“I have also to state that I am informed by Brigadier-General Scurry, who was in that portion of the battle, that the white flag displayed from Kuhn’s Wharf was respected the moment it was seen.”
With the exception of Private Hersey, left to help take care of baggage, wounded men taken to hospital, Surgeon Cummings, left to attend them, and naval officers to attend the funeral of Wainwright and Lea, all of the prisoners marched to Virginia Point in the afternoon, where they were obliged to wait until half-past one o’clock A.M. next day, January 2d, for cars to transport them to Houston.
On arrival at that city, about noon, the depot was reported to be crowded with people, and the train was stopped half a mile out. The men then marched, under guard, through Houston to their quarters in a cotton warehouse near Buffalo Bayou. The officers were confined in Kennedy’s building, corner of Travis and Congress Streets.
On the march through crowded streets, many bantering remarks were made, mostly by women, who were exceedingly bitter and sarcastic. The men had been cautioned by their colonel not to pay any attention to insults, which they must expect to receive, but carry themselves as if on parade. They did march through the City of Houston as if on parade, giving the people a sight of good marching, military bearing and good manners such as they had not seen before.
In passing the Houston Telegraph newspaper office, where from the windows was displayed the captured regimental colors underneath the Texas Lone Star Flag, the men got mad, some of them threatening to “go for them.” Cool counsel prevailed, and no trouble occurred.
The Houston Telegraph, in giving an account of the arrival of the prisoners, said they were acknowledged Americans, with an occasional foreigner to be seen among them, either Irish or Dutch. Gave them credit for being well dressed and good looking. Spoke of Colonel Burrell as a tall, slim specimen of a man, who was much stared at by the people, but he never lifted his eyes from the ground during the march. As the prisoners of war marched up Main Street they were well treated, and received from the Houstonites the compliment of being a fine-looking body of men, who ought to be ashamed of themselves for volunteering their services in the villainy of trying to subjugate a chivalrous people.
At the hospitals in Galveston Surgeon Cummings remained until the eighteenth of January, attending Federal wounded, also assisting the Confederate surgeons. Sisters of Mercy, attached to the Convent of St. Leon, rendered service to the wounded of both sides impartially. On the tenth, while a gunboat was shelling the city from the Gulf side, some shells exploded in the convent yard, necessitating removal of patients to a small, wooden school-house, when a hospital flag was raised, which stopped further mischief.
Commander Wainwright and Lieutenant Lea, of the Harriet Lane, were buried with Masonic and military honors on the second. Major Lea, C. S. A., father of the lieutenant, officiated at the grave, reading the Episcopal Church burial service in a firm, unfaltering voice to the end, when he gave way to his feelings and wept like a child. The rest of the killed were buried on the third.
Surgeon Cummings, on the twentieth of January, found time to make the following official report of the killed and wounded: