At three o'clock, Sunday morning, October 2d, we were roused by the entry of armed men with lanterns. They furnished each of us with a dirty haversack containing what they called two days' rations of corn bread and meat. Then they moved us single-file down stairs. As we passed, they took from each his blanket, even those the officers had just bought and paid for. If we expostulated, we were told we were going to a place where we should not need blankets! For my freemasonry or some other unexpressed reason, they allowed me to pass, wearing my overcoat. Then they took us by bridge across the James River, packed us in box-cars on the railway, forty to sixty in each car, and started the train southwest towards Danville.
The road-bed was bad and the fences on either side were gone. We made but four or five miles an hour. One of our officers declared that they kept a boy running ahead of the engine with hammer and nails to repair the track! also that they put the cow-catcher on behind the last car to prevent cattle from running over the train! At nine o'clock in the evening we reached a place called Clover. We passed the night in Clover! on the bank beside the railroad, where we studied astronomy! and meditated!
Next morning they repacked us, and we were transported seventy miles farther to Danville. My memorandum book mentions a conversation I had on the way with a very young and handsome rebel, one of the guard. He was evidently ingenuous and sincere, pious and lovable. After a few pleasant remarks he suddenly asked:
"What are you Northerners fighting for?"
"In defense of the Constitution and the Union. What are you fighting for?"
"Every right that is sacred and dear to man."
"What right that is sacred and dear to man had the United States ever violated before you fired on Fort Sumter?"
Of course he fell back on the Declaration of American Independence, that "Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed"; also on the doctrine so emphatically expressed by Abraham Lincoln in his speech in Congress in 1846; viz.:
Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to raise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize and make their own of as much territory as they inhabit.
We arrived at Danville at noon. A heavy rain began to fall. Having been two days without opportunity to wash, we were drenched for an hour or two by the sweet shower that seemed to pour from the open windows of heaven. When our thoughtful guards concluded that we were sufficiently cleansed and bleached, they sheltered us by putting us into coal cars, where the black dust was an inch deep. That dust was fine! but the thought seemed to strike them that our nicely laundered garments might get soiled. So in half an hour they took us out and placed us in corn cars. It rather went against the grain, but finally I sat down with the other kernels on the floor. The weather being inclement, they felt it their duty to keep us in doors, lest we should catch cold!