By September, however, hints in letters from friends, rumors and newspaper stories combined to convince them of the hard fact that prisoner exchanges had indeed broken down. They learned that on July 3, Secretary of War Stanton had issued a general order declaring all paroles null and void; a short time later all exchanges were stopped. To the prisoners in Camp Douglas, it became clear that escape was the only way to freedom.
Once the Kentucky boys made up their minds to escape, they overlooked no opportunity to do so. “Prisoners have slid out fence holes in the dark,” Colonel De Land reported in October to his superior, Commissary General William Hoffman. “They have passed out as workmen, and in a variety of ways have eluded vigilance of guards.” On the rare occasions when prisoners were recaptured, De Land’s method of punishment was to make them carry board signs on their backs marked ESCAPED PRISONER RECAPTURED. After the Chicago newspapers printed statements by military officials advising the prisoners to accept their fate and not attempt escape, one prisoner wrote a caustic letter to the Tribune: “The commanders seem to expect us to stay here. It is not our business to stay. It is theirs to keep us.”
Escapes continued through the autumn, so many that one official privately remarked that “the authorities at Washington might as well turn Morgan’s men out in a body, as they will all get out singly, anyhow.” Exactly how many escaped is not clear from the records, but probably one third of the eighteen hundred Morgan men captured during the raid forced their way to freedom before the war’s end.
Those who did not escape adjusted as best they could. They were permitted to receive presents from home—clothing, food, tobacco and a little money. A photographer set up a studio in the enclosure and did a thriving business making ambrotypes and miniatures which the boys mailed to their sweethearts back in Kentucky and Tennessee.
“Don’t be at all concerned for my welfare,” Henry Stone assured his parents in one of his frequent letters. “You can’t hurt a Morgan man.” But late in September, after the weather turned bad and sickness broke out among the prisoners, he mentioned that “one or two poor fellows are dying daily.”
On September 29, Stone attempted to cheer his mother by writing her that he hoped to be exchanged very soon, though by that time he certainly could not have believed it possible. “Imagine to yourself a long mule-shed, weather-boarded; on the inside bunks put up three deep one above another, also at places whole rooms to themselves with bunks in them; these are our barracks, back of them are cooking-houses with large fireplaces, cooking utensils furnished. We get up at 7 o’clock, have roll call; then comes breakfast, composed generally of warm bread, coffee, butter, with milk to go in our coffee; vegetables we have with beef or bacon, for dinner at 4 p.m. Our mess composed of nine live in a nice little room to ourselves, two cooks per day, one ration-drawer and the other non-cooks carry water. During the day we read the news, books, etc. [Stone had been reading Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, the war prisoners’ favorite classic], play marbles, cards, checkers, chess—in fact all games are played here. We have two sutler’s stores, a barbershop and daguerrean room.”
By mid-October, however, conditions within Camp Douglas deteriorated to the point where a medical inspector ordered it closed for the third time. Six thousand prisoners were packed into barracks space intended for four thousand. Typhoid, pneumonia and measles were prevalent. Open slit trenches were in filthy condition, facilities for cleanliness deficient, and some barracks were without doors, roofs or flooring. More than a thousand prisoners had not a single blanket, and many had no winter clothing. “The commander would not use U. S. Army clothing sent him,” the inspector reported, “because he feared prisoners would escape if so clad…some 150 sick men are lying in the barracks who should be in the hospital receiving attention.”
The inspector was especially disturbed by Colonel De Land’s dungeon which was used for punishments. “A close room about 18 feet square, lighted by one closely barred window about 18 by 8 inches, about 6 feet from the floor, and entered by means of a hatchway in the ceiling. The floor is laid directly on the ground and is constantly damp. A sink occupies one corner, the stench from which is intolerable. In this place at the time I visited it were confined twenty-four prisoners, the offense of all, I believe, being attempts to escape. The place might do for three or four prisoners, but for the number confined there it is inhuman. At my visit I remained but a few seconds and was glad to get out, feeling sick and faint.”
In taking note of this report, the Commissary General of Prisoners, William Hoffman, warned Colonel De Land to put his camp in order, and scolded him for not issuing Union clothing to Confederate prisoners. “Cut the skirts of the coats short,” he ordered, “and cut off the trimmings and most of the buttons, which will sufficiently distinguish them from Federal soldiers.”
It was during this period that ten men of the 2nd Regiment escaped, records indicating that two sergeants from B and I companies and eight privates from four other companies made their way out. On October 9, Henry Stone wrote another reassuring letter to his mother, adding one significant line: “We have everything we want but freedom.” On a dark night one week later, Stone decided he had seen enough of Camp Douglas. He tied his boots around his neck with a bandanna handkerchief, climbed a twelve-foot fence between two pacing guards, and escaped.
He walked into Chicago, looked up his younger brother who conveniently was studying medicine at Rush College, borrowed some money and clothing, and spent the next day sight-seeing. After dining sumptuously at the Adams House, young Stone boarded an Illinois Central train, rode to Mattoon, transferred to Terre Haute, and was soon visiting with his family at Greencastle.
