A MISERABLE TABLEAU MET AMANDA GARDNER’S EYES each time she looked out her upstairs windows. Below her, on the flatlands along the Alabama River, three thousand thin, dirty men milled about inside the crowded stockade of Cahaba prison under a perpetual pall of smoke. Many of the men were sick. Some of them died as easily as fog rose from the river on a cool morning, and their friends had to touch their bodies to make sure they were gone. Others died hard, thrashing on the ground.
Gardner lived in an otherwise comfortable house in the town of Cahaba, Alabama, an enclave of columned mansions, storefronts, and shanties that spread across the floodplain of the Alabama and Cahaba rivers. The town had been the state capital in the 1820s but, like Campbellton, Georgia, had been sliding toward obscurity since before the war, primarily because it was prone to floods. The local railroad had gone bankrupt, and the Confederate Army had torn up the tracks to repair more important lines elsewhere. But in June 1863, the town took on one final momentous role as a portal into the darkest underworld of the war. Gardner’s house stood next door to the prison, providing her with an unenviable box seat.
By late October 1864, Gardner could see the prisoners hugging their shoulders against the chill of autumn. The weather was invigorating and brisk for anyone who had only to pull cloaks, blankets, and gloves from the cedar chest, pick the last of the season’s roses, and lay a cozy fire on the hearth. But the prisoners were dangerously exposed, and the halcyon sky, open to the cool, clear air pushing down from the north, was a harbinger of the deadly chill to come.
The prisoners’ suffering was not a significant source of concern for most of the people of Cahaba, who had problems of their own. The Confederacy was running short of food and supplies; the rebellion was not going well; and the women’s husbands, sons, and brothers were fighting and dying on distant battlefields. The prisoners’ countless small fires sent smoke through both the stockade and the town, and everyone within range could smell the stench of sickness, of death, and of the god-awful latrines. Occasionally, the report of a guard’s rifle echoed across the river. The muffled chatter during the day, the occasional moans and cries at night, provided the background noise at every table. But the prisoners themselves were largely a faceless, nameless mass. On Sundays, when the church held services next door, the parishioners’ singing drowned them out.
Gardner did not have the luxury of living in studied ignorance. She saw the prisoners meting out their last reserves of energy, lying in the dirt, hovering over their tiny fires, waiting in line at the awful latrines, stepping over each other and the accumulation of filth. Sometimes they fought. They were tormented by mosquitoes, maggots, and flies.
Somewhere amid the rabble was Romulus Tolbert, who arrived at Cahaba in October from the military hospital in Montgomery, after the Rebels had done all they could for his throbbing shoulder and jaw. By a strange twist of fate, his friend John Maddox arrived at about the same time, after being captured near Draketown, Georgia, as did Perry Summerville, hobbling on his swollen, unset broken leg. For Tolbert and Maddox it must have been a bittersweet reunion. They were in prison, but they had each other for support as Tolbert nursed his wounds and both were afflicted with diarrhea (Maddox eventually came down with scurvy, too). A man who had a friend at Cahaba, or a company of fellow soldiers, was comparatively fortunate. Friends could look out for each other, watch over whatever possessions they could still claim while the other waited in line for rations or at the latrines, help defend against the depredations of thugs, and tend to their respective needs when they were sick. A lone man was completely dependent upon the kindness of strangers and vulnerable to predators, who were numerous in the prison population.
Cahaba was run by Captain Howard H.A.M. Henderson, a Methodist minister, who maintained generally good relations with the prisoners. As winter set in Henderson arranged for a steamboat load of clothing, blankets, medicines, and other supplies from the United States government to travel to the prison under a flag of truce. Its cargo included two thousand coats, hats, and pairs of pants, shoes, and socks; fifteen hundred blankets; medicine; envelopes and writing paper; and one hundred cooking tins. Unfortunately, most of the clothing was soon traded off to the guards for food, leaving the men almost as bereft as before. A far less compassionate man, Lieutenant Colonel Sam Jones, headed the military post at Cahaba and was second in command of the prison. By late 1864 Jones was in charge most of the time, as the comparatively benevolent Henderson was frequently away, procuring needed supplies or trying to effect a prisoner exchange.
According to Jesse Hawes, who ended up at Cahaba after his third and final capture, “It was often in the power of Henderson to extend kindnesses and courtesies to prisoners, and we are glad to note that the opportunity was not infrequently embraced.” Henderson even bought a pair of shoes for a barefoot young prisoner whom he escorted to Memphis to be exchanged, and he openly wept over the death of another young Union soldier.
Jones was another story. A bitter man who scoffed at the prisoners’ suffering, he had been assigned to Cahaba after being court-martialed for falsifying military records, and he was later suspected of the murder of a prisoner alleged to have been behind a failed uprising. Jones would be remembered darkly by the prisoners.
