Prison Life in the Old Capitol and Reminiscences of the Civil War

Prison life was much the same North or South in its general features, having its discomforts and privations, its days of worry, its longings and its disappointments, combined with that chafing under restraint, which is a feeling common to all men. Yet the sufferings of prisoners could have been alleviated in the North to a greater degree than was possible at the South, where in most cases the distress was due to lack of means to relieve it. The Confederate Government could not do for Federal prisoners what it was unable to do for its own soldiers or people.

It is not strange that when the flood of war swept over the country I should plunge into its turbulent waters and be carried along with the current. This martial spirit was inherited and fostered from the cradle up. My grandmother came to this country from Ireland in the stormy days of the rebellion of 1798. When but a little child I would sit by her side for hours, drinking in, like a heated, thirsty traveler, the wild stories of the exciting scenes she had witnessed there, and listening to the pathetic recital of the wrongs of her loved country and its people. And at night I would drop off to sleep on her lap with the old Irish rebel songs of ’98 murmuring a lullaby in my baby ears.

It was only natural, too, that I should be enlisted on the Southern side. I was born in Baltimore, and it was there I passed the early years of my life. My father, James J. Williamson, had the distinction ofdesigning and building the first clipper ship ever constructed—the clipper ship Ann McKim, built in Baltimore in 1832, for the old house of Isaac McKim, of Baltimore. The history of Maryland, with the record of the heroic deeds of the Old Maryland Line in the War of the Revolution, had always possessed a charm for me above all other books. It was my greatest pride to know that I was a Marylander and that Baltimore was my home.