CHAPTER XLIV
PRISON BARS
The ship which bore the distinguished prisoner from Savannah did not proceed to Washington, but anchored in Hampton Roads at Fortress Monroe.
A little tug puffed up and drew alongside the steamer. She took off Alexander H. Stephens, General Joseph Wheeler and Burton Harrison. Stephens and Wheeler were sent to Fort Warren in Boston Harbor.
The next, day the tug returned.
Little Jeff ran to his mother trembling and sobbing:
"They say they've come for father--beg them to let us go with him!"
Davis stepped quickly forward and returned with an officer. "It's true," he whispered. "They have come for Clay and me. Try not to weep. These people will gloat over your grief."
Mrs. Davis and Mrs. Clay stood close holding each other's hands in silent sympathy and grim determination to control their emotions. They parted with their husbands in dumb anguish.
As the tug bore the fallen Chieftain from the ship, he bared his head, drew his tall figure to its full height, and, standing between the files of soldiers, gazed on his wife and weeping children until the mists drew their curtain over the solemn scene.
Mrs. Davis' stateroom was entered now by a raiding party headed by Captain Hudson. Her trunks were again forced open and everything taken which the Captain or his men desired--among them all her children's clothes. Jeff seized his little soldier uniform of Confederate gray and ran with it. He managed to hide and save it.
Captain Hudson then demanded the shawl which Davis had thrown over his shoulders on the damp morning when he was captured.
"You have no right to steal my property," his wife replied indignantly. "Peace has been declared. The war is over. This is plain robbery."
Hudson called in another file of soldiers.
"Hand out that shawl or I'll take the last rag you have on earth. I'll pay you for it, if you wish. But I'm going to have it."
Mrs. Davis took the shawl from Mrs. Clay's shoulders and handed it to the brute.
"At least I may get rid of your odious presence," she cried, "by complying with your demand."
Hudson took the shawl with a grin and led his men away. Two of his officers returned in a few minutes and thrust their heads in the stateroom of Mrs. Davis' sister with whom Mrs. Clay was sitting.
"Gentlemen, this is a ladies' stateroom," said the Senator's wife.
One of them threw the door open violently and growled:
"There are no ladies here!"
"I am quite sure," was the sweet reply, "that there are no gentlemen present!"
With an oath they passed on. Little tugs filled with vulgar sightseers steamed around the ship and shouted a continuous stream of insults when one of the Davis party could be seen.
General Nelson A. Miles, the young officer who had been appointed jailer of Jefferson Davis and Clement C. Clay boarded the ship and proceeded without ceremony to give his orders to their wives.
"Will you tell me, General," Mrs. Davis asked, "where my husband is imprisoned and what his treatment is to be?"
"Not a word," was the short reply.
His manner was so abrupt and boorish she did not press for further news.
Miles ventured some on his own account.
"Jeff Davis announced the assassination of Abraham Lincoln the day before it happened. I guess he knew all about it--"
The wife bit her lips and suppressed a sharp answer. Her husband's life was now in this man's hands.
"You are forbidden to buy or read a newspaper," he added curtly, "and your ship will leave this port under sealed orders."
In vain Davis pleaded that his wife and children might be allowed to go to Washington or Richmond where they had acquaintances and friends.
"They will return to Savannah," Miles answered, "by the same ship in which they came and remain in Savannah under military guard."
Jefferson Davis was imprisoned in a casemate of Fortress Monroe, the embrasure of which was closed with a heavy iron grating. The two doors which communicated with the gunner's room were closed with heavy double shutters fastened with crossbars and padlocks. The side openings were sealed with fresh masonry.
Two sentinels with loaded muskets paced the floor without a moment's pause day or night. Two other sentinels and a commissioned officer occupied the gunner's room, the door and window of which were securely fastened. Sentinels were stationed on the parapet overhead whose steady tramp day and night made sleep impossible.
