C H A P T E R  T W E N T Y - F O U R

“They Held Existence by a Frail Tenure”

ON THURSDAY, AUGUST 21, the Richmond Enquirer reported that a new prison had opened three days earlier, under the direction of Captain George Alexander, assistant provost marshal, and its capacity was reputed to be in excess of one thousand, more than five times the number of Castle Godwin. When Lewis and Scully had been thrown in Godwin four months earlier, it held sixty prisoners; now that number had bloated to nearly two hundred, and conditions were intolerable.

The new prison, to be “christened ‘Castle Thunder,’ a name indicative of Olympian vengeance upon offenders against her laws,” was located on Cary Street and was converted from a tobacco warehouse. The Enquirer’s reporter had visited the L-shaped premises and approved of what he’d seen, though he worried the prison might be too luxurious for the sort of person to be incarcerated within.

The general cleanliness of the place is the first object which strikes the visitor’s sense of appreciation as he enters. The arrangement of the offices of Assistant Provost-Marshal [Alexander], superintendent, and police, all on the first floor in the front of the building; of the store-rooms, armory and “halls for confiscation” in the rear, and of the culinary department in the court, is as orderly, convenient, and comfortable as could be desired. The prison department is above, and is appropriately divided into sections for males, females, citizens and soldiers respectively; and still higher up is the hospital, where everything is kept in proper condition, and the patients have plenty of breathing and sleeping room. Convalescents enjoy a promenade upon the roof of an adjoining wing of the building.

There were a couple of features the correspondent overlooked, such as the windowless “Condemned Cell” and the three six-foot-square dungeons, or “sweat houses,” as Alexander preferred to call them. The stench from inside was pestiferous, worse than a pigsty.

The hospital didn’t long retain its perfect condition. On October 3 Surgeon William Carrington was commissioned by Jefferson Davis to inspect all the hospitals in Richmond’s prisons. When he came to Castle Thunder he was appalled, writing that there “are about 70 patients in a garret room 40ft by 80 of low pitch and very imperfect ventilation. The capacity of the room was 32 patients. There was no bath room, linen room or hospital clothing. The beds and bedding were filthy and the clothing & the persons of the patients in the same conditions.”

Pryce Lewis, John Scully, and the other inmates of Castle Godwin were transferred to Castle Thunder on Monday, August 18. Waiting to greet them was George Alexander, newly promoted to assistant adjutant general. The elevation had made him even more conceited. He yelled commands at his prisoners “as though delivering them through a speaking-trumpet.” He was also in the habit of regaling prisoners with stories of his own exploits earlier in the war, which while impressive enough, were burnished by Alexander’s braggadocio. Alexander warned the prisoners, “There is no use, men, of trying to get out of here. It is absolutely impossible … you can not have a thought that is unknown to me. You might as well attempt to scale Heaven as escape from the Castle. You had better behave yourselves, and become resigned to your situation.”

Each prisoner was searched for weapons, then dispossessed of money and jewelry, and given a receipt in return. Then they were escorted to their cells. Lewis and Scully were taken down the passage and up three long flights of stairs—armed guards were stationed at the foot of each staircase—to the third floor, directly beneath the garret hospital. This floor “consisted originally of two large rooms and one small room which was [their] cell.” The door to the spies’ cell was made from wooden boards, which with a bit of effort could be removed and replaced without drawing attention to the fact. So at night when most of the prison’s fourteen guards were off-duty or relaxing on the first floor, Lewis and Scully would “squeeze out into the large rooms and enjoy the society of the other prisoners.” The camaraderie among the incarcerated transcended wartime loyalties; everyone knew about the two Northern spies, but no one cared. If anything, Lewis and Scully were celebrities. The prisoners with whom they mingled represented all of war’s detritus; there were dozens of Confederate soldiers awaiting trial for desertion, mutiny or murder. There were civilian men accused of disloyalty or forgery, women caught selling either liquor or sex, and there were thieves and drunkards both male and female.

