Having "gone through" us, they incarcerated the officers in one room, the enlisted men in another.
[4] Dr. Fontleroy was a brother of Mrs. Major Whittlesey, one of my fellow professors, instructor in military tactics, at Cornell University. Whittlesey was a graduate of West Point, and, while there, had had cadet U. S. Grant under his command!
At Libby--Thence to Clover, Danville, Greensboro, and Salisbury--Effort to Pledge us not to Attempt Escape.
The two rooms at Libby adjoined each other on the second floor, but a solid brick wall was between them. When we entered, about a hundred and fifty officers were already there. The first thing that attracted my attention was an officer putting a loaf of bread through a small hole in the partition where one or two bricks were removable. He was feeding a hungry prisoner. A cap or hat nicely concealed the perforation.
Libby has a hard name, but it was the most comfortable of the six Confederate prisons of which I saw the interior. With all his alleged brutal severity, of which I saw no manifestation, and his ravenous appetite for greenbacks, for which we could not blame him, Dick Turner seemed an excellent disciplinarian. Everything went like clockwork. We knew what to expect or rather what not to expect, and _when_! My diary for Wednesday, September 28, 1864, the day after our arrival, reads as follows:
The issue to us daily is One gill of boiled beans, One quarter gill of bean broth, One half loaf of soft bread, (Four ounces meat) and A little salt.
There was one inestimable boon, a copious supply of pure water.
There were at this time no panes of glass, in fact no sashes, in the windows, and the wind swept freely through. The nights were becoming cold. Confederate sentries were on the lower floor and outside. They kept up a custom rather unusual, I think, during the war, of calling out in sing-song tones every hour the number of the post and the time, with occasional variations; _e. g._: "Post number fourteen, two o'clock, and all's well." Then the next sentinel would sing out, "Post number fifteen, two o'clock, and all's well." Then the melodious voice of the next, farther away and sadly unorthodox, "Post number sixteen, two o'clock, and cold as h--l!"