The embrasure opened on the big ditch which surrounds the fort--sixty feet wide and ten feet deep in salt water. Beyond the ditch, on the glacis, was a double line of sentinels and in the casemate rooms on either side of his prison were quartered that part of the guard which was not on post.
To render rest or comfort impossible a lighted lamp was placed within three feet of the prisoner's eyes and kept burning brightly all night. His jailer knew he had but one eye whose sight remained and that he was a chronic sufferer from neuralgia.
His escape from Fortress Monroe was a physical impossibility without one of the extraordinary precautions taken. The purpose of these arrangements could have only been to inflict pain, humiliation and possibly to take his life. He had never been robust since the breakdown of his health on the Western plains. Worn by privation and exposure, approaching sixty years of age, he was in no condition physically to resist disease.
The damp walls, the coarse food, the loss of sleep caused by the tramp of sentinels inside his room, outside and on the roof over his head and the steady blaze of a lamp in his eyes at night within forty-eight hours had completed his prostration.
But his jailers were not content.
On May twenty-third, Captain Titlow entered his cell with two blacksmiths bearing a pair of heavy leg irons coupled together by a ponderous chain.
"I am sorry to inform you, sir," the polite young officer began, "that I have been ordered to put you in irons."
"Has General Miles given that order?"
"He has."
"I wish to see him at once, please."
"General Miles has just left the fort, sir."
"You can postpone the execution of your order until I see him?"
"I have been warned against delay."
"No soldier ever gave such an order," was the stern reply; "no soldier should receive or execute it--"
"His orders are from Washington--mine are from him."
"But he can telegraph--there must be some mistake--no such outrage is on record in the history of nations--"
"My orders are peremptory."
"You shall not inflict on me and on my people through me this insult worse than death. I will not submit to it!"
"I sincerely trust, sir," the Captain urged kindly, "that you will not compel me to use force."
"I am a gentleman and a soldier, Captain Titlow," was the stern answer. "I know how to die--" he paused and pointed to the sentinel who stood ready. "Let your men shoot me at once--I will not submit to this outrage!"
The prisoner backed away with his hand on a chair and stood waiting.
The Captain turned to his blacksmiths:
"Do your duty--put them on him!"
[Illustration: "'Do your duty--put them on him'"]
As the workman bent with his chain Davis hurled him to the other side of the cell and lifted his chair.
The sentinel cocked and lowered his musket advancing on the prisoner who met him defiantly with bared breast.
The Captain sprang between them:
"Put down your gun. I'll give you orders to fire when necessary."
He turned to the officer at the door:
"Bring in four of your strongest men--unarmed--you understand?"
"Yes, sir--"
The men entered, sprang on their helpless victim, bore him to the floor, pinned him down with their heavy bodies and held him securely while the blacksmiths riveted the chains on one leg and fastened the clasp on the other with a heavy padlock.
He had resented this cowardly insult for himself and his people. He had resisted with the hope that he might be killed before it was accomplished. He saw now with clear vision that the purpose of his jailer was to torture him to death. His proud spirit rose in fierce rebellion. He would cheat them of their prey. They might take his life but it should be done under the forms of law in open day. He would live. His will would defy death. He would learn to sleep with the tramp of three sets of sentinels in his ears. He would eat their coarse food at whatever cost to his feelings. He would learn to bury his face in his bedding to avoid the rays of the lamp with which they were trying to blind him. He had need of all his fierce resolution.
He had resolved to ask no favors, but his suffering had been so acute, his determination melted at the doctor's kind expressions.
The physician found him stretched on his pallet, horribly emaciated and breathing with difficulty, his whole body a mere fascine of raw and tremulous nerves, his eyes restless and fevered, his head continually shifting from side to side searching instinctively for a cool spot on the hot coarse hair pillow.
"Tell me," Dr. Craven said kindly, "what I can do to add to your comfort?"
The question was asked with such genuine sympathy it was impossible to resist it.
A smile flickered about his thin mouth, "This camp mattress, Doctor," he slowly replied, "I find a little thin. The slats beneath chafe my poor bones. I've a frail body--though in my youth and young manhood, while soldiering in the West, I have done some rough camping and campaigning. There was flesh then to cover my nerves and bones."
