"The soul of a brave and courageous man who only wanted to serve his country and return home to his fiancee is forever illuminated."
That's how one reviewer described the poignant story of an intelligent and perceptive Union soldier who endured the horrors of the Civil War prison on Belle Isle in Richmond, as detailed by award-winning author and journalist Don Allison.
"It is three months since I was captured," Union cavalryman J. Osborn Coburn wrote from Richmond's Belle Isle prison in January 1863.
"Then I expected that all enlisted men would be paroled and exchanged and returned to our lines. We were full of health, heart, hope and spirits. We were fleshy, having known but little of hunger. We were confident in our ability to endure almost anything. Now we are down, clear down, starved out. Our flesh as well as hope and spirits are all broken or nearly so. We get peevish and irritable, cross, dirty and careless. Eat like beasts, our faces and hands begrimed with dirt and pine smoke and but little inclination to wash them or strength if we had."
Coburn's diary is perhaps the closest a reader can come to experiencing the horrors of Civil War prison life. His journal is the focus of a revised edition of a classic book from Faded Banner Publications, "Hell on Belle Isle: Diary of a Civil War POW Revised Edition."
An uncommonlygifted writer, Coburn was an attorney before joining the Sixth Michigan Cavalry in the summer of 1862. He turned his pen to describing life as cavalryman in George Armstrong Custer's famed Michigan Cavalry Brigade, and later as a POW in Richmond in late 1863 and early 1864.
Editing and narrating "Hell on Belle Isle" is newspaper editor Don Allison, whose two decades of journalistic work have attracted honors from both the UPI and AP wire services. In preparing "Hell on Belle Isle" Allison has drawn on a lifelong interest and study of the Civil War. His ancestors fought on both sides during the conflict.
Belle Isle is not as well known as the infamous Andersonville prison in Georgia, but Belle Isle rivaled Andersonville in terms of the squalid conditions of neglect and starvation endured by its prisoners.
It was actually a fluke that Allison learned Coburn's journal existed. A friend working with him on a history of the 38th Ohio Infantry copied a 38th Ohio reference from a newspaper microfilm, and by chance a brief story about the diary appeared on the photocopy.
As Allison explains,"I was able to obtain a transcription - the original diary was lost in a house fire about 25 years ago - and I knew Coburn's story needed to be told. I was definitely certain I had to do the book after finding Coburn's photograph in a Michigan antique shop, a store I stopped at on an unexplained whim."
Life on Bell Isle was a terrible hardship. Leaky, worn-out tents were provided for the men, but overcrowding often left men with no shelter at all. Rain and cold brought terrible suffering, as did illness, homesickness and an almost continual hunger.
"A little rain and very raw cold day," Coburn wrote in November 1863. "No wood and nothing for supper but the usual two ounces of meat. It does almost seem as if this infernal Confederate government desires the reduction of our numbers and was accomplishing it in this slow and barbarous manner of murdering us. I know they are hard pressed by our armies on all sides and their means cut very close, but they might certainly furnish us with wood to warm us and our rations..."
On Feb. 4, as he neared the end of his ordeal, Coburn wrote that "Hereafter I shall not try to keep a daily record of events as this book is nearly full and I don't know how to keep another. Suffice it to say here that general prospects of our release do not increase except as time passing brings us nearer to an end _ perhaps our own in time."