How it feels to die...
On June 22, 1906, Rev. J. T. Mann gave an interview to a reporter from the Pensacola Journal describing the sensations he felt as he was being hanged 42 years earlier. This interview was made into a booklet that Mann sold as he traveled about telling his story. A copy of the booklet found its way to the Florida Memory Project. I felt his story was interesting enough to excerpt some quotes from it for my blog.
“You ask me to tell you how it feels to be hanged,” said Rev. J. T. Mann. “Well, I suppose if there’s anyone qualified to do so, it is myself, as I spent four minutes of my career at the end of a hangman’s rope near [Pensacola, Florida] during the civil war. It occurred at Fort Barrancas where I was captured as a Confederate spy, and but for the fact that a sergeant ordered me cut down as he thought the wrong man was being executed, I would not now be here telling you of the sensations a man feels dangling at the end of a rope.”
Soon after the Civil War broke out, Mann enlisted in Company C, Bogart Guards, of the Third Louisiana Battalion (CSA). He quickly learned the realities of war. In the Seven Days’ Battle he received a “slight” wound in the hand, then at the Battle of Gaines’ Mill, Mann was shot in the neck. In the Second Battle of Manassas, he was wounded in the right hip and left thigh. After being released from the hospital, Mann became a spy for the Confederacy. Near Fort Barrancas, Florida, he joined a group of union army Vermont Volunteers, posing as a Confederate deserter. He became close friends with a Vermont sergeant and was able to obtain and relay information to General D. H. Maury (CSA) about Federal gunboats in Mobile Bay.
Learning that a ship carrying a Union payroll would be arriving near Fort Pickens, General Maury and Col. Page Baker (CSA) decided to try to capture it. The plan quickly went awry and Mann was captured by the Vermont troops.
“I tried to escape back to the Confederate lines,” Mann said, “but I was captured and taken back to the fort. There was where I had the experience of being hanged. A crowd of infuriated [Union] soldiers surrounded me, and realizing they had captured a Confederate spy, proceeded to hang me without further ado. A rope was slipped around my neck and the other end suspended over a projecting joist of a building one and a half stories high over which they pulled me up by hand until I was about a finger’s length above the earth.
“…When life was nearly extinct the Vermont sergeant interfered, and ordered my body let down, insisting I was the wrong man. Restoratives were applied and by vigorous friction I was resuscitated.”
Mann recounted to a reporter of the Pensacola Journal about how it felt to be hanged. “The first sensation,” he said, “was as near like that of a steam boiler ready to explode as anything I can call to mind. Every vein and blood vessel leading to and from the heart seemed to be charged with an oppressive fullness that must find an avenue to escape or explode. The nervous system throughout its length was tingling with a painful, pricking sensation, the like of which I had never felt before or since.
“Then followed the sense of an explosion, as if a volcano had erupted. This seemed to give me relief, and the sensation of pain gave way to a pleasurable feeling—a feeling to be desired by everyone could it be arrived at without hanging. With this sensation, a light broke in upon my sight, a light of milky whiteness, yet strange to say, so transparent that it was easier to pierce with the eye than the light of day. Then there came into my mouth a taste of sweetness the like of which I have never known. Then I felt as if I was moving on, and leaving something behind, but there was a consciousness which seemed to say goodbye to my body…”
Mann claimed to have had a religious experience in which he heard voices singing hymns.
Being brought back to life, Mann stated, was just as excruciatingly painful as being hanged. He was court-martialed but the Vermont sergeant testified in his behalf and he was acquitted.
After the war, Mann settled in Fitzgerald, Georgia and became a Baptist minister. Later in his life, he traveled the country telling his story. Before visiting a certain city or town, he would enlist newspaper reporters to interview him and write stories that would draw crowds to hear him. He charged a dime for each booklet.
