Palmer asked, “Are you serious?”
Hindman shrugged. “If it came down to slavery or secession? I choose secession. But we haven’t been driven to that extreme yet.” He paused. “We have the resources, caves with niter deposits, lead mines, foundries, and mills. Enough textile mills, though small, exist for some uniform production, and women can be enticed first to spin and then weave additional garments for the men. We don’t much care what it looks like as long as men are warm.
“Francis”—Hindman turned to Shoup—“I am giving you free rein. Requisition bells, boilers, and brass, but build me a cannon foundry and an arsenal. Offer fair compensation from the funds we took from Memphis. If anyone stands in your way, arrest them.”
“Some people won’t take Confederate notes,” Palmer reminded.
“They will. From this moment on, the use of Federal currency or specie is illegal. Violators will be arrested for treason.”
Palmer looked worried. “Tom, if you alienate the people, this whole thing could turn on us. We could have our own civil war within a civil war. General Curtis is already recruiting Arkansas regiments to fight for the Union.”
Hindman’s eyes narrowed. “John, if it takes a dictator to save a democracy, then I am indeed Arkansas’s Caesar. But I guarantee you this: when it’s all said and done, Arkansas will be free, or I will be dead for the trying.”
26
June 15, 1862
Sixty-one men, including Doc, John Mays, and Augustus Clyde, had been captured when Doc Hancock’s makeshift field hospital was overrun at Shiloh. The other fifty-eight were wounded so badly the fleeing Confederates hadn’t been able to evacuate them before Brigadier General William Sherman’s Federal troops arrived on the late afternoon of April 7.
Transported through the streets of Chicago, past the scornful eyes of gawking citizens, twenty-seven of his charges made it alive to the round-arched gate at Camp Douglas prison camp.
The rest had died on the long and abusive journey from Shiloh to St. Louis, and then in the cramped cattle cars that had brought them to Chicago and prison camp. For Doc the journey had been a living hell as he’d watched helplessly, doing what he could for his suffering patients.
As he watched them being processed, papers were compared by bored and careless officers, names checked off, one by one, on the lists.
“Where’s Charles Masson?” one would call.
“Dead,” Doc would answer. “He died in St. Louis.”
And the name would be scratched off.
Next they were searched, their bodies patted down, pockets turned inside out. A physician’s assistant asked if they were ill, looked in their eyes and mouths, and ushered them along.
After finally being passed through the gate, he, Mays, and Clyde found themselves in bedlam and chaos. And then the stench hit them. They were locked in a twenty-acre compound with nearly eight thousand other Confederate prisoners of war. The smell of excrement, urine, unwashed mankind, and rot was immediately overpowering. Hovering columns of flies filled the air like a Mosaic plague.
The swarms of mosquitoes, Doc would learn, arrived at dusk.
The lice would take a full day to make their presence known.
The camp was surrounded by a fence, armed sentries, and manned guard towers. The high observation platform outside the fence had been built by an entrepreneur who charged local Chicagoans ten cents to climb the steps where they could look over into the camp and see the thousands of prisoners.
Wooden barracks, twenty-four feet by ninety, and filled with stacked bunks, were elevated three feet above the muddy soil. Originally designed to discourage escape tunnels and hiding places, the elevation did serve the positive value of raising the rickety wooden floors above the flooding each time it rained, and allowed some air circulation during the hot summer months.
Matters would change in winter when men froze to death sleeping on the uninsulated plank floors while the Chicago winds blew snow beneath. Windows on the south side let in light, and each barracks had a fireplace and tin stove.
“What do we do with our wounded?” Doc asked one of the guards, appalled that his amputees and immobile wounded had just been shifted off litters and left in the shade of the gate.
“Not my problem, Reb. You might get some of the canned mackerel in here to carry them to the hospital square.”
“Canned mackerel?”
“With eight thousand of you bastards packed in here, and more coming, that’s pretty much your situation, ain’t it?”
“Yeah,” one of the prisoners called. “We’ll he’p y’all.” He was a tall man, bearded, perhaps in his late twenties. “McNeish,” he called. “You others, give us a hand here.”
“We appreciate it,” Doc told him.
“Lieutenant Ab Smith,” he said, offering his hand. “Seventh Louisiana. This hyar nasty piece of work is Andy McNeish. Welcome to Camp Douglas.” He gestured to the others standing around. “Come on, boys. Grab a man and help us git ’em over to the hospital square. Ain’t like y’all was doing anything important anyway.”
Within moments, the motley crowd had shuffled forward, grabbed up Doc’s wounded, and carefully borne them into the heart of the camp.
Doc, last in line, tagged along behind James, who was carried on an impromptu blanket litter to join the rest in the hospital square with its infirmary and separate pesthouse: a barracks area for the isolation of the contagiously ill and dying. Doc followed James’s stretcher bearers into the clapboard building, and winced. Instinctively, he placed a hand to his nose against the stench and flies.
Every bed was already taken. The worst of Doc’s wounded were laid on the barracks floor. To Doc’s horror, the only place the wood could be seen was where the passing of feet had worn away the coating of feces, blood, urine, and vomit. The plank-walled building was a hothouse; the fly-filled air hummed, and the walls crawled.