The highlight of Lewis’s day was the exercise hour. Not only could he escape for a few blissful minutes the stench imparted from the tubs that served as toilets on the prison floors, but he had the chance to converse with prisoners confined in “the Citizens’ Room” on the second floor. Among the topics of conversation was the course of the war, which at the time was discouraging for the Northerners. Not only had the Federals pulled back from Richmond, but the rebels had chased them north, crossing the Potomac on September 5 and engaging McClellan’s army twelve days later at a Maryland creek called Antietam. Unimaginable carnage ensued. By the end of the day twenty-three thousand American soldiers lay dead or wounded.

The inmates soon learned that Captain Alexander was a fair man: civil to the good, evil to the bad. Pryce Lewis struck up a rapport with the preening superintendent, who saw himself as the Confederacy’s answer to Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Where the Crimean War had inspired the English poet to write “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” so Alexander had been moved by the South’s travails to pen verses of similar stature. Unfortunately Alexander didn’t quite possess Tennyson’s turn of phrase, but Lewis discovered that “by praising his poetry it was easy to keep on the right side of him.” So adroit was Lewis in playing to Alexander’s ego that the prison governor took to printing souvenir copies of his ballads and poems.

In Castle Godwin Lewis and Scully had been well fed, but in Castle Thunder there were just two meals a day, and they barely qualified as meals. The food was brought to them in their cells, for breakfast “a piece of wheat bread of good quality and a piece of fresh soup meat, often in an uneatable condition.” The second meal was served between three and four in the afternoon and consisted of “a tin can of soup and a piece of bread. The soup was made of black beans and, if allowed to stand a little while, the maggots and winged insects would rise to the surface.” Lewis and Scully fished out the insects and threw them away, but ate the maggots for their nutrition.

An acquaintance Lewis made among the prisoners on the second floor was Colonel Thomas Jordan (not to be confused with the Thomas Jordan who was Rose Greenhow’s spymaster), Ninth Pennsylvania Cavalry, who had been captured in Kentucky the previous July. Subsequently Jordan was accused of having orchestrated a campaign of robbery, rape and murder throughout the state of Tennessee a few weeks before his capture. George Randolph, the Confederate secretary of war, had ordered an inquiry into the allegations, the results of which were pending.

Jordan and Lewis “exchanged little notes on a string through cracks in the floor,” and during the exercise hour they paced the yard in each other’s company. Toward the end of November Jordan learned that the charges leveled against him had been dismissed; also, eyewitnesses told the inquiry Jordan had been “very humane and kind to citizens.” He was ordered to be returned to Washington on a flag-of-truce boat, along with “two hundred and forty five Abolition prisoners of war, and ninety-eight citizen prisoners of the North.” The prisoners departed Richmond on November 29, and Jordan had secreted on him a note from Lewis written the night before, which was addressed to Allan Pinkerton.

Among the ninety-eight civilian prisoners liberated along with Colonel Jordan was Hattie Lawton. As early as June 1862 the Richmond Dispatch had speculated that “Mrs. Webster,” as everyone in Richmond still described her, would soon be released. But she remained confined throughout the long hot summer. In August she too had been transferred from Castle Godwin to Castle Thunder, and while her new abode had horrified her, she was resilient enough to write Jefferson Davis on October 13. The letter was a heartfelt plea from a grieving widow.

My Honorable President

I come to you, a poor weak woman whose future looks, oh, so cheerless. I come to you the relic of him who has paid the penalty of his wrongdoing, if wrong he did, of which I know nothing. I come to you begging. I wish to go home. It was hinted an exchange. Oh sir, exchange me, Southern born, a South adoring woman … I have suffered. Oh, you can feel for the suffering; let me go home where I may seek some sot, and unnoticed pass the remainder of my dreary, dreary days. I will pray for you, do you no harm and my Holy Mother knows my heart; but I have ties in Maryland, interests there. Please let me go home.

