Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1865 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VIII. THE NEGROES IN LIBBY. There was attached to the prison about twenty "native Americans of African descent," who had been cooks and officers' servants in the Union army, but who, through the fortunes of war, had at various times been captured and brought to this popular hotel for "Yankee" soldiers. They worked in and around the prison, scrubbing floors, carrying out slops, and cutting wood. For the most trifling offences, either imagined or real, they were stripped and tied over a tobacco hogshead or pork barrel, when Dick Turner, to gratify his devilish nature, would give the poor fellows on the bare back from thirty to forty lashes, with a horsewhip or cat-o-nine tails. The piteous moans and screams of the unoffending victims ascending from the cellar in which the brutal work was enacted, was frequently heard in the prison above. Thank God! that such scenes can never recur in the land of Washington, without the guilty perpetrators having to answer to a tribunal of justice for the crime. The "General," one of the negroes above mentioned, was quite an original, and one of the peculiarities of Libby, never to be forgotten by the boarders at that place. It was the "General's" duty to go through the prison every morning with a kettle of burning tar, fumigating the rooms. He would inform us on each occasion that the smoke was "bery benewicial to the gemmen, kase it was good Union smoke." THE LIBBY TUNNEL. After the enterprise contemplated by the "Council of Five" was abandoned, the leaders of that organization determined to escape from the prison by tunneling from the lower story or basement of the building, provided access could in any way be had to that part of the prison. A league, consisting of thirty-one members, each of...
