For even as Andersonville was a name that stank in the North, so was Rock Island one to bring terror to the heart of any Southerner who had relatives imprisoned there.
When Lincoln refused to exchange prisoners, believing it would hasten the end of the war to burden the Confederacy with the feeding and guarding of Union prisoners, there were thousands of bluecoats at Andersonville, Georgia.
The Confederates were on scant rations and practically without drugs or bandages for their own sick and wounded.
They had little to share with the prisoners.
They fed their prisoners on what the soldiers in the field were eating, fat pork and dried peas, and on this diet the Yankees died like flies, sometimes a hundred a day.
Inflamed by the reports, the North resorted to harsher treatment of Confederate prisoners and at no place were conditions worse than at Rock Island.
Food was scanty, one blanket for three men, and the ravages of smallpox, pneumonia and typhoid gave the place the name of a pest-house.
Three-fourths of all the men sent there never came out alive.
And Ashley was in that horrible place!
Ashley was alive but he was wounded and at Rock Island, and the snow must have been deep in Illinois when he was taken there.
Had he died of his wound, since Rhett had learned his news?
Had he fallen victim to smallpox?
Was he delirious with pneumonia and no blanket to cover him?
“Oh, Captain Butler, isn’t there some way-Can’t you use your influence and have him exchanged?” cried Melanie.
“Mr. Lincoln, the merciful and just, who cries large tears over Mrs. Bixby’s five boys, hasn’t any tears to shed about the thousands of Yankees dying at Andersonville,” said Rhett, his mouth twisting.
“He doesn’t care if they all die. The order is out. No exchanges.
I—I hadn’t told you before, Mrs. Wilkes, but your husband had a chance to get out and refused it.”
“Oh, no!” cried Melanie in disbelief.
“Yes, indeed.
The Yankees are recruiting men for frontier service to fight the Indians, recruiting them from among Confederate prisoners.
Any prisoner who will take the oath of allegiance and enlist for Indian service for two years will be released and sent West.
Mr. Wilkes refused.”
“Oh, how could he?” cried Scarlett. “Why didn’t he take the oath and then desert and come home as soon as he got out of jail?” Melanie turned on her like a small fury.
“How can you even suggest that he would do such a thing?
Betray his own Confederacy by taking that vile oath and then betray his word to the Yankees!
I would rather know he was dead at Rock Island than hear he had taken that oath.
I’d be proud of him if he died in prison. But if he did THAT, I would never look on his face again.
Never!
Of course, he refused.”
When Scarlett was seeing Rhett to the door, she asked indignantly:
“If it were you, wouldn’t you enlist with the Yankees to keep from dying in that place and then desert?”
“Of course,” said Rhett, his teeth showing beneath his mustache.
“Then why didn’t Ashley do it?”
“He’s a gentleman,” said Rhett, and Scarlett wondered how it was possible to convey such cynicism and contempt in that one honorable word.
PART THREE
CHAPTER XVII
May of 1864 came—a hot dry May that wilted the flowers in the buds—and the Yankees under General Sherman were in Georgia again, above Dalton, one hundred miles northwest of Atlanta.
Rumor had it that there would be heavy fighting up there near the boundary between Georgia and Tennessee. The Yankees were massing for an attack on the Western and Atlantic Railroad, the line which connected Atlanta with Tennessee and the West, the same line over which the Southern troops had been rushed last fall to win the victory at Chickamauga.
But, for the most part, Atlanta was not disturbed by the prospect of fighting near Dalton.
The place where the Yankees were concentrating was only a few miles southeast of the battle field of Chickamauga.
They had been driven back once when they had tried to break through the mountain passes of that region, and they would be driven back again.
Atlanta—and all of Georgia—knew that the state was far too important to the Confederacy for General Joe Johnston to let the Yankees remain inside the state’s borders for long.
Old Joe and his army would not let even one Yankee get south of Dalton, for too much depended on the undisturbed functioning of Georgia.
The unravaged state was a vast granary, machine shop and storehouse for the Confederacy.
It manufactured much of the powder and arms used by the army and most of the cotton and woolen goods.
Lying between Atlanta and Dalton was the city of Rome with its cannon foundry and its other industries, and Etowah and Allatoona with the largest ironworks south of Richmond.
And, in Atlanta, were not only the factories for making pistols and saddles, tents and ammunition, but also the most extensive rolling mills in the South, the shops of the principal railroads and the enormous hospitals.
And in Atlanta was the junction of the four railroads on which the very life of the Confederacy depended.
So no one worried particularly.
After all, Dalton was a long way off, up near the Tennessee line.