Exact Record of Rations in DanvilleOpportunity to CookDaily Routine of Proceedings from Early Dawn till Late at Night.

Our imprisonment at Danville lasted from October 20, ’64, to February 17, ’65, one hundred and twenty days. I kept a careful daily record of the rations issued to us, as did also Lieut. Watson W. Bush, 2d N. Y. “Mounted Rifles.” After our removal from Danville to Richmond for exchange, we compared our memoranda, and found they substantially agreed. During the one hundred and twenty days the issues were as follows:

Bread. A loaf every morning. It was made of unsifted corn-meal, ground “cobs and all.” Pieces several inches in length of cobs unground were sometimes contained in it. It always seemed wholesome, though moist, almost watery. Its dimensions were a little less than 7 inches long, 3 or 4 wide, and 3 thick. I managed to bring home a loaf, and we were amazed at the shrinkage to a quarter of its original size. It had become very hard. We broke it in two, and found inside what appeared to be a dishcloth!

Meat. Forty-three times. I estimated the weight at from 2 to 5 or 6 ounces. In it sometimes were hides, brains, heads, tails, jaws with teeth, lights, livers, kidneys, intestines, and nameless portions of the animal economy.

Soup. Sixty-two times; viz., bean soup forty-seven times; cabbage nine times; gruel six. It was the thinnest decoction of small black beans, the slightest infusion of cabbage, or the most attenuated gruel of corn-cob meal, that a poetic imagination ever dignified with the name of soup!

Potatoes. Seven times. Seldom was one over an inch in diameter.

Salt fish. Five times. They call it “hake.” It was good. “Hunger
the best sauce.”

Sorghum syrup. Three times. It was known as “corn-stalk molasses.”
It was not bad.

Nothing else was given us for food by the Confederates at Danville. The rations appeared to deteriorate and diminish as the winter advanced. My diary shows that in the fifty-three days after Christmas we received meat only three times.

Manifestly such supplies are insufficient to sustain life very long. By purchase from the rebel sutler who occasionally visited us, or by surreptitious trading with the guards, we might make additions to our scanty allowance. I recollect that two dollars of irredeemable treasury notes would buy a gill of rice or beans or corn, a turnip, onion, parsnip, or small pickled cucumber!

The Confederate cooking needed to be supplemented. Here the cylinder coal-stoves were made useful. The tops of them were often covered with toasting corn bread. Tin pails and iron kettles of various capacities, from a pint to several quarts, suspended from the top by wooden hooks a foot or two in length, each vessel resting against the hot stove and containing rice, beans, Indian corn, dried apple, crust coffee, or other delicacy potable or edible slowly preparing, made the whole look like a big black chandelier with pendants. We were rather proud of our prison cuisine. Cooking was also performed on and in an old worn-out cook-stove, which a few of our millionaires, forming a joint-stock company for the purpose, had bought for two hundred Confederate dollars late in the season, and which the kind prison commander had permitted them to place near the southwest end of the upper room, running the pipe out of a window. Culinary operations were extensively carried on also in the open yard outside, about forty feet by twenty, at the northeast end of the building. Here the officer would build a diminutive fire of chips or splinters between bricks, and boil or toast or roast his allowance. We were grouped in messes of five to ten or twelve each. Happy the club of half a dozen that could get money enough and a big enough kettle to have their meal prepared jointly.

Such was the case with my own group after the lapse of about two months. We had been pinched; but one morning Captain Cook came to me with radiant face and said: “Colonel, I have good news for you. I’m going to run this mess. My folks in New York have made arrangement with friends in England to supply me with money, and I’ve just received through the lines a hundred dollars. We’ll live like fighting-cocks!” Adjt. J. A. Clark, 17th Pa. Cav., was our delighted cook. Shivering for an hour over the big kettle amid the ice and snow of the back yard, he would send up word, “Colonel, set the table for dinner.” To “set the table” consisted in sweeping a space six or eight feet square, and depositing there the plates, wood, tin, or earthen (mine was of wood; it had cost me a week’s labor in carving). The officers already mentioned, Cook, Clark, Bush, Sprague, with Lieut. E. H. Wilder, 9th N. Y. Cav., sit around in the elegant Turkish fashion, or more classical recline like the ancients in their symposia, each resting on his left elbow, with face as near as possible to the steaming kettle, that not a smell may be lost!

