Prison Life at Fort McHenry.
By Rev. Dr. T. D. Witherspoon, late Chaplain of the Forty-Second Mississippi Regiment.
Paper No. 2.
It was my lot to be entertained successively in two of the leading hotels of this prison, and of these I will briefly speak. The first was the loft of the stable in which the horses of the officers of the fort were stalled. The floor, which separated us from our neighing neighbors beneath us, was full of broad seams from the shrinkage of the rough boards of which it was composed, so that the hot, steamy air from below had full access to us, and during the oppressive days and sultry nights of July and August, with the thin roof of shingles between us and the sun, and the hot steam arising from the stalls beneath, our situation was anything but comfortable. Nor must you judge us too harshly if I assure you that there was a general feeling of relief when we found one morning, to our surprise, that a process of summary ejectment had been served upon our four-footed neighbors and a hundred or more ragged and barefoot Confederates were being marched in sans ceremonie and quartered in their stalls.
The lower story of our hotel having thus come into requisition for purposes of prison transfer, it was not long until the demand was also made for the upper story, as it was near to the office of the Provost Marshal, and, therefore, convenient for the temporary herding of Confederates on their passage through.
Our next hotel was a more airy one, and, therefore, in good weather, a more comfortable one—an old shed, originally built as a barracks for Federal troops, some twenty feet wide by an hundred feet long, with dirt floor, weatherboarding of rough boards set upright and without strips to cover the seams, which were from a half inch to an inch in breadth, with roofing of the same rough boards, warped and shriveled by the sun so that the heavy September rains ran down in torrents upon us. On either side of the long apartment were rows of two-story berths (or bunks in soldier parlance), made of rough boards, without mattresses, or straw or bedding of any kind, our only protection from the hard board being found in the army blanket, which each prisoner had brought with him to the fort, or with which he had been provided through the generosity of friends.