Very respectfully, your obedient servant

Mrs. T Webster

The letter was forwarded to General Winder, who by now suspected there was more to Mrs. Timothy Webster than first met the eye. He returned the letter with a recommendation that the prisoner “would compromise many friends in Maryland” were she to be released. Eventually, however, the authorities in Richmond relented, and Lawton was sent North, to make her report on the sorry saga of Timothy Webster.

Colonel Jordan delivered Lewis’s letter as promised, but by now Pinkerton knew nearly all the events surrounding Webster’s death, and it appeared from the letter he dictated to one of his subordinates that he attached no blame to Lewis. The letter reached Castle Thunder early in the New Year of 1863.

Pryce Lewis Esq,

Castle Thunder, Richmond, Va

Dear Sir

I am requested by Mr. Allen [Pinkerton’s nom de guerre] to write you, and to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of No. 28th 1862, the first direct news from you. He requests me to say to you that he is very glad to hear directly from you and hopes still that you will improve other opportunities of writing to him, letting him know of any and every want so that if in his power, he may supply it to you. That he regrets your arrest, your sufferings, your long confinement, and that his efforts thus far, have not proved successful in your liberation … Mr. Allen, also directs me, further, to say that sometime since, he has received through the American Legation in London, a letter from your brother, saying that your relatives there had heard of your arrest and supposed execution, and desiring to know of your effects; and that he replied to the letter, through the same channel, giving your brother the facts of the case, and of the assurance had from the Confederate authorities, of your safety and probable release … I hardly need add that everyone in the employ of Mr. Allen, shares with him in the deep feeling on account of your long and dreadful suffering; and all alike, desire to express the wish and hope of your early deliverance.

Around the same time as Lewis received the letter, Captain Alexander underwent the first real test of his authority at Castle Thunder. On the night of Monday, January 26, 1863, a group of Confederate prisoners contrived to make firebombs from the prison stove, which they then hurled from the windows of their cells toward the building opposite. Inside were scores of captured Union soldiers. Their screams brought out the guards, and it was several hours before the fire was brought under control. In the opinion of the Richmond Examiner the arson “best illustrates the amount of hellish recklessness and devilry which is congregated within the walls of Castle Thunder.” It called for swift retribution, and Alexander obliged. Lewis looked between the cracks in the wooden planks across his window as the culprits were “marched down into the prison yard and there they were kept in the wind and rain without shelter for six days.”

Complaints were made, but Alexander was unrepentant, as he demonstrated in April 1863 when he was summoned to appear before the committee of the House of Representatives of the Confederacy to answer charges of cruelty within the walls of Castle Thunder. Even some of the staff condemned the practices of their superior. A hospital steward named T. G Bland told the hearing that in his view the prisoners were “most barbarously and inhumanely treated.” One of General Winder’s detectives, Robert Crow, singled out John Caphart, Timothy Webster’s hangman, as the most sadistic.

The committee published their report on May 1. In it George Alexander was found to have employed “improper” methods at times, but, because Castle Thunder “embraced among its inmates the most lawless and desperate characters,” they recommended that no further action be taken against either the superintendent or any of his guards.

Lewis had been “subpoenaed as a witness in [sic] behalf of Captain Alexander and though I enjoyed two trips under guard to the Capitol my testimony was not called for.” Not long after, Lewis fell ill. Fortunately it wasn’t smallpox, the disease men feared above all others. An epidemic had swept the city at the end of 1862, and the authorities ordered every house to display a white flag if there was a carrier of the disease within. Superintendents of Richmond’s prisons covered their floors with loam and lime, considered to be an effective deterrent against bacteria, but men still succumbed from time to time. Mumps, measles and typhoid were also prevalent, but when the prison surgeon, Coggin, was fetched to attend to Lewis he diagnosed dysentery. As the hospital was full, Coggin handed Lewis “three most powerful pills” and told the Englishman he would soon feel better. Lewis “swallowed only one of them [and] the effect of this was so prostrating that I was satisfied that if I had taken the entire dose, I should have died immediately.”

