Stealing the General by Russell S. Bonds

Author:Russell S. Bonds
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781594165009
Publisher: Westholme Publishing
Published: 2011-12-30T19:09:43+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Heaven or Cincinnati

Atlanta

Boys, tell them at home, if any of you escape, that I died for my country and did not regret it.

—Sergeant Major Marion A. Ross, 2nd Ohio

EVEN AS ANDREWS’S BODY WAS being lowered into its shallow grave, the eight Ohio soldiers who had so recently tried and failed to save his life were taken from the barracks at the Concert Hall and moved to their new quarters. It was nearly dusk. The dirt streets were crowded with horses and wagons, remnants of the depot traffic and the day’s commerce, and the sidewalks were bustling with people heading to and from the trains or on their way out to enjoy the warm Saturday evening. Mark Wood was sick with fever and kept holding up the bedraggled column, pleading for stops to rest, until his chainmate Alf Wilson finally picked him up and carried him the rest of the way. They were marched about six blocks southeast to the Fulton County Jail, which stood at the northeast corner of Fraser and Fair Streets (known today as Memorial Drive). The two-story prison was yet another brick-walled edifice, but one the raiders found it to be “a more pretentious structure than we had yet occupied.”

Built in 1855, the boxlike jail aspired to be a castle, with a cornice and parapet above giving it the appearance of a squatty, squared-off rook tucked in a fenced-off corner of the chessboard. The first floor, which provided accommodations for the jailer and his family, was bisected by an east-west hallway extending through the building, with locked doors front and rear. A stairway on the right side of the hall led up to a similar central corridor on the second floor. There, four cells, each about sixteen feet by sixteen feet, were used for confinement, two on each side of the hallway. In two of the cells was “a stout iron cage,” as Wilson remembered, “similar to that which Barnum used to carry the big rhinoceros in.” The cell walls were paneled inside with oak planking spiked to the brick beyond; the windows strongly barred with iron, their lintels and sills made of granite from nearby Stone Mountain; the double cell doors—an inner one of riveted iron bars and an outer one of hardwood—hung on massive hinges and sealed by heavy locks. “From this imperfect description of our prison,” Wilson wrote, “the reader will see that the prospect of our breaking out was not the best.” (Though perhaps not impossible, as we shall see.) The eight men were placed in the southwest cell and shortly thereafter were given one welcome accommodation. The authorities, with apparent confidence in the sturdy construction of the jail and the alertness and ability of the guards, removed the handcuffs, collars, and trace-chains the Ohioans had worn for more than six weeks. “This was a great relief,” Wilson recalled. “We had worn them so long in couples that we would find ourselves involuntarily, at times, following each other about as if still compelled to do so by chains.

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