Not all of Stone’s comrades could count on such a run of fortune; for many of them their luck ran out at the fence. “Erection of new fence,” Colonel De Land reported late in October, “has made prisoners desperate. Several have been killed, others wounded, yet some escapes could not be prevented. New fence will be completed this week and then escape will be next to impossible. Has been bribery, no doubt, constantly a throng of disloyal men and women here from Kentucky to test the virtue of every soldier they meet with money. Three or four days more will make Camp Douglas so safe and secure that not even money can work a man out.”
But De Land reckoned without the resourcefulness of the alligator horses. In November, Lieutenant George Eastin, still posing as Private George Donald, and two genuine privates of D Company made a successful break. And on December 3, De Land was writing Hoffman again: “It is my disagreeable duty to report to you the circumstances of a serious break of the Morgan prisoners in this camp.”
This big escape the night of December 2 was a triumph for the boys of the 2nd Kentucky who engineered construction of a tunnel from one of their barracks to the outside of the fence. For fifty feet they burrowed a narrow hole under frozen ground crust, secreting the dirt under floors of barracks and cook-houses. By covering the tunnel entrance with board flooring during the day, they avoided all suspicion, and waited patiently for a night with fog off the lake. At eight o’clock the night of December 2 the first men started through the cramped tunnel, and an hour and a half later when guards first discovered what was happening, about one hundred prisoners were gone.
Colonel De Land sent mounted troops out for twenty miles on roads leading north and west, and recaptured some of the fugitives. “This is the eighth attempt,” he noted despairingly in his report, “to escape from here by tunneling under fences.…I have ordered all floors removed from barracks and cook-houses and spaces filled with dirt to the top of the joists. Will undoubtedly increase sickness and mortality, but it will save much trouble and add security.”
By a strange coincidence, at the same time the Camp Douglas boys were digging their escape tunnel, General Morgan and his officers also were digging out of their prison in Columbus, Ohio. The news of John Morgan’s escape reached his boys only a day or so before they made their big break, and no doubt helped steel their courage to b
egin the long dragging crawl through that fifty-foot airless passage which led to dangerous freedom.
*Its present-day placement would be between Thirty-first and Thirty-third streets, near the Douglas monument just off Lake Shore Drive.
3
Soon after their confinement in the Cincinnati jail late in July, most of Morgan’s officers were transferred to military prisons—Johnson’s Island and Camp Chase. But when Ohio’s Governor, David Tod, insisted that Morgan and his officers should be treated as civil prisoners accused of crimes against citizens of his state, General Burnside offered no objections. Nor did General-in-Chief Halleck interfere with this unusual decision. Halleck was determined to make an example of “Morgan’s guerrillas, this band of robbers and murderers,” as he called them. In this climate of vindictiveness created largely by lurid stories in the Northern press, rules of warfare were put aside. Orders went out to transfer all captured Morgan officers to the Ohio state penitentiary at Columbus, where they were to be treated as common criminals.
On the morning of July 30, Morgan and those of his officers still in Cincinnati were brought out into the street before the jail. The 111th Ohio formed a hollow square around them and began the march to the railroad depot. “First came John Morgan dressed in blue jeans pants, and having on a new grass linen blouse, his towering form prominent in the procession.…Most of the prisoners were smoking cigars, and we noticed a canteen freely circulating among them on their way down Ninth Street to the depot.”
Upon arrival at Columbus, the officers’ first experience of convict life was to be stripped and ordered into water barrels where they were scrubbed vigorously with horse brushes. After these rough baths they were seated in barber chairs, and beards and hair were close-shaved. The loudest objector to this indignity was Colonel D. Howard Smith, who was proud of owning the longest beard and suit of hair in the Morgan division. “This morning,” he wrote in his diary, “as if our degradation and humiliation was not sufficiently complete, we were marched out of our cells to the public washroom, our persons stripped and washed by a convict, and our heads shorn, and our beards taken entirely off!”
Arriving from Johnson’s Island a day or so later, Basil Duke failed to recognize John Morgan when the General spoke to him. “He was so shaven and shorn that his voice alone was recognizable.”
The prisoners were assigned to a double-tiered cell block, each man confined to a single room three and one-half feet wide by seven feet long. During the day they were allowed the freedom of a hallway that ran the length of the lower cell block, but each evening before sundown they were locked in their individual compartments.
Accustomed for two years to rigorous outdoor life and continual movement, the young officers found this close confinement—without exercise, sunlight or fresh air—almost unbearable at first. “A long ladder, which had been left in the hall, leaning against the wall, was a perfect treasure,” Duke wrote. All day while they were out of their cells they took turns practicing gymnastics upon this ladder, “cooling the fever of their blood with fatigue.”
Gradually they turned to more sedentary time killers—chess, marbles, reading, letter writing. Duke and Morgan both wrote poems, Duke composing subtly satirical verses belittling the prison guards and wardens. But most of Morgan’s writing was in the form of indignant letters to high officials of the Union, demanding that he and his officers be treated as military rather than civilian prisoners.
During the first few weeks conditions were endurable; then one by one privileges were taken away. Food became abominable, newspapers and other reading matter were forbidden. As a special form of cruelty they were handed empty envelopes from wives or sweethearts, the letters removed.