Weeks passed, and Lewis lay festering in the stale air of his cell, at times convinced “life was slowly ebbing away.” The cumulative strain of the past twelve months had turned his hair gray, and his once bold brown eyes had drawn back into the sockets of his pallid face. Lewis spent his days huddled under his threadbare blanket, a pitiable shadow of the man who, two years earlier, had traveled through Virginia as an impeccably attired member of the English aristocracy. Lice swarmed over his body, but he had neither the energy nor the strength to repel them. Occasionally he felt a rat scamper across his whiskers.

By the early summer of 1863 the fever had broken, and Lewis was on the mend. His psychological well-being improved when he received a letter from Allan Pinkerton. Lewis had written to his boss to ask for news of their possible release. Since the end of 1862 he and Scully had believed their freedom was pending, but each time something had gone awry, either the intervention of General Winder or a newspaper editorial such as the one that appeared in the Richmond Enquirer on December 11: “We understand that Scully and Lewis, who have been confined in Castle Thunder, under sentence of death, as spies, in co-partnership with Webster, who was hung, have been pardoned, and are to be sent North. It is difficult to comprehend the meaning of such kindness on the part of the Confederate authorities.”

Now Lewis was desperate for at least a glimmer of hope. “I regret much that you were not exchanged,” wrote Pinkerton, who this time used the alias of “T. H. Hutcheson.” He promised Lewis “that no effort of mine or your friends will be left untried to effect your speedy release,” and he mentioned that he had written Lewis’s brother in England “to let him know how you are situated.” In addition, could Lewis “please say to Mr. Scully that I called on Mrs. S a few days ago—and that her and all the family were well, in fact, I may say all looking well.”

Finally, Pinkerton said he wanted to put Lewis’s mind at rest. Yes, he was now familiar with all the facts of Webster’s arrest, trial and execution, and the Englishman “may rest assured that my mind is perfectly unprejudiced and that you have my most sincere commiseration with you in the great sufferings you have endured … and I assure you that never for an instant has my faith or confidence in you wavered. And in this all your friends fully coincide.”

Pinkerton was true to his word; he was working feverishly to secure the release of his two operatives. At the end of May it appeared their release was imminent, but then for some reason it was canceled again at short notice. On May 25 Lieutenant Colonel William Ludlow, Federal agent for exchange of prisoners, wrote an angry letter to his Southern counterpart, Robert Ould, in which he brought “to your mind the cases of Lewis and Scully. You distinctly and without reservation told me that these men should be delivered on the day following the delivery to you of a large number of citizen prisoners; their names were especially mentioned and I have not yet received them. I shall deliver to you no more political or citizen prisoners except at ‘our own pleasure’ and no such agreement or understanding such as you propose will be for a moment entertained.”

The threats failed, however, and Lewis and Scully remained stewing in Castle Thunder as the summer arrived. If anything, their nationality now counted against them as the Confederate authorities no longer had any reason to curry favor with the British.

.   .   .

At the outbreak of hostilities, the Confederacy had acted with greater alacrity in dispatching to Great Britain emissaries to speak on its behalf; in other words, to propagandize. Men such as William Yancey and Pierre Rost had secured audiences with Lord John Russell, the foreign secretary, to plead the Southern cause, while the Union had procrastinated in appointing an American minister to London, one of their own, as opposed to George Dallas, a Buchanan appointee who, while capable, wasn’t wholly trusted by the new president. Finally Charles Adams had been assigned, but when he arrived in London in the second half of May 1861, he had a lot of ground to make up on his Southern rivals.

By the time Adams took up his new post, several dozen Union-supporting Negroes had taken it upon themselves to hold public meetings to counter the Confederate point of view, taking their lead from the most celebrated Negro to visit Britain, Frederick Douglass. He had been a leading member of the abolitionist movement since the 1840s and was a gifted writer and orator. Douglass was a friend of John Brown, but he had wisely refused to take part in the Harpers Ferry assault because he knew it would achieve nothing. Nonetheless the authorities claimed letters had been found among Brown and his men incriminating Douglass, so he fled to Canada and thence to England, arriving in November 1859. For six months he undertook a lecture tour of Britain for the American Anti-Slavery Society, playing to packed houses and captivating them with the eloquence of his oration on behalf of the enslaved. In May 1860 Douglass was about to leave for France on a similar tour when word reached him that his youngest daughter had died. He returned to the States and ended the war as a special adviser to President Lincoln.

