind, ahl no longer just represented
evil stupidity. he became everything i despised about the past three years. now it had boiled
down to something smaller than the greed of confederate legislators and their cronies but was
no less threatening. this petty minded, cruel man had us completely under his thumb. the
helplessness of it made me lightheaded. to my mind, this newest injustice reeked of ahl, not
schoepf.
astonishment surged through the crowd. next to me, a fellow leaning on a wooden crutch
muttered under his breath, “that goddamned schoepf!” a wave of profanities swept through the
pen.
“do you all, every one of you, understand me?” ahl continued. “guards will be reminded of
special order number 157 every day before they stand duty. every single day. it is your
responsibility as prisoners never to forget it.” fellows spat more oaths under their breath, while
others stared hopelessly at the ground. zeke’s ire pulsated across his pinched face as he stared
upward at ahl. the man felt the heat of zeke’s hatred and glared back, taking his measure and
storing it away. ahl’s eyes then fell on me, standing next to zeke, and lingered. once again, i
stared him down.
we had recently suspected that schoepf was wary of men relieving themselves at the
doorways of the barracks because the guards’ warnings had grown increasing harsh. but now
there would be serious consequences for men with raw wounds, amputated limbs, and serious
illnesses who had trouble walking the narrow, board pathways across the muddy pen in the
black night. the boards ran about seven hundred feet before reaching the bridges leading to
privies or “sinks.” these were nothing more than planks with side-by-side round holes sawn in
them, set out over shallow water too low for the tide to wash away daily droppings. meals of
decayed meat, often covered with green flies, insured the spindly bridges and pathways were
constantly lined with men shifting from foot to foot. understandably, all of us preferred to
stumble half asleep to tend to our needs just beyond a barrack exit.
that very day, a man from our barrack committed a “nuisance” on the bank of the delaware
river. zeke and beards had newly befriended him in the pen and joined in with others pitching
a bar of soap back and forth in a slippery game of catch during the monthly bath. he was
nineteen-year-old wilbur sparks from madison, virginia. i think he’d joined the army only
recently, although he’d suffered some wounds in that time. a raw scar traveled across his nose
and forehead. while the others waited for beards to chase after the bobbing piece of soap,
wilbur stepped onto the sand, and turning his back, relieved himself. a guard screamed for him
to halt, but the boy, unable to stop the flow midstream, hollered over his shoulder that the guard
was “a yankee son of a bitch.” the bathing group burst apart, guessing the guard’s angry
response. the guard raised his rifle and took direct aim. the hapless fellow tumbled onto the
sand, his pants flapping open below the bloody exit wound in his belly. he died quickly. this
was a sobering demonstration of schoepf’s obsession, ahl’s application of it, and another
incident to feed zeke’s and my wrath.