At Cahaba, as at other prisoner-of-war camps in both the North and the South, a man could die of almost anything. Hawes wrote in his journal of the death of “a tall young boy” from Illinois of chronic diarrhea, the result of “miserable, polluted surface water, the coarse meal, poorly cooked, the exposure to the cold rains.” He watched the boy make frequent trips to “the sinks,” as the latrines were called, and noted a few days later that “his journeys were fully as frequent, but his steps were slower, his face more hollow, his eyes more dull. He growled at first, then complained in a hollow voice; the lines of pain and long-suffering deepened upon his face; his steps grew slower, weaker, sometimes staggering; he neglected to fasten his clothing; faeces ran from the bowels as he slowly dragged himself to the ‘sink.’ A day later he sat all day resting his chest upon his knees, his head falling forward. The next day he lay upon his side on the ground; some one gave him all he had some boughs of pine for a bed. He was too weak to go to the ‘sink’ now. The drawn, haggard, suffering face showed less of the agony he manifested a few days before, and more of weakness, dullness. The eyes grew more sunken, the discharges from the bowels were only a little bloody mucus. He could answer questions if one asked him anything; he asked occasionally for a sip of water, never for food. He was getting more and more stupefied. During the day we placed over him whatever we could to render him as comfortable as possible. I went to him in the night he was only a few feet away from us and found him dead.”
The next day, Hawes wrote, “A cold rain started in before morning, and at daylight some one pulled off his ragged garments to cover his own suffering limbs.” A detail of the boy’s friends was permitted to remove him from the stockade for burial.
That was the way it sometimes worked. Of the nearly two hundred thousand Union troops held in Confederate prisons during the war, more than thirty thousand died. The rate was only slightly better among Rebel prisoners held in the North: More than twenty-six thousand dead among the more than two hundred thousand incarcerated. The fatalities at Cahaba were a fraction of the total—a few hundred. But for people like Amanda Gardner, each one was a sadness and an affront.
Cahaba, sometimes known as Castle Morgan, was the most crowded prison in the Confederacy, perhaps of the entire war. Despite Henderson’s efforts, medicine, food, clean water, and firewood were sometimes in short supply. Captive officers fared better than enlisted men; they were housed in town and were free to move around upon their pledge not to escape. But the stockade was dismal. Originally designed as a holding pen for Union soldiers captured in battle or cavalry raids who would ostensibly be transferred to established prisons elsewhere, it quickly became overcrowded after the two armies’ exchange program broke down. Afterward, men continued to arrive even as other prisons filled, which meant there was no place for them to go. Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry was particularly adept at catching Yankees and was largely responsible for the Cahaba overflow. Soon the population swelled to the point that each man had, on average, only about six square feet of space during the day, and even less at night, when the prisoners were sequestered within the warehouse. By the time Tolbert and Maddox arrived the place was starting to implode.
It is hard for anyone who has never experienced loss of freedom to fathom the insult of it: The deep disappointment, the uncertainty, the claustrophobia, and the fear—to be locked up by a stranger who cares little about you and may even loathe you, to finally lose control. At meal time hundreds of prisoners crouched in the bare dirt, cooking mush in tin cups and broken pans over their fires. Smoke shrouded the compound and burned their eyes as they tried to cook, so that they had to bury their faces in their sleeves or call for someone to relieve them. Many of the men wore ragged blue uniforms that had gone unchanged for months and were stained with sweat, shit, and blood. Some were barefoot. The sick lay on the ground drawing the thin warmth of the sun, clutching pained bellies, or nursing fantastic, infected wounds. Many were oblivious—moaning, groaning, talking to themselves, cursing at anyone who stumbled over them. Here and there men sat with their shirts in their laps, methodically picking lice for hours, their sunburned arms and heads mismatched to their bony white torsos. Now and then a prisoner would go high-stepping through the crowd toward the privy, where there was always a line because there were only six stinking holes for three thousand men. Maddox, and eventually Tolbert, ended up spending their share of time there, too.
Gangs of criminals roamed the stockade, many of them bounty jumpers, the majority purportedly from New York City. There was little policing of the prison by the guards, aside from the no-go zone known as the deadline, which extended around the inside perimeter of the stockade, so for long periods of time the muggers ruled. Hawes wrote that solitary prisoners—the most vulnerable to the raiders, as the thugs were called—were fortunate when the man known as Big Tennessee arrived. Big Tennessee, whose exact identity would later be debated (though there was general agreement that his last name was Pierce), arrived at Cahaba at about the same time as Tolbert, Maddox, and Summerville and made his presence known almost right away. A blue-eyed, illiterate farmer, he was nearly seven feet tall and a “mountain of muscle” before he grew emaciated like the rest of the prisoners, his arms and chest “enormous even for a man of his gigantic dimensions. He brought to mind old pictures of gladiators,” Hawes recalled. In one perhaps embellished scene—for Hawes, like J. Walter Elliott, was sometimes prone to exaggeration, though he had a remarkable eye for detail—he described Big Tennessee dispatching two muggers with a right and a left hook, then grabbing two more by their hair and cracking their heads together. After the initial fight, all Big Tennessee had to do was show up to right a wrong, according to Hawes. When prisoners went to him to report a robbery, he would escort them to the perpetrator, confront the man, and force him to make amends.