Into Douglass’s shoes stepped other Negroes, many of whom had fled to Britain a decade earlier after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Others, such as the Reverend J. Sella Martin from Boston, came specifically to preach the message of emancipation. Martin toured the churches and chapels of England and Scotland, telling the congregations all about the iniquities of slavery.

The Confederate emissaries thought it wise to eschew public meetings and instead ingratiated themselves with selected editors of newspapers and journals in the hope of receiving a sympathetic press. The Irish Times, the London Standard and the London Herald all ran articles written by Southern agents. But these papers were read in the main by the middle classes, and they didn’t carry the influence of the workingmen and -women. It was they, ultimately, who would determine British government policy, and for a while the Confederate emissaries believed they would come down on their side, particularly as the Union blockade began to bite and the cotton ceased to come. From December 1861 to May 1862 only 11,500 bales of cotton arrived in England from the United States, less than 1 percent of the amount for the same period the previous year. Cotton workers in the north of England began to lose their jobs and applied for Poor Relief (the equivalent of today’s state benefits); in the county of Lancashire, 61,207 people out of a total population of 2.3 million asked for official handouts in November 1861; by March 1862 this figure had risen to 113,000, and by December it had soared to 284,418.

The working classes were suffering, but they weren’t starving, thanks to government aid (motivated by a fear of revolution) and donations from private charities. Ironically, the hardships endured by the mill workers in the north of England because of the Union blockade only strengthened their support for the North’s cause. They believed that no one, regardless of his color or creed, should be oppressed, and they were willing to suffer so that others wouldn’t have to. In this belief they were delighted by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862, in which he declared that unless rebel states returned to the Union by January 1 their slaves would be considered as free men. Attendance at antislavery meetings in cities such as Liverpool, Leeds and Manchester shot up in the months that followed, and a typical resolution was the one passed at an assembly in Sheffield on January 10, 1863: “Resolved: that this meeting being convinced that slavery is the cause of the tremendous struggle now going on in the American states, and that the object of the leaders of the rebellion is the perpetuation of the unchristian and inhuman system of chattel slavery, earnestly prays that the rebellion may be crushed, and its wicked object defeated, and that the Federal Government may be strengthened to pursue its emancipation policy till not a slave be left on the American soil.”

The London Times, still at best ambivalent toward the North, dismissed these meetings as being attended by “nobodies,” but Charles Adams reported to Washington that “these manifestations are the genuine expression of the feelings of the religious dissenting and of the working classes.” The British government, he predicted, would not be so foolish as to do anything to enflame the passion of the workingman, not with memories of the Chartist movement still alive. Adams was correct in his estimation. Britain refused to change its position of neutrality on the question of the American conflict, even refusing a French idea to help broker a peace plan in November 1862. The United States didn’t need outside help to resolve its disputes. Then in 1863 a dispute arose between Denmark and the German Confederation over Schleswig-Holstein (a peninsula between the North and Baltic seas), giving the British government a convenient excuse to turn its attention from the west to the east.

Lincoln never forgot the benevolence of the British working class, nor their support for his cause, and on January 19, 1863, he wrote to the people of Manchester, telling them that he could not “but regard your decisive utterances upon the question of slavery as an instance of sublime Christian heroism, which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country.”

In the mind of Allan Pinkerton, Abraham Lincoln had diminished in stature following the dismissal of George McClellan as commander of the Army of the Potomac on November 7, 1862. McClellan had gone because Lincoln was no longer able to tolerate his prevarication, “delaying on little pretexts of wanting this and that … I began to fear he was playing false—that he did not want to hurt the enemy.” Lincoln believed that but for McClellan’s cautiousness at Antietam the previous September, the bloody stalemate would have been a comprehensive Union victory. McClellan’s successor was General Ambrose Burnside.

