The Final Days

Monday, March 7, 2011

In commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, I would like to honor my great-great grandfather Michael McDonald in a series of blogs including his written accounts of his Civil War experiences.

Captured by the Confederate soldiers, Michael McDonald was sent to the Salisbury Prison.

...woke up the next morning to find ourselves at Salisbury--Salisbury notorious for its rebel prison pen!...


But only a day or two before our arrival, Kilpatrick had been through there with his Union troopers and had burned the prison stockade.  We were marched out to the prison grounds, a dead line established, and guards stationed around us.  We were the last guests at this celebrated southern hostelry upon ground that ought to be sacred in American history; where thousands of our brave fellows had suffered death by starvation.  Heretofore we had shared rations with our guards, but now we were placed upon the regular Salisbury diet--a pint of corn meal per day!  The lack of water was the cause of our greatest suffering.  Plenty of good water could be had just outside the prison grounds, but although the agonized cry of "water! water!" went up from three or four hundred parched throats hourly, it was not brought to us nor were we permitted to go for it,  and were obliged to content ourselves with what could be found in the stagnant pools within the grounds.  A young lady living in the vacinity subsequently told me that distressed by the cries of the suffering prisoners, she had repeatedly sent her colored servants with supplies to relieve their thirst, but that the guards invariably refused them admission. 


Luckily our days of imprisonment were to be few.  The southern confederacy was falling to pieces around us.  Day by day we observed that our guards treated us with increasing consideration, respect and deference.  And then the joyful hour came when they stacked their guns and shouted across the dead line, "Johnson's army has surrendered!  We are the prisoners and you are free!"


Perhaps we didn't cheer!

(Shirley's note:  Perhaps this was not "Johnson's army, but Confederate General Joseph Johnston's army that surrendered?  General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia on April 9, 1865.  News, however, didn't travel fast.  According to war department documents, Michael McDonald was taken prisoner near Raleigh, North Carolina four days later, on April 13, and returned to duty April 30, 1865.)

Given our liberty, we wandered around the houses of the neighborhood in search of something to eat, and were generally treated kindly.


Transportation was finally furnished us to Raleigh by rail and we bade Salisbury and its hateful memories anything but a fond adieu.  As our train passed by a camp of confederate soldiers we could not resist the temptation of cheering.  Exasperated by our elation, some of the men in camp seized their guns and poured a volley into our crowded car, seriously wounding two of our number.  It was the last time I was under fire from the guns of the Southern Confederacy in four years' service.


Arriving in Raleigh, Pete and I found that Company E was encamped four miles out from the city and we set out to make the distance afoot.  Both were weak from our prison diet and it took us many hours to make the journey, but by dint of frequent rests and helping each other along we finally came within sight of the camp and our ears were greeted with the shout, "Here comes Mike and Pete!" and the boys came streaming out to meet us.  We had to fight them off and keep them at a distance, while we called for water and clean clothes.  We were literally alive with vermin.  But a bath in a neighboring creek, wholesome (food and clean) clothing and the services of Sloggy, the company barber, soon made us presentable.  And it was thus that the bummers of Company E got back to camp.

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