When the steamer N. P. Banks was loaded at Lakeport with supplies for Pensacola, and ready to sail on the twenty-first, Captain A. N. Shipley, A. Q. M. in New Orleans, called for a detail. Sergeant Ballou, Corporal Fales and twelve privates from Company B composed the detail, with rations for one week. The instructions Ballou received from Shipley were, to go aboard the Banks as a guard, watch the captain, a southerner, and see that he stopped at all forts on the lake to leave provisions and various stores, then to proceed to Fort Pickens, and Pensacola. If the steamboat captain showed any disposition to do otherwise, then he was to arrest all of the officers and run the steamer into the blockading fleet off Mobile and report. The transport vessel that made a similar trip, a short time previous, had been run through the blockaders into Mobile by her officers, and the cargo passed into Confederate hands. The round trip was made in five days, without any event of importance.
These duties of detailed men, with constant activity at the lake posts to prevent smuggling across to the enemy, gave many men a taste of active duty that was fatiguing, if it was without glory.
It was hard work to get rolls, returns and statements, required by army regulations, made correctly and promptly by company officers of the regiment. A few officers appeared to think these documents were unnecessary, a species of red tape to be fought down. Still it was said they averaged as good as any organization in the Gulf Department, if not better. In the army, among those who knew nothing about it, a great deal of talk was constantly made about red tape. Among business men the wonder was, that the vast machinery of an army could be successfully kept going with such simple returns. There was nothing about them a school-boy of ordinary ability could fail to understand in a short time of study. To understand the nature and use of these documents was as much the duty of an officer as to know how to drill his men. His duty to the men demanded it. Without them payments could not be made, either bounties or wages, rations provided, clothing held in readiness for issue, pensions granted for disability or to the proper relatives of deceased soldiers. Many a large corporation or business house, in their method of conducting business, requires a system much more complicated than the Government has in use for administration of the army. When delays and trouble occurred in the rolls, returns, etc., it was usually traced to the inability of some officer to understand them.
The company returns required were: morning reports, company muster rolls, company muster and pay rolls, company monthly return, returns of men joined company, descriptive lists, quarterly company returns deceased soldiers, muster-in rolls, muster-out rolls, enlistments, re-enlistments, furloughs, discharges, final statements, rolls of prisoners of war, ordnance returns.
All very simple to fill up properly; each return so printed that there was no excuse for not understanding how it was to be done.
The regimental returns required were: consolidated morning reports, field and staff muster rolls, field and staff muster and pay rolls, muster rolls of hospital, muster and pay rolls of hospital, regimental monthly returns, lists of officers, alterations in officers, quarterly regimental returns of deceased soldiers, annual return of casualties.
Careful supervision at regimental headquarters was necessary of company pay rolls, in order to have them correct before forwarding to proper officers.
The regimental books were lost at Galveston; it became necessary to make out a new descriptive book, and could only be done by obtaining the company descriptive books to copy. Captain Bailey, Company H, had peculiar ideas of his own in regard to making proper company returns to regimental headquarters, and when he refused to obey an order from Lieutenant-Colonel Stedman, to forward his company book, it was proper to discipline him.
On the thirteenth a regimental order to Captain Leonard, Company C, in command of Companies C and H, contained the following: “You will also forward to these headquarters the descriptive books of both companies C and H of the regiment, for copying in the regimental records.” What followed is explained in a letter written to the brigade-commander next day:—