Pushing his personal feeling aside, however, Pinkerton wrote Lincoln on June 5, 1863, telling him about the execution of Webster and asking for his help in securing the release of Lewis and Scully. “Pryce Lewis is an Englishman and has no one in this country dependant upon him,” wrote Pinkerton to the president, “but I have been and still am supporting the families of Webster and Scully. The death of the former precludes the possibility of any interference in his behalf, but the latter, fortunately, can still be benefitted by such interference … my object in writing to you is to appeal to you, in the name of these men and of their friends, to see that Justice is done to those who have so long suffered for having risked everything, even life itself, to Serve their country; and to ask that such disposition may be made by you of the matter, by referring it to whoever may have the more immediate charge of such arrangements or in such other manner as may best ensure the release and return to their homes of men who cannot but appear to me, under all the circumstances, as having a peculiar claim upon their Government for protection and relief.”

When Pinkerton’s letter elicited no response from the president, he organized the dispatch south of twenty dollars in gold and some smart clothes for his two operatives. Lewis still had on the same tatty shoes he’d worn during his escape from Henrico County Jail, so he was delighted when a brand-new suit and boots arrived from Chicago. Scully was less requiring of the footwear, and to Lewis’s disdain “he made a present of his new boots to a nephew of Captain Alexander who was an officer in the Confederate army … it had good results for the captain took Scully twice to drive in Richmond soon after.”

Alexander scrupulously husbanded the money and allowed Lewis and Scully access to it whenever they wished. Intoxicated by the novelty of sudden wealth, the pair for several days drew upon the fund to buy food, “but it cost so much—six dollars a meal—that we gave up such extravagance.”

Alexander also moved the two men from their cell on the third floor to the more spacious Citizens’ Room below. Lewis found the transference wryly amusing, proof of “what a difference money makes, even in the case of condemned prisoners.” The Citizens’ Room contained “a different class of prisoner: men connected with the sanitary commission, correspondents of newspapers, merchants captured on the coasts [but] with enough of the poor to act as substitutes for scavenger duty.” Here the windows were glazed, half barrels were used as chairs and there was even a stove in one corner. Among the denizens of the Citizens’ Room was J. T. Kerby, an Englishman living in Niagara, Canada, who had been arrested in November 1862 on the charge of spying. Kerby claimed he had come to Virginia on a business trip, but in reality he was a Union spy, though not in Pinkerton’s employ. The two most prominent newspaper reporters held in the Citizens’ Room were twenty-nine-year-old Albert Richardson and thirty-seven-year-old Junius Browne of the New York Herald Tribune. They had been captured at Vicksburg in May 1863, along with Richard Colburn of the New York World. Colburn was soon released (the Confederates didn’t much mind his newspaper), but the Tribune was considered one of the most bilious organs of the North. Richardson and Browne were thrown in Castle Thunder as punishment for the poison that flowed from their pens.

Richardson and Lewis soon got to talking and discovered they had common ground. The reporter had been with Cox’s army two years earlier during the Kanawha Valley campaign. Richardson rated Cox “an excellent officer,” and they shared fond memories of the camp at Poca and the river trip to Charleston.

Privately, Richardson was appalled by the appearance of the two spies, disclosing in his diary that “they held existence by a frail tenure … long anxiety had turned Lewis’s hair gray, and given to both nervous, haggard faces.” The arrival of Browne and Richardson aided Lewis’s rehabilitation for they shared Lewis’s eye for the absurd, and nothing was more absurd in Castle Thunder than Captain Alexander. Richardson giggled behind his hands at the sight of Alexander strutting around the prison in “pompous attire that included gauntlets and a red sash,” but it was his verse that had the men weeping tears of laughter.

At nighttime the Citizens’ Room was lit with gas, so the men kept late hours playing checkers or whist, reading, talking and smoking. They composed lighthearted verses, obviously nowhere near the quality of Alexander’s offerings. Their favorite was “The Castle Song.”

