Journey of the Captives

Thursday, November 14, 1861

General Jonathan Winder returned to Ligon Factory for the seven Union officers selected as hostages on November 10. Colonel W.R. Lee, Major Paul Revere, and five other men shook hands with their fellow prisoners in silence and then departed with guards for their new quarters at Henrico County Jail. The jail was a small building that contained only four prisoner chambers, and all seven hostages were confined in one dingy cell that measured seventeen by eleven feet. Two small, barred windows provided scant lighting, which was extremely dim during the late autumn and winter. The jail also served as a detention and discipline center for slaves, and, to the great horror of the seven hostages, conducted weekly whippings for punishment.¹

References:
¹George A. Bruce, The Twentieth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry 1861 - 1865 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Riverside Press, 1906), 66-67; Richard F. Miller, Harvard's Civil War: A History of the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (Lebanon, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 2005), 92-94.