Longstreet’s Corps Was on the Way to Chickamauga.
The same fall I was at High Point, N. C., and saw Longstreet’s Corps pass. The trains all stopped there and I mingled and talked much with them. I never saw soldiers in higher spirits. As they had come through Raleigh, they had destroyed the late ex-Governor W. W. Holden’s Raleigh Standard printing press. They exhibited papers fastened to sticks like flags, with handfuls of type. Holden had been advocating peace and they considered him a traitor to the South. They said those western Yankees had been having things their own way out there, but Lee’s men were going to give them something that they would not forget soon. “We will put them in a trot like we have been chasing them out of Virginia.” They were traveling on freight and flat-cars, with as many on top of freight boxes as inside.
About a week after that we were at High Point again, conveying some arrested conscripts to Raleigh, when train load after train load of Federal prisoners passed going from Chickamauga to Richmond. The trains stopped and we talked with those western prisoners and found them very sassy and determined about the Union. One big, red-whiskered fellow said to me: “What you fellers doing back here so far in the rear?” We replied: “We have plenty of men at the front to attend to you fellows. We are just resting and having a good time.” He replied, “Yes, d—n you; I guess you are back here hunting for conscripts and trying to force good Union men into your d—d army.” His train pulled out and we let him go at that, but thinking from the grit he displayed that he must be a Tennessean or Kentuckian.