Sword and Pen: Ventures and Adventures of Willard GlazierOwens, John Algernon
History
Sword and Pen: Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier
Owens, John Algernon
Glazier, Willard W., 1841-1905; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Personal narratives
Under siege.--Charleston Jail.--The Stars and Stripes.--Federal
compliments.--Under the guns.--Roper Hospital.--Yellow
Jack.--Sisters of Charity.--Rebel Christianity.--A Byronic
stanza.--Charleston to Columbia.--"Camp
Sorghum."--Nemesis.--Another dash for liberty.--Murder of
Lieutenants Young and Parker.--Studying topography.--A
vaticination.--Back to reality.
The next we see of Lieutenant Glazier is in the city of Charleston,
South Carolina, on the twelfth of September, 1864. Coming Street on the
morning of that day was crowded with people of every variety of calling,
from the priest and sister of charity, out on their merciful errands, to
the riff-raff and _sans-culottes_ out on no errand at all but to help
the excitement. The city was under siege.
At the end of the street a body of six hundred emaciated,
broken-spirited, ragged men, escorted by a strong guard, marched along,
and the busiest of the pedestrians paused to gaze upon them as they
passed. Coarse and scurrilous was the greeting the captives received
from the motley and shameless groups. A few of the more respectable
citizens, however, spoke words of grace to them, and some added hopeful
predictions of the final triumph of the Union cause. The prisoners were
hurried forward to the yard of Charleston Jail, where for the first time
in many weary months they beheld the glorious flag of their country
floating in the breeze over Morris Island. Weak as they were the
patriotic sentiment was still strong within and they gave one rousing
cheer! Some, despite the curses of their guard, dancing like children,
while others wept tears of joy.
[Illustration: Charleston Jail--charleston, South Carolina.]
The jail, as Captain Glazier describes it, was a large octagonal
building of four stories, surmounted by a tower. In the rear was a large
workshop, in appearance like a bastile, where some of the prisoners were
confined. As a lugubrious accessory to his own quarters, he had a
remarkably clear view of a gallows, erected directly in front of his
fragment of a tent. "The ground floor of the jail was occupied by
ordinary criminal convicts; the second story by Confederate officers and
soldiers, under punishment for military offences; the third by negro
prisoners, and the fourth by Federal and Confederate deserters, and it
is complimentary to the good sense of the rebels that deserters from
_either_ side were treated by them with equal severity." He gives a sad
account of the terrible condition of the negro soldiers and their
officers who were captured at Fort Wagner, and says the hospital at this
place was "a lazar-house of indescribable misery."
On the twenty-second of September, Glazier makes the following note on
the progress of the siege:
"Shelling is kept up vigorously. From sixty to a hundred huge, smoking
two-hundred-pounders convey Federal compliments daily to the doomed
city."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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