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 14 “In the Hands of Devils” P r ison S t o r i e s , 1 8 6 2 Beyond Hope When Wallace Hoyt and the boys captured at Cedar Mountain were herded into the rebel prison camp set up on an island in the James River in Richmond, they were greeted by old friends. The 120 boys captured at Port Republic were already there. Belle Isle, however, had not been their first stop in the rebel prison system. While what remained of the Twenty-Ninth Ohio headed north through the mud toward the safety of Shields, the captured took up the march south, in the direction of the rebel prison. Within an hour of Tyler’s retreat, relative quiet returned to the battlefield. Those who had not made their way out were driven from their hiding places behind bushes and fallen trees and herded onto the road. They passed by the Lewiston Coaling, with its blasted treetops and dead men lying in tangled piles, some dead horses wedged between trees still leaning into their traces as if waiting for the command to pull the abandoned guns away.1 A rebel colonel rode up and said that if it were up to him he’d hang them all, on the spot.2 Stonewall Jackson rode up to the group, quiet and handsome on his sorrel horse. He spoke sympathetically to some of the boys and instructed the guards, “Give those boys the best of attention. Let them suffer no abuse, for they are our equals.”3 Soldiers who were there and heard and saw Jackson, like Pvt. W. E. Baldwin of the Twenty-Ninth Ohio, sensed greatness in him. The afternoon of the battle the prisoners were marched up into the mountains through Brown’s Gap and past long lines of wagons stamped “U.S.” on the canvas sides. They heard cannonading behind them, and the sound gave them hope that they would be rescued. It had been nothing more than Frémont firing a few salvos toward the rebels as they disappeared into the mountains. They slept their first night in captivity on the ground, with the rain coming down and nothing to eat except for the crumbs in their pockets. They crossed down out of the Blue Ridge the next day, and the last of the hope that they would be saved receded behind them. The second night, the guards crowded them into a barn. The Twenty-Ninth’s boys climbed into the hayloft and fell asleep. They had not been asleep long when a rebel called from below, “If you Yanks want anything to eat you had better come down and get it.”4 The guards had lit cooking fires and passed out rations. The prisoners dangled the bacon over the flames and made cakes of flour and water baked on flat stones set close to the fire. Some soldiers thought this the finest meal they ever ate in the army, whether guests of the Confederacy or soldiers of Uncle Sam. On the third day they were marched into Charlottesville. Tables had been set up, and atop them sat platters of roasted turkeys, chickens, bread, butter, pastries, and cups of wine. They were even more p r i s o n s t o r i e s , 1 8 6 2 167 surprised when the local ladies invited them to step forward and load plates.5 Some boys thought it might be a trick, but they overcame their shyness and were fed. After dinner they were marched through the town to the courthouse, where they were made to stand while the residents gaped at them as if they were circus animals.6 On the fifth day they got on boxcars that took them to their place of residence for the near term, Lynchburg, Virginia. No man would find the experience of capture and confinement pleasant, but just how harsh this chapter of a soldier’s life had been depended on who told the story, and when it was told, whether a few weeks or decades afterward. In peaceful times, Lynchburg had been a pleasant, prosperous town of seven thousand residents. The long trains passing through every day carried bundles of tobacco mostly, but since the war, the boxcars carried rebel armies.7 The trains dumped cargoes of wounded and sick rebels on the depot platform and steamed out, leaving the burden of how to care for all these soldiers on the shoulders of the civilians...

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