Big Tennessee could not be everywhere, though, and fear of the raiders led the prisoners to form their own police force and eventually to seize and try a group of offenders, after which the ringleader was sentenced to be chained to a log each night. The police force became less effective after its leaders were transferred to other camps, and eventually the raiders infiltrated its ranks. Some semblance of order was restored only after the bulk of the raiders joined the Confederate Army and left en masse.
Hawes observed a group of raiders molesting a young man, stripping him naked and dousing him with cold water. The episode drew the attention of Big Tennessee, who pulled the men off and helped the young man back into his clothes. Afterward, Hawes recalled, the boy was allowed to return to “his little nest in the sand,” though he died the next night. Hawes also recalled a “smooth-faced, handsome boy, a gun-boat man belonging to the monitor Chickasaw,” whose eyes “were large and full” and whose manner was “pleasant and captivating.” The handsome young man attracted attention, some of it unwelcome. According to Hawes, a prisoner informed a randy ruffian named Perry—who had deserted the Confederate Army and joined the Union Army, only to be captured and sent to Cahaba—that the young man was actually a woman in disguise. This may have been a euphemism—sex was never openly discussed in the accounts of Cahaba survivors—but for weeks afterward, Hawes said, “the boy, who was informed of the fraud, was the recipient of numerous gifts and more numerous smiles from his uncouth admirer, his reticence and coyness when speaking with Perry only adding to the ardor of the suitor.”
Sickness, hunger, cold, and the attention of greedy and occasionally horny thugs were not the only menaces. The men faced soul-sapping ennui and aggressive, even sadistic guards. The compound was surrounded by a wall of wood, which blocked out everything but a rectangle of sky. The prisoners might catch the scent of the river or the murmuring of the town, the occasional neighing of a horse, the ringing of a bell, the passage of hushed voices or shouts, or the singing in the church on Sunday. Now and then a few were allowed outside to gather wood, or on some other supervised detail, or to be treated for what ailed them at the makeshift hospital in the nearby Bell Tavern Hotel. But for the most part, the prisoners suffered from a lack of mental stimulation. The days were marked by the changing color and light of the square of sky, which brightened and dimmed, glared or crackled with lightning, and was traversed by clouds and the arcing sun and moon and stars.
Melville Cox Robertson, a prisoner who was also from Jefferson County, Indiana, wrote in his diary that “prison life is rather the most monotonous thing yet. But where there is so many together as there is here it can hardly be dull to most of those confined but to myself it sometimes becomes almost intolerable. There is so little of congeniality of spirit among those with whom I am associated that I often feel myself almost completely alone in the midst of 500 men.”
Jutting into the sky above the stockade, alongside the gables of Gardner’s house, were guard towers where old men and boys watched with guns resting on the rails, waiting for a prisoner to step across the deadline. Anyone who set foot across was subject to being shot, and many were. In one diary entry, Robertson wrote, “A shade of gloom is cast over all this evening by the sudden death of one of our beloved prisoners. Shot by the guards for stopping a moment in the passage from the entrance to the yard.” Less than two weeks later Robertson wrote that another prisoner was shot by the same guard.
The number of prisoners ebbed and flowed as new captives arrived and others died or were shifted to different camps, and exchange was such a perennial subject of discussion that some prisoners eventually found it tiresome.
Robertson, who was assigned as a nurse at the Bell Tavern Hotel, wrote in his diary, “I am sensible that the best thing I can do is to make the best of my condition and I am trying to do it. I eat my corn-bread, smoke my pipe and look forward to something better.” The hotel, whose bar, elaborate ballroom, billiard hall, and poker room had, before the war, been a favorite meeting place for area planters, politicians, and river travelers, was appropriated by the Confederate government and outfitted with cots. When the number of patients grew to two hundred, additional beds were set up in a neighboring house.
A report by Confederate surgeon R.H. Whitfield on March 31, 1864, when Cahaba contained only about six hundred fifty men, noted that the spring that provided water to the camp was polluted before it entered the stockade by “washings of the hands, feet, faces, and heads of soldiers, citizens, and negroes, buckets, tubs, and spittoons of groceries, offices and hospital, hogs, dogs, cows, and horses, and filth of all kinds from the streets and other sources.” As a result of Whitfield’s scathing report, Cahaba was ordered closed and its inmates transferred to Andersonville. Many were transferred, but Cahaba never closed, partly because of the halt in prisoner exchanges. Soon the population of inmates began to grow again, by leaps and bounds.
