Before it can reach you
I shall be dead--for which I'll thank God. I'm sorry now I didn't
take my chances with the other fellows, bribe the guard and escape
from Camp Douglas in Chicago. A lot of the boys did it. Somehow I
couldn't stoop. Maybe the fear of the degrading punishment they gave
McGoffin, the son of the Governor of Kentucky, when he failed,
influenced me, weak and despondent as I was. They hung him by the
thumbs to make him confess the name of his accomplices. He refused
to speak and they left him hanging until the balls of his thumbs
both burst open and he fainted.
"The last month at Camp Douglas was noted for scant rations. Hunger
was the prevailing epidemic. At one end of our barracks was the
kitchen, and by the door stood a barrel into which was thrown beef
bones and slops. I saw a starving boy fish out one of these bones
and begin to gnaw it. A guard discovered him. He snatched the bone
from the prisoner's hand, cocked his pistol, pressed it to his head
and ordered him to his all-fours and made him bark for the bone he
held above him--
"We expected better treatment when transferred to Elmira. But I've
lost hope. I'm too weak to ever pull up again.
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