"About the same time, orders were received from the commanding General at New York, which were concealed from General Wadsworth, but he finally learned that he was not to be paroled nor exchanged, but was to be sent to England as a rebel of too much consequence to be at liberty. Not long afterward, Major Benjamin Benton, a brave and worthy man, who had served under the General the preceding summer, was taken and brought into the fort, and lodged in the same room with him. He had been informed that both himself and the General were to be sent immediately after the return of a privateer now on a cruise, either to New York or Halifax, and thence to England. The prisoners immediately resolved to make a desperate effort to effect their escape. They were confined in a grated room in the officers' barracks within the fort. The wells of this fortress, exclusively of the depth of the ditch surrounding it, were twenty feet high, with fraising on top, and chevaux-de-frise at the bottom. "Two sentinels were always in the entry, and their door—the upper part of which was glass—might be opened by their watchmen whenever they thought proper, and was actually opened at seasons of peculiar darkness and silence. At the exterior doors of the entries, sentinels were also stationed, as were others in the body of the fort, and at the quarters of General Campbell. At the guard-house a strong guard was daily mounted. Several sentinels were stationed on the walls of the fort, and a complete line occupied them by night. Without the ditch, glacis and abattis, another complete set of soldiers patroled through the night, and a picket guard was placed in or near the isthmus leading from the fort to the main land. Notwithstanding all these fearful obstacles to success, they resolved to make the perilous attempt.