When the news of Gen. Lee’s surrender was received, our brigade was
at Raleigh, N. C. President Davis and his Cabinet officers joined us
at Greensboro, N. C., and our command escorted them from there to
Washington, Ga., where it disbanded. I rode to Augusta, Ga., with
Lieut. William Messick, who was from Danville, Ky., and there I
surrendered to the 18th Indiana Infantry Regiment, then occupying the
city, and received my parole May 9, 1865.
Before we were disbanded at Washington, Ga., the remnants of the funds
of the Confederate States, in specie, that had been hauled by wagons
through from Richmond, was distributed among the troops at that time. I
remember the men of our brigade got $26.00 a piece. Most of it was in
Mexican dollars, silver money. I brought it home with me. Fortunately,
I had enough to get home on without using that money, and, after
our marriage, my wife and I thought it would be a good idea to have
that silver made into spoons. We took it down to Duhme & Company, at
Cincinnati, and enjoined upon them to use that silver, and no other, in
a set of tablespoons, and those spoons are on our table today.
No man can fully or correctly appreciate the value of personal liberty
who has never been a prisoner. At least three-fourths of Morgan’s men
felt what it was to endure the fearful life of a Northern military
prison, and many of them were humiliated by incarceration in the
loathsome dungeons and cells of penitentiaries while prisoners of war.
Fortunately for me, I escaped from Camp Douglas in time to avoid the
starvation policy subsequently inaugurated there, which was said to
have been enforced by way of retaliation for the treatment Federal
prisoners received at Andersonville, Ga. The difference between the
two was that at Andersonville the Confederates did not have the food
to give the prisoners, while in the North, the Federal authorities
had plenty, and refused to supply it to Confederate prisoners in
sufficient quantities. Of the seven members of our mess Clay and I left
in Camp Douglas, three died there, one took the oath, and the other
three, after twenty-one months of horrid prison life, were exchanged
a few weeks before the close of the war. Only one of these three is
now alive. He is living in Montgomery County, near Mount Sterling. Of
the three who died there, one was James Richard Allen, who, in the
presidential campaign of 1860 by the “Hoosier Boys” referred to, was
the representative of Douglas; and afterward, in 1862, came South,
and joined the Confederate Army as I had done. He had been captured
somewhere in Virginia, as I now recall.