The U.S. Army burial records list ten deaths among the Cahaba prisoners from gunshot wounds or other injuries, which could have been inflicted by guards or by soldiers before or during their capture. The roll lists only two men dying of scurvy, the disease that killed hundreds at Andersonville. Because fruits and vegetables were also scarce at Cahaba, the lower toll probably stemmed from better treatment of the disease. In general, the prisoners appeared to have had decent access to medicine most of the time, because Cahaba was situated between Alabama’s medical supply depots at Demopolis and Montgomery, but there were periodic and significant interruptions. The disruption of the supply lines deprived everyone, including the citizens of Cahaba, their slaves, and the Rebel army, of food and medicine, and when the precious commodities were being doled out, the prisoners were last in line. Extended deprivation weakened everyone. Weakness and parasites rendered them vulnerable to disease. The proliferation of disease begot more disease. Dysentery flowered. When a person is measuring out his last remaining energy, something as minor as an infected mosquito bite can drain away the last of it like water from a busted barrel. By then the body has burned all its fat and begun consuming muscle and tissue. It is only a matter of time until vital organs begin shutting down. The greatest causes of mortality at Cahaba were pneumonia, dysentery, and diarrhea. Some prisoners during the Civil War died of simple homesickness, or “nostalgia,” which surgeons actually listed as a cause of death.
Many of the problems associated with Cahaba and other prisons, both in the Confederacy and in the Union, were brought on by lack of planning for such large numbers of captives. In many ways, conditions were better at Cahaba than at other camps in either the North or the South, and the inmates’ chances of survival were only slightly worse than on many battlefields, but that would have provided cold comfort at the time. They were enduring the worst living conditions they could have imagined, and no one knew how or when it would end. For the most part, their world consisted of the same dirty prisoners corralled inside the dreary compound, which alternated between dusty and muddy, depending on the weather, and was filled with smoke day in and day out. As Hawes wrote: “I had entered the prison in the most vigorous health, and blessed with an appetite that made no discrimination among foods that were edible. Like the rest, I divided my day’s ration into equal parts, consuming them one in the morning, the other in the afternoon; but as soon as I had gone to sleep I nearly always began to dream of being home, and as soon as I would enter the house I at once went to the pantry and began to eat…Oh, what delightful lunches I used to get in those dream journeys to the home pantry!”
In later descriptions of the Bell Tavern hospital, Hawes judiciously left out that after being admitted there he was officially diagnosed with “nothing,” apparently during a severe cold snap that made the prospects of a heated ward more attractive. Even in the deep South, the cold could be severe enough to give unprotected men frostbite. Hawes recalled one particularly cold morning when a popular young prisoner known as Little Eddie failed to show up for roll call. When Hawes asked about Little Eddie, he was told that the boy was breathing his last, so he and a group of five friends went in search of him. They found Little Eddie curled in a fetal position in the dirt, shivering and unable to speak. It was not the first nor would it be the last time they observed a prisoner wasting away, but Hawes and his friends were not ready to give up on Little Eddie. They gathered him in their arms and dragged him from the shadows into the warmth of the sun, wrapped him in blankets borrowed from more fortunate prisoners, and took his hands and feet in their own hands and exhaled their own warm breath onto them, rubbing them and holding them close to their bodies. They dribbled warm water into his mouth, trying, as Hawes recalled, “to coax back the ebbing tide of life.” Slowly, Little Eddie came around. His friends had bought him some more time.
Initially, the prisoners slept in bunks in the warehouse stacked up to five tiers high—essentially shelves of rough boards spaced about thirty inches apart, with no bedding. There were only enough bunks, or roosts, as the prisoners called them, to accommodate four hundred men, so the rest had to sleep on the ground unless a roost came open as a result of a transfer or the death of its former occupant. Because there was no way to heat the partially walled and roofed building, aside from a single fireplace, the prisoners had to build their own open fires if wood was available, and the resulting smoke was suffocating on cold nights. There was only one wheelbarrow to be used in removing rubbish and waste, and the stench was horrendous. The entire stockade was filthy, like the men, and overrun with lice, fleas, flies, and rats, which buzzed or nosed around them and kept them awake at night. Hawes found the lice particularly disgusting and wrote that they “crawled upon our clothing by day…crawled over our bodies, into the ears, even into the nostrils and mouths by night.” He was also disturbed by the rats, which he wrote “were a source of much annoyance to us who slept upon the ground.” He was at first fearful the rats would bite him, but over time he became mostly annoyed that they kept waking him up.
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.