At the head of the Richmond Post they have placed a Marylander

And like a Devil in Regions lost there sits old Gen. Winder

He snaps & snarls & rips & swears when he’s sober & when he’s tight

The old villain’s heart’s as black as his head is white

All through this vicinity they hate him as hard they can

But never do as they slander him by calling him a decent man

Yet as mean as he’s a patriot that may be understood

For when he left the Yankee Country twas for that country’s good

In the door of the Castle like a stopper in a jug

To shut the mouth of the prison they’ve stuck a bell plug

It is Capt Alexander, who’s so cross & spunky

He’s not fit for a commander of an oyster pungy

The capt. is such a case as may often be seen

Who thinks he’s smart but is very green

He’s a thundering blower but would dare not fight

As dogs that bark the loudest are seldom known to bite

One September day Lewis read in a Richmond paper that Brigadier General Humphrey Marshall had arrived in the city. Marshall was a large man, “too heavy to mount a horse,” but he was a doughty commander and a brave soldier. In May 1862 his forces had defeated those of General Jacob Cox at Princeton, Virginia. The report Lewis read related that the fifty-one year-old Marshall had now resigned from the army and was in Richmond to serve the Confederacy in a civil capacity. There was also a throwaway line that among the general’s friends was Robert Ould, the Southern agent for exchange of prisoners. Lewis “suggested to Scully that as he was intimate with Captain Alexander to speak to him about Marshall and see if he could not be retained to do something for us.” Scully thought it worth a try. So did Alexander, who liked to boast he had the ear of everyone in Richmond.

For a few days nothing happened; then one morning a guard came to fetch Scully from the Citizens’ Room. When the Irishman returned he told Lewis that he’d spoken to Marshall, who promised to investigate their plight. Marshall reappeared a couple of days later and informed Scully that “he had seen Commissioner Ould about our case and he thought an exchange could be accomplished.”

Scully had two or three further interviews with Marshall, and at each one the general’s jowls wobbled as he nodded his head and told the prisoner that he saw no reason why their release couldn’t be effected. The tension was excruciating. Lewis and Scully refused to allow themselves to believe they might soon be free. They played cards, read, slept; they did everything but speculate on their liberty.

On the morning of Saturday, September 26, 1863, the pair were summoned from their cell and led downstairs into Captain Alexander’s office. Humphrey Marshall told Lewis and Scully that he had obtained their release.

Before either Lewis or Scully had time to mumble a thank-you, Marshall added that their freedom came with a price: five hundred dollars each. Lewis’s heart sank. He detected the malevolent hand of General Winder; it was another of his cruel psychological torments. Lewis asked how they could possibly find such a sum, explaining that the only money they had was what remained of the cache sent by the Pinkerton agency.

Marshall casually replied that if the pair gave him a joint note for one thousand dollars he would trust them to honor it once they had their freedom. It was a deal. Marshall wrote a receipt, Lewis and Scully signed it, and they “began at last to take breath, it looked as if we were really going to get away.”

The next forty-eight hours took an age to pass. They told each other that they wouldn’t believe they were going home until the moment they saw their first Stars and Stripes fluttering in the breeze. What they expected to see at any moment was the leering face of Winder or one of his Plug-Uglies laughing at their evil prank.

Then on the afternoon of Monday, September 28, Caphart entered the Citizens’ Room and ordered the two spies to collect their belongings. They asked why. Caphart told them to shut up and do as they were told. Lewis had hardly any belongings to gather. He put on his tatty felt hat, slung his coat over his arm and at the last moment remembered Captain Alexander’s ballad, the “Virginia Cavalier.” He must take that to show the boys.

Lewis and Scully then “said goodbye to our fellow prisoners, including the newspaper correspondents, for whom we carried messages to their friends,” and followed Caphart downstairs. They were taken to Libby Prison, just a couple of hundred yards along Cary Street from Castle Thunder, and ordered to stand in line with some other prisoners and sign their parole. When it was the turn of Lewis and Scully, the officer behind the desk read the names on the form and looked up at the two shriveled men before him. If it had been up to him, he told them, they would have hung with Webster.

