HOW THE SIX HUNDRED OFFICERS FARED. BY JUNIUS L. HEMPSTEAD, NEW ORLEANS, LA,
I see in the October (1907) Veteran some extracts from the diary of one of my dear comrades of the Immortal Six Hundred who was a prisoner of war on Morris Island. His leaflets must have been written many years after the war. If he were alive, I certainly could refresh his memory.
At the time the dear ladies of Charleston, under flag of truce, forwarded the eatables we were on retaliation for Andersonville. The provisions were never received. The
Federals did, however, allow us to have the smoking and chewing tobacco.
Colonel Hallowel, who commanded the negro regiment that guarded us, was merciless in his exactions. We were eating wormy hard-tack; to lose the worms was to lose the ration. I was appointed a committee of one to remonstrate. With some of these crackers in my hand, I approached this officer, and in a gentlemanly manner stated the situation, broke the crackers to prove the truth of my statement. He sarcastically replied: "You fellows are hard to please; you have been complaining of not getting any meat."
If our dear comrade received at that time what he jotted down, he must have been singularly favored. The dishwater —bean soup—that our negro guards brought us was cooked upon the island sand bar, with half a dozen beans that seemed lost in the liquid. The soup was cooked without covers, and the sand formed a base for the weakness above.
Miss Lucile Cobb does not mention the horrors of Fort Pulaski, where the corn meal had lost its original color, and was caked in the barrels and burrowed with slugs, worms, and bugs, or the fact that the comrades would punch nails in the bottoms of old tin cans, and thus separated the slugs, worms, and bugs from the tasteless meal by sifting. This, with strong pickle that must have come from Noah's ark, formed for days our food. No one could eat it. The scurvy spread rapidly and fatally. When we were shipped (North) back to Fort Delaware, a great cry of horror went up from our comrades in the pen.
I do not write this for any sensational effect. Miss Cobb's article is misleading. I think she has not written all of the horrors of that martyrdom for a great principle. As the President of the Immortal Six Hundred, I write these facts with no disrespect to the daughter of our dear comrade.