Wood was scarce. It was used with most rigid economy. Many joists overhead had been sawed off by Lieut. Lewis R. Titus of the Corps D’Afrique, using a notched table-knife for a saw. In this way the Vermont Yankee obtained pieces for cooking, but he weakened the structure till some officers really feared the roof might come tumbling about our heads; and I remember that the prison commandant, visiting the upper room and gazing heavenward, more than once ejaculated irreverently the name of the opposite region!

Through the kindness of a Confederate officer or bribing the guards a log four or five feet in length is sometimes brought in. Two or three instantly attack it with a blunt piece of iron hoop to start the cleaving, and in less time than one could expect such a work to be done with axes it is split fine with wooden wedges.

Naturally one of the ever-recurring topics of discussion was the glorious dishes we could prepare, if we but had the materials, or of which we would partake if we ever got home again. In our memorandum books we are careful to note down the street and number of the most famous restaurant in each of the largest cities, like Delmonico’s in New York or Young’s in Boston.

With few exceptions one day is like another. At earliest dawn each of the two floors is covered with about a hundred and seventy-five prostrate forms of officers who have been trying to sleep. Soon some one of them calls in a loud voice. “Buckets for water!” The call is repeated. Five or six, who have predetermined to go early to the river Dan that seemed nearly a quarter of a mile distant, start up and seize large wooden pails. They pass to the lower floor. One of them says to the sentinel on duty at the southwest corner door, “Sentry, call the sergeant of the guard; we want to go for water.” He complies. In five, ten, or fifteen minutes, a non-commissioned officer, with some half a dozen heavily armed soldiers, comes, the bolts slide, the doors swing, our squad passes out. They are escorted down the hill to the river, and back to prison. By this time it is broad daylight. Many are still lying silent on the floor. Most have risen. Some are washing, or rather wiping with wet handkerchief, face and hands; others are preparing to cook, splitting small blocks of wood for a fire of splinters; a few are nibbling corn bread; here and there one is reading the New Testament. There is no change or adjustment of clothing, for the night dress is the same as the day dress. We no longer wonder how the cured paralytic in Scripture could obey the command, “Take up thy bed and walk”; for at heaviest the bed is but a blanket!

Now, for a half-hour, vengeance on vermin that have plagued us during the night! We daily solve the riddle of the fishermen’s answer to “What luck?” the question which puzzled to death

“The blind old bard of Scio’s rocky isle,”

“As many as we caught we left; as many as we could not catch we
carry with us!”

About eight o’clock the cry is heard from the southwest end of the room, “Fall in for roll-call! fall in!” to which several would impudently add, “Here he comes! here he is!” A tall, slim, stooping, beardless, light-haired phenomenon, known as “the roll-call sergeant,” enters with two musketeers. We officers having formed in two ranks on the northwest side of the room, he passes down the front from left to right slowly counting. Setting down the number in a memorandum book, he commands in a squeaky feminine voice, “Break ranks,” which most of us have already done. Much speculation arose as to the nature and status of this singular being. His face was smooth and childlike, yet dry and wrinkled, so that it was impossible to tell whether he was fifteen or fifty. A committee was said to have waited upon him, and with much apparent deference asked him as to his nativity, his age, and whether he was human or divine, married or single, man or woman. They said he answered sadly, “Alas! I’m no angel, but a married man, thirty-seven years old, from South Carolina. I have three children who resemble me.”

Immediately after roll-call, corn bread is brought in for breakfast. It is in large squares about two feet in length and breadth, the top of each square being marked for cutting into twenty or twenty-five rations. Colonel Hooper and Capt. D. Tarbell receive the whole from the rebel commissary, and then distribute to each mess its portion. The mess commissary endeavors to cut it into equal oblong loaves. To make sure of a fair distribution, one officer turns his back, and one after another lays his hand upon a loaf and asks, “Whose is this?” The officer who has faced about names some one as the recipient.

Clear the way now for sweepers. From one end of the room to the other they ply their coarse wooden brooms. Some officers are remarkably neat, and will scrape their floor space with pieces of glass from the broken windows; a few are listless, sullen, utterly despondent, regardless of surroundings, apparently sinking into imbecility; the majority are taking pains to keep up an appearance of respectability.