They remained in Libby Prison overnight, and just before dawn on Tuesday, September 29, they and the other paroled prisoners were marched west along Cary Street, which ran parallel to the James River, to the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad Depot, at the corner of Byrd and Eighth streets. It was no more than a mile, but it exhausted Lewis and Scully. With what strength Lewis had left he “got up on a box freight car for fresh air. It tasted delicious.”

At ten minutes to six the train began to move. It was true, they really were going home. They arrived in Petersburg at seven thirty a.m., changed trains and continued their journey to City Point on the James River. The flag-of-truce boat was waiting for them, and there hanging limply from the mast in the cool morning air was the Union flag. Lewis turned to Scully and said, “If before this I had any English feelings left, I’ve been turned into a complete American now.”

Scully and Lewis arrived at College Green Barracks, Annapolis, in Maryland on the morning of Wednesday, September 30. There they encountered Major S. E. Chamberlain, First Massachusetts Cavalry, in charge of the parole camp. He was a “full-dressed, pompous, heavy official” who declined Lewis’s request for help in reaching Washington, citing a recent order issued by the War Department denying transportation to civilians. But we’re not civilians, retorted a furious Lewis, who in response to Chamberlain’s continued indifference “told him something of the service [we] had rendered the government … that we had been prisoners for nineteen months, under sentence of death part of the time, and chained hand and foot.” The outburst failed to move the officer, so Lewis turned to Scully and suggested they walk the forty miles to Washington. But Scully had a better idea. Why not pawn Lewis’s coat and with the money buy two train tickets to Washington? That required a pass, however, which Chamberlain at first refused. Eventually he relented and on a scrap of paper wrote out a permit: “The bearer Lewis Price [sic], a citizen of England, arrived this morning from Richmond by flag of truce boat. The guards and patrols will allow him to pass. S. E. Chamberlain, Maj 1st Mass. Cav., comd’g A,G,B.”

Lewis and Scully walked into town and pawned the coat for three dollars. They found a saloon, “lunched on bread and cheese,” and caught the evening train west to Washington, arriving at nine o’clock at the Baltimore & Ohio station. It felt strange to be in the capital again. So what do we do now? they wondered. Pinkerton had moved his headquarters back to Chicago, they knew that from his letters, but who else remained in the city who could help them? They remembered Colonel William Wood, superintendent of the Old Capitol Prison, to whom they had delivered the odd Confederate sympathizer. He would be of assistance. They trudged to Old Capitol Prison, a three-story brick building on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and East First Street (site of today’s U.S. Supreme Court). There they told their story to a guard, who fetched Wood, but when the superintendent arrived at the prison gate he looked upon the two men with suspicion. Don’t you know me, Colonel? asked Lewis. Wood squinted at the gray-haired, middle-aged man. He shook his head. It’s me, said the Englishman. Pryce Lewis.

For a few moments Wood was speechless; then “he uttered an exclamation of astonishment and indulged in considerable profanity to express his feelings of surprise.” He ushered the men inside to his office, fed them and listened to their tale of woe. Wood then summoned the captain of the guard and told him to have two cots made up. In the morning Dr. Ford, the prison doctor, inspected the men, and Wood telegrammed Pinkerton, who was in Philadelphia.

Pinkerton replied on the same day, October 1: MANY THANKS FOR YOUR KIND INFORMATION. TELL SCULLY AND LEWIS TO COME HERE. I CANNOT POSSIBLY LEAVE JUST NOW. SHOULD THEY REQUIRE MONEY TO COME PLEASE LET THEM HAVE IT AND I WILL RETURN IT TO YOU. GIVE THEM MY ADDRESS HERE AND TELL THEM TO AVOID ALL PUBLICITY OF THEIR AFFAIRS UNTIL THEY SEE ME.