Pemberley Ranch - Jack Caldwell [58]
“What?”
“Captain George Whitehead was second in command o’ th’ Camp Campbell prison camp in Missouri, where Charles an’ me were taken after Vicksburg. Now, ole George may have been the assistant commander, but since his colonel spent the better part of every day tryin’ to get inside of a bottle, George had a free hand runnin’ th’ place. For a year we enjoyed his hospitality, us and a thousand other prisoners.” His face grew soft. “At least there were a thousand when we started out. By th’ time Charles an’ me were transferred to Camp Douglas in Illinois th’ next summer, three hundred of us were in th’ ground.”
Beth was shocked. “Three hundred men died? But… but the papers all said that Confederate prisoners were treated well.” She looked at Anne, who also sat with an astonished look on her face.
“You… you never told us, Will,” was all she said.
“It ain’t somethin’ a man likes to remember, Annie. God help me, I wish I could forget.”
“What happened?” Beth asked.
“Three things—mismanagement, malnourishment, an’ mistreatment. Ha, didn’t think I could get all that out.” Darcy looked perversely proud of his alliteration. “Camp Campbell wasn’t supposed to be a prison—it was a way station. But the real prisons weren’t ready. So there we stayed, as more an’ more men came. A thousand souls on a few acres. Sickness an’ starvation took more of the victims.”
“Starvation?” Beth cried. “But what of the food the War Department sent?”
“Oh, it came, what little they actually sent. We were right by the railroad siding, an’ we saw the Yankee soldiers unloadin’ the freight cars. Funny thing, though—not all of it got into the kitchens. Charles was workin’ in the camp hospital at the time, an’ he made friends with some o’ the guards. He found out from them that a lot of the food for the prisoners was sold to the townspeople.”
“By who?”
Darcy gave her a look. “Who do you think?” Darcy took another drink as Beth digested the implication. “We couldn’t complain about it without bein’ labeled malcontents and bein’ charged with insurrection. But we complained anyway, for all the good it did. George liked that word—insurrection. Most of us were accused of it at least once. He also liked the whip.” An unreadable expression came over Darcy before he turned to the fireplace. “Flogging was a weekly occurrence.”
Beth was having a hard time handling what she was hearing. How could a handsome and charming man like George Whitehead be the ruthless and dishonest monster Darcy was describing? It couldn’t be true, could it?
Darcy continued in an unemotional voice. “By the time they shipped us out, there were three hundred graves in the Confederate cemetery. Some o’ the townspeople didn’t want individual headstones—said it was ugly an’ we didn’t deserve it anyway—but decency won out. An’ as for Captain George Whitehead, he got a promotion to major.
“Camp Douglas4 in Chicago wasn’t any better. We were crammed in with twelve thousand others in a place designed for half that many. Eighty acres o’ hell. They wouldn’t let Charles serve in the hospital. We never knew how many died—four to six thousand, Charles thinks, most in unmarked graves or tossed into Lake Michigan. An’ unlike Andersonville, nobody was punished for it.”
Darcy bowed his head before turning back to the ladies, both shaken by what they had heard. “All that kept me alive was wantin’ to get back home and see my daddy an’ my sister again. In the summer of ’65, I finally got back to Rosings, only to find my daddy sick. You remember, don’t you, Annie? I had to take over runnin’ Pemberley. For two years, Daddy and me ran the ranch together, me from a horse an’ him from his sickbed. By then, th’ Yankee carpetbaggers were movin’ in, but we paid them no mind. There was a ranch to run.
“Fitz an’ I took a herd up to Kansas in ’68. By the time I got back, Daddy had been in his grave for three weeks. And sittin’ on the front porch o’ Pemberley,