The doctor called an attendant:
"Bring this prisoner another mattress and a softer pillow."
"Thank you," Davis responded cordially.
"You are a smoker?" the doctor asked.
"I have been all my life, until General Miles took my pipe and tobacco."
The doctor wrote to the Adjutant General and asked that his patient be given the use of his pipe.
On his visit two days later the doctor said:
"You must spend as little time in bed as possible. Exercise will be your best medicine."
The prisoner drew back the cover and showed the lacerated ankles.
"Impossible you see--the pain is so intense I can't stand erect. These shackles are very heavy. If I stand, the weight of them cuts into my flesh--they have already torn broad patches of skin from the places they touch. If you can pad a cushion there, I will gladly try to drag them about--"
Dr. Craven sought the jailer: "General Miles," he began respectfully, "in my opinion the condition of state-prisoner Davis requires the removal of those shackles until such time as his health shall be established on a firmer basis. Exercise he must have."
"You believe that is a medical necessity?"
"I do, most earnestly."
About the same time General Miles had heard from the country. The incident had already aroused sharp criticism of the Government. Stanton had come down to Fortress Monroe and peeped through the bars at the victim he was torturing, and had extracted all the comfort possible from the incident. The shackles were removed.
His jailer persisted in denying him the most innocent books to read. He asked the doctor to get for him if possible the geology or the botany of the South. General Miles thought them dangerous subjects. At least the names sounded treasonable. He denied the request.
The prisoner asked for his trunk and clothes. Miles decided to keep them in his own office and dole out the linen by his own standards of need.
Davis turned to his physician with a flash of anger.
"It's contemptible that they should thus dole out my clothes as if I were a convict in some penitentiary. They mean to degrade me. It can't be done. No man can be degraded by unmerited insult heaped upon the helpless. Such acts can only degrade their perpetrators. The day will come when the people will blush at the memory of such treatment--"
At last the loss of sleep proved beyond his endurance. He had tried to fight it out but gave up in a burst of passionate protest to Dr. Craven. The sight of his eye was failing. The horror of blindness chilled his soul.
"My treatment here," he began with an effort at restraint, "is killing me by inches. Let them make shorter work of it. I can't sleep. No man can live without sleep. My jailers know this. I am never alone a moment--always the eye of a guard staring at me day and night. If I doze a feverish moment the noise of the relieving guard each two hours wakes me and the blazing lamp pours its glare into my aching throbbing eyes. There must be a change or I shall go mad or blind or both."
He paused a moment and lifted his hollow face to the physician pathetically.
"Have you ever been conscious of being watched? Of having an eye fixed on you every moment, scrutinizing your smallest act, the change of the muscles of your face or the pose of your body? To have a human eye riveted on you every moment, waking, sleeping, sitting, walking, is a refinement of torture never dreamed of by a Comanche Indian--it is the eye of a spy or an enemy gloating over the pain and humiliation which it creates. The lamp burning in my eyes is a form of torment devised by someone who knew my habit of life never to sleep except in total darkness. When I took old Black Hawk the Indian Chief a captive to our barracks at St. Louis I shielded him from the vulgar gaze of the curious. I have lived too long in the woods to be frightened by an owl and I've seen Death too often to flinch at any form of pain--but this torture of being forever watched is beginning to prey on my reason."
The doctor's report that day was written in plain English:
"I find Mr. Davis in a very critical state, his nervous debility extreme, his mind despondent, his appetite gone, complexion livid, and pulse denoting deep prostration of all vital energies. I am alarmed and anxious over the responsibility of my position. If he should die in prison without trial, subject to such severities as have been inflicted on his attenuated frame the world will form conclusions and with enough color to pass them into history."
Dr. Craven was getting too troublesome. General Miles dismissed him, and called in Dr. George Cooper, a physician whose political opinions were supposed to be sounder.