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oldier say to another, pointing to me, "I wish I had the whiskey in me that he has." If I only could have had a little at that time, I think it would have been good for me.
We were taken to the rear of the enemy's line to a field just outside of Petersburg, where we were placed under a Confederate guard, and remained there all that afternoon and all night. It was about two o'clock in the afternoon when we surrendered. A mounted officer rode up during the afternoon to take a view of us, who I was told was General Lee. If it was, it was the only time I ever saw that famous officer.
As I have said, I was completely prostrated, and lay upon the ground, with no desire and scarcely the strength to get up. A fellow-officer brought me some water, which I drank, and bathed my head and forehead and breast, in order to restore me, if possible, from the fainting condition I was in. As the sun went down and the night came on, it became cooler, and I began to revive and feel renewed vigor. The Confederates gave us nothing to eat. An apple was given me by some one, and that was the only food I had that day. The next day was Sunday. In the morning the Confederates took the officers and the negroes who had been captured in battle and arranged us in an order like this: four officers, four negroes, four officers, four negroes, and so on, until all the officers and negroes were formed into a line of that character. Then they marched us all over the town of Petersburg, through the streets, to show us up to the inhabitants. The idea they had in view, I suppose, was to humiliate the officers. We passed one house, in the doorway of which stood a white woman, with a colored woman on either side of her, and as we passed I heard her say, "That is the way to treat the Yankees; mix them up with the niggers, they are so fond of them, mix them up." I thought to myself that she was very much in the same position that we were. Another woman whom we passed, called out, saying that if she had her way she would put all those Yanks in front of a battery and mow them all down.
A man said to me as we marched along, "They are going to take you down to Andersonville. They are dying down there three or four hundred a day; you will never live to see home again." I thought to myself that his welcome was not, to say the least, hospitable. The guard who was marching along by my side said to me that he did not believe in insulting a prisoner; that he had made up his mind never to insult a prisoner, because he had the feeling that he might some time be in the same position.
We were taken to an island in the river Appomattox, the officers at last being separated from the colored men. About eight o'clock Sunday evening eight hard crackers and a small piece of uncooked bacon were given to each of us. I had had no food except the apple that I spoke of, since the Friday night previous in camp; I went from Friday night to Sunday night without anything to eat. I ate part of the crackers and the bacon, thinking that I would make them go as far as possible, not knowing when I might receive any more. It was dark when they gave us the crackers and the bacon, and in the morning I discovered that the bacon was alive with maggots and that I had been eating it. I scraped off the maggots, and ate the rest of it.
On Monday morning they put us aboard box freight-cars. There were no seats in the cars, and we were packed in like so many cattle, and started on our journey to Danville, Virginia. Arriving there, we were imprisoned in a tobacco warehouse, where we remained two or three days. This warehouse the Confederate government had improvised as a place in which to incarcerate prisoners of war, and a very large number of men were confined here. We saw some most revolting sights, men reduced to skeletons and so weak that they could scarcely crawl about. Here we were given boiled bacon and hard crackers for our food.
The enlisted men remained here, but the commissioned officers were taken on board freight cars again, and carried in the same way as before to Columbia, South Carolina. It was a very tedious and trying journey. It was insufferably hot, and very little food was supplied us. We arrived at Columbia after dark in the evening, and marched directly to the county jail, situated in the city of Columbia.
We were placed in rooms in the jail. The one in which I was had nothing in the way of furniture in it. We simply lay down upon the floor just as we had come from the freight cars. The next day we were distributed around in the rooms on the floor above that on which we were first placed.
The jail stood on one of the principal streets of the city, close to the sidewalk and adjacent to what I took to be the city hall. In the rear of the jail was a yard, surrounded by a high fence and containing out-houses. It was a small yard. In it was a small brick building containing a cook-stove. A pipe from a spring led into the yard, with a faucet from which we drew water, which was of very excellent quality.
The room in which I was placed I should think was in the neighborhood of twenty feet square. There were, as I remember, seventeen of us in that room. There were seven similar rooms, four on one side and three on the other side of a hall running the length of the building. The side of the room towards the outer wall consisted of an iron grating. Between that grating and the outer wall was an alley-way perhaps three feet in width. There were windows in this outer wall, which were also covered with gratings. The room contained nothing whatever in the way of chairs or beds or anything for our comfort. It was absolutely empty of everything, except lice and bedbugs, until we entered it. All along on the angle made by the walls and ceiling were rows of bedbugs, and at night they came down upon us.
Having been divided in these rooms, we organized ourselves into messes, there being a mess in each room. Each mess detailed men from its number to do the cooking. We appointed the highest officer of our number in the prison, Colonel Marshall, as provost marshal. He appointed a lieutenant as adjutant, who kept a roster and detailed two men every day in each of the rooms to do police duty. Their duty was to sweep the floor, and to scrub it when necessity required. No broom was supplied us. We therefore had to purchase one. The men in the room in which I was, clubbed together and bought a broom, of very inferior quality, for which we paid five dollars in Confederate money. There was a tub belonging to the room, very roughly made, in which we brought up water from the yard below whenever we found it necessary to wash the floor. We would dash the water over the floor, and then scrub it with the broom.
We were allowed out in the prison yard each day, at daylight in the morning for an hour, and again in the afternoon for an hour. During the morning hour we all gathered around the one faucet in the yard, to perform our morning ablutions. There were some one hundred and twenty of us, as I remember, and of course we could not all engage in this process at the same time.
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