On Tuesday evening we started for Jackson, Mississippi, in company with forty other Union prisoners. They were mainly from Ohio regiments, young in years, but veteran soldiers—farmers' sons, with intelligent, earnest faces. Pemberton's army was in motion. Our train passed slowly through his camps, and halted half an hour at several points, among crowds of Rebel privates.
The Ohio boys and their guards were on the best possible terms, drinking whisky and playing euchre together. The former indulged in a good deal of verbal skirmishing with the soldiers outside, thrusting their heads from the car windows and shouting:—
"Look out, Rebs! The Yankees are coming! Keep on marching, if you don't want old Grant to catch you!"
"How are times in the North?" the Confederates replied. "Cotton a dollar and twenty-five cents a pound in New York!"
"How are times in the South? Flour one hundred and seventy-five dollars a barrel in Vicksburg, and none to be had at that!"
After waiting vainly for an answer to this quenching retort, the Buckeyes sang "Yankee Doodle," the "Star-Spangled Banner," and "John Brown's Body lies a-moldering in the Ground," for the edification of their bewildered foes.
Arrival in Jackson, Mississippi.
Before dark, we reached Jackson. Though a prisoner, I entered it with far more pleasurable feelings than at my last visit; for my tongue was now free, and I was not sailing under false colors. The dreary little city was in a great panic. Before we had been five minutes in the street, a precocious young newsboy came running among us, and, while shouting—"Here's The Mississippian extra!" talked to us incessantly in a low tone:—
"How are you, Yanks? You have come in a capital time. Greatest panic you ever saw. Everybody flying out of town. Governor Pettus issued a proclamation, telling the people to stand firm, and then ran away himself before the ink was dry."
Kindness from Southern Editors.