Many who have been kept awake through the night by cold or rheumatism now huddle around the stoves and try to sleep. Most of the remainder, as the weeks pass, glide into something like a routine of occupations. For several weeks I spent an hour or two every day carving with a broken knife-blade a spoon from a block of hard wood. Sporadic wood-splitting is going on, and cooking appears to be one of the fine arts. An hour daily of oral exercises in French, German, Spanish, Latin, or Italian, under competent teachers, after the Sauveur or Berlitz method, amused and to some extent instructed many. Our cavalry adjutant, Dutch Clark, so called from his skill in the “Pennsylvania Dutch” dialect made perhaps a hundred familiar with the morning salutation, “Haben Sie gut geschlafen?” ("Have you slept well?”) Lieut. Henry Vander Weyde, A. D. C., 1st Div., 6th Corps, the artist chum of our principal German instructor, amused many by his pencil portraits of “Slim Jim,” the nondescript “roll-call sergeant” of uncertain age and gender; also of some of the sentries, and one or two of his fellow prisoners. A worn-out pack of fifty-two cards, two or three chess and checker boards of our manufacture, and twenty-four rudely carved checker-men and thirty-two fantastic chess-men, furnished frequent amusement to those who understood the games.

On an average once in two days we received about one o’clock what was called soup. We were told, and we believed it to be true, that all the rich nitrogenous portion had been carefully skimmed off for use elsewhere; not thrown away as the fresh maid threw the “scum” that formed on top of the milk!

The topic of most frequent discussion was the prospect of an exchange of prisoners. Our would-be German conversationalists never forgot to ask, “Haben Sie etwas gehoerten von Auswechseln der Gefangenen?” ("Have you heard anything of exchange of prisoners?”) It was hard to believe that our government would leave us to die of starvation.

At the close of the soup hour and after another turn at sweeping, almost every officer again sat down or sat up to rid himself of the pediculidae vestimenti. We called it “skirmishing”; it was rather a pitched battle. The humblest soldier and the brevet major-general must daily strip and fight. Ludicrous, were it not so abominable, was this mortifying necessity. No account of prison life in Danville would be complete without it. Pass by it hereafter in sorrow and silence, as one of those duties which Cicero says are to be done but not talked about.

The occupations of the morning are now largely resumed, but many prefer to lie quiet on the floor for an hour.

An interesting incident that might happen at any time is the arrival in prison of a Confederate newspaper. A commotion near the stairway! Fifty or a hundred cluster around an officer with a clear strong voice, and listen as he reads aloud the news, the editorials, and the selections. The rebels are represented as continually gaining victories, but singularly enough the northern armies are always drawing nearer!

Toward sunset many officers walk briskly half an hour to and fro the length of the room for exercise.

Another roll-call by the mysterious heterogeneous if not hermaphroditical Carolina sergeant!

Brooms again by the mess on duty. Again oral language-lessons by Cook and Putnam. Then discussions or story-telling.

It is growing dark. A candle is lighted making darkness visible. We have many skilful singers, who every evening “discourse most excellent music.” They sing Just before the battle, mother; Do they miss me at home? We shall meet, but we shall miss him (a song composed on the death of one of my Worcester pupils by Hon. Charles Washburn); Nearer, My God, to thee, etc. From the sweet strains of affection or devotion, which suffuse the eyes as we begin to lie down for the night, the music passes to the Star-spangled Banner, Rally round the flag, John Brown’s body lies a’mouldering in the grave, and the like. Often the “concert” concludes with a comic Dutch song by Captain Cafferty, Co. D, 1st N. Y. Cav.

Sleep begins to seal many eyelids, when someone with a loud voice heard through the whole room starts a series of sharp critical questions, amusing or censorious, thus:

“Who don’t skirmish?” This is answered loudly from another quarter.

“Slim Jim.” The catechism proceeds, sometimes with two or three distinct responses.

“Who cheats the graveyard?”

“Colonel Sprague.”

“Who sketched Fort Darling?”

“Captain Tripp.” (He was caught sketching long before, and was refused exchange.)

“Who never washes?”

“Lieutenant Screw-my-upper-jaw-off.” (His was an unpronounceable foreign name.)

“Who knows everything?”

“General Duffie.” (Duffie was a brave officer, of whom more anon.)

“Who don’t know anything?”

“The fools that talk when they should be asleep.” (The querists subside at last.)

For warmth we lie in contact with each other “spoon-fashion,” in groups of three or more. I had bought a heavy woolen shawl for twenty Confederate dollars, and under it were Captain Cook, Adjutant Clark, and Lieutenant Wilder; I myself wearing my overcoat, and snuggling up to my friend Cook. All four lay as close as possible facing in the same direction. The night wears slowly away. When the floor seemed intolerably hard, one of us would say aloud, “Spoon!” and all four would flop over, and rest on the other side. So we vibrated back and forth from nine o’clock till dawn. We were not comfortable, but in far better circumstances than most of the prisoners. Indeed Captain Cook repeatedly declared he owed his life to our blanket.