For the slightest infraction of rules—talking in the dining room, for instance—they were transferred to a dungeon. As punishment for writing a letter critical of the United States government, Major Webber was confined for several days in a cell sealed on the inside with sheet iron which excluded all light and air. In the hundred-degree summer weather, the box was like an oven, and he was forced to subsist on two slices of bread and one cup of water per day. When Webber was released his face was hollowed, his gaunt frame more wasted than ever.
In one of Dick Morgan’s confiscated letters he told of how four officers, including his brother Calvin, and Basil Duke, were put in the “black hole” as punishment for talking after lights were out. “They were all released this morning except Basil, who they say is not humble enough yet to let out. I suppose he will remain there until Monday, if not longer. Cally says it is the most terrible place he was ever in and was covered with green mold when he came out.”
Major J. B. McCreary, who spent five days in “the hole” for having a knife in his possession, called it “this living death, this Hell on earth.” For the entire period he was kept in total darkness, “all the time nauseated by the terrible stench of the night bucket, which, though the only furniture in the cell, had seemingly not been cleaned for weeks. When I was taken out I was scarcely able to stand up, and some of my comrades had to be helped to their cells, with their feet swollen and the blood oozing out of their fingernails and toenails.”
As the men at Camp Douglas had done, Morgan and his officers gradually came to the realization that the doom of imprisonment was upon them; there could be no release except by their own efforts and ingenuity. They must force an escape.
They discussed the subject occasionally during October, yet in the face of their barred cells, the heavy brick walls, a courtyard guarded by vicious dogs, and an outer wall twenty-five feet high, escape seemed utterly impossible.
Various plans were advanced, then rejected. At last Tom Hines suggested one, an idea which he said had occurred to him while reading Les Misérables. He had noticed that the concrete floor on which the hallway and lower row of cells rested was always dry. As this was the ground floor, the concrete should be moist on warm humid days—unless there was an air chamber below. During a deliberately casual conversation with an elderly deputy warden, Hines learned that there was such an air chamber.
When Hines revealed his findings to a small group of escape plotters and suggested they start digging, Morgan laughingly called him “Count of Monte Cristo.” But they decided to try. After securing two or three table knives from the prison dining room, they sharpened these dull instruments as best they could and took turns chipping away at the concrete floor in Tom Hines’ cell.
Lookouts were assigned to watch unobtrusively for the approach of guards at the hallway entrance. As noise had to be kept to a minimum, work went very slowly. The concrete was six inches thick, with a six-layered arch of bricks below. The workers carefully concealed all rubbish in their handkerchiefs, later thrusting the large pieces inside Tom Hines’ mattress and dropping the dust and grainy mortar into the coal stove in the hallway.
To cover the floor opening in his cell, Hines used a carpetbag in which he kept his change of clothing. Fortunately for the plotters, the prison authorities made no careful inspections during this period, and after the diggers broke through into the four-foot air chamber, a system of rapping signals was devised to warn workers below of the approach of any guards.
When they had forced an opening through the brick sidewall below, they ran into a section of hard-packed earth and grout. What they needed now was a spade, and some of the more observant had noticed one with a broken handle lying rusted beside a coal heap in the outer yard through which they passed three times each day to the dining room. The problem was how to obtain the spade without being observed by the guards.
A plan was worked out in great detail. Captain Jake Bennett would wear his long loose coat, and as they marched out into the yard, several others near him would pretend to engage in a playful scuffle. During this horseplay, Bennett would be shoved to the ground, fall upon the coveted spade, and slip it inside his coat.
The scheme worked to perfection, Bennett sitting stiffly upright through breakfast to prevent the spade showing aga
inst the folds of his coat.
With this spade the digging went much faster, but there were other problems to be overcome. As the tunnel’s exit would be inside the prison yard, they had yet to devise a method for scaling the twenty-five-foot outer wall. A rope and a hook would be required. In the darkness of their cells, several of the plotters tore their bed coverlids into strips, and Calvin Morgan took on the job of plaiting them into a thirty-foot rope. For a hook, they took the poker from the hall stove, bent it, and attached it to the end of the rope.
Other necessary preparations included the acquisition of a railroad timetable. Knowing that local newspapers usually carried timetables, Morgan asked a guard for one, but as newspapers were still forbidden the man refused. Morgan had to bribe him with fifteen dollars in gold before the newspaper was finally secured. After studying the timetable, Morgan and Hines realized that escape to Canada would be too risky. Trains leaving Columbus at night did not reach the border until long after daylight. Any escape would certainly be discovered at dawn, and the alarm would be out to all border points before the fugitives could cross. They would have to go south for Kentucky.
After long discussions it was decided that no more than six men should attempt to make the breakout with Morgan. Any more than that might jeopardize all, and all agreed that the important objective was to get John Morgan back through the Confederate lines to reorganize what was left of his old command and recruit new regiments. The six selected to try for escape with Morgan were Tom Hines, Ralph Sheldon, Sam Taylor, L. D. Hockersmith, Jacob Bennett, and J. S. Magee. They would separate, Hines accompanying Morgan on the train to Cincinnati, the others moving in different directions.