Most respectfully,

Your ob't serv't,

J. E. JOHNSTON.

MAJOR-GENERAL Cox,
U. S. Army."

General Schofield and myself passed the night at the house of ex-Governor Morehead, who had urged us to do so. Our host had been one of the leading Whigs of North Carolina in the ante-bellum days, and with his friends and neighbors Gilmer and Graham had opposed secession at the beginning; but with the instinct of politicians, they had striven to lead the current they could not stop when once it had carried them away. The house was a comfortable villa in the Italian style, with a tower overlooking the rolling country for a long distance. The architecture was simple but effective, and the house had evidently been a home of comfort and ease in better times. We were frankly and cordially welcomed, and allowed to see the mixed feelings with which the reassembled family accepted the collapse of the Confederacy. Among the young people was a son of the governor who had been desperately wounded but had recovered. The rebellion had had their devoted support, but they said, "That is all past now," and seemed eagerly desirous to get into accord with the new order of things. The young man told of his army adventures, and compared notes with us as to camp life in the different armies. We were struck with the strong comparison he made in speaking of his wound. A bullet had entered his mouth and passed out at the back of his neck, and he said it felt, for all the world, as if a city lamppost with its cross-bar had been dragged through his head. I have no doubt this gave as good an idea of the sensation as possible, for I have often heard wounded men speak of the feeling of having received a terrible blow from some big and heavy thing, when hit with a musket-ball. The ladies entertained us with half-gay, half-pathetic stories of the way home-life had run on during the long campaigns, and of the ingenuity they were obliged to use to supply the place of tasteful articles of dress or adornment when the blockade had become stringent, and when each little community was thrown almost wholly upon its own resources. The head of the house discoursed more gravely of the situation of the country at large, and tried to forecast the future. Now that the surrender was made, he was anxious that the army should be disbanded and sent home as soon as possible, for the disposition of the Confederate soldiers to pay their arrears by pillage made him fear that his own farm would be stripped bare before they got away. There is no doubt that there was a good deal of cause for such anxiety, especially for leading men whom the private soldiers were disposed to hold largely responsible for all their woes. It was no slight test of character and good breeding, under such anxieties, for the family to pay delicate and courteous attention to the comfort of their guests, and to keep as far as possible in the background everything that might betray their own troubled feelings.

On Wednesday (3d May) General Schofield returned to Raleigh, leaving me in responsible command of the district. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xlvii. pt. iii. pp. 394, 407.] By administering the parole to the troops by companies and regiments, keeping a number of officers at work and using abundant clerical assistance in verifying the copies of rolls, the task had been completed in a couple of days, and General Johnston began to move his men southward. General Cheatham with the Tennessee troops marched across the Great Smoky Mountains, but the others were ordered to rendezvous at West Point in Georgia, which was a central place for all who lived in the Gulf States, from which they could most readily reach their homes. While they remained together they were fed by us, and we furnished rations sufficient to sustain them on the journey. Our ration, too, was quite a different thing from theirs, and the men seemed more affected by this bestowal of unwonted and abundant supplies than by any other incident in the surrender. They said it seemed hardly possible that men who were but yesterday arrayed in deadly hostility to them, could now be supplying their wants so liberally.

Whilst they stayed they seemed never to tire of watching our men on duty and on the various parades. Our guard-mounting was particularly a show affair. From the moment the music struck up on the parade ground, and the detachments for the guard from the different companies began to file out and march into place, there was always a large concourse of the men in gray making a most interested body of spectators. The smart appearance of the men, the rapid inspection of arms, of haversacks and knapsacks, the march in review, the assignment to posts, the final marching off the field, all seemed to give them great enjoyment. They said they had not paid much attention to the formalities which so greatly relieve the drag and labor of military life even in the field, and they were ready with cordial and appreciative praise of the discipline and finish in drill which they saw.

As the Confederate troops left Greensborough, I concentrated my own corps there, [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xlvii. pt. iii. pp. 376, 384, 396, 502.] sending one of the infantry divisions to Salisbury, and Kilpatrick's cavalry division to posts still farther toward the southwest. A visit of inspection which I made to Salisbury gave me the opportunity of examining the site of the recent prison camp there. The treatment of our prisoners by the Confederate authorities is a repellent subject, and I would gladly pass it by and say nothing discordant with the tone of high honor and respectful good-will which marked the conduct of the leading officers of the Confederate forces in the field. We may fairly admit that the resources of the Confederacy had been so taxed that food and clothing were hard to procure, and that their armies in the field were ill-fed and in rags. There is, however, a limit beyond which a government calling itself civilized may not go, and as the public opinion of the world, crystallized into what we call international law, will not permit the wholesale decapitation of prisoners, as might be done by a king of Ashantee or Dahomey, so it forbids the herding of captive men in a mere corral, leaving them utterly without shelter of any sort through the sleet and rain of winter, near the North Carolina mountains. It forbids starving them to death or leaving them to rot with scurvy because they are not supplied with wholesome food and medicines. It is the plain duty of a civilized government to parole and send home military prisoners who cannot be fed or sheltered. If controversies as to exchange existed, such conduct would have been the surest way to shame us out of any position that was wrong, and the public opinion of the world would have been powerful in making it the more profitable way, as it was the only one not utterly barbarous. I speak with a solemn sense of the obligation to avoid every railing accusation when I say that it would have been humane and civilized in the comparison, if the prisoners at Andersonville and Salisbury had been shot down by fusillades or quickly poisoned by wholesale (as Napoleon was accused of doing at Jaffa) instead of subjecting them to death by starvation and exposure which swept them away at a rate no plague ever rivalled or approached. I have seen too much of the Southern people, in arms in the field and in their homes, to believe for one moment that they would knowingly approve the treatment our prisoners received. But their own reputation before the world makes it their duty to fix the responsibility for a great crime upon those whose commands or whose criminal negligence caused horrors which are among the most odious things in the world's history.

I had seen at Wilmington and Goldsborough the condition of train-loads of these released captives. Their situation has been surgically and medically recorded in the surgeon-general's official reports. There is no room for dispute. They were men reduced to idiocy and to the verge of the grave by the direct effects of hunger and exposure and the diseases necessarily connected with such suffering. They were not of the dregs of humanity, who might be said to fall into animality when the restraints of society and of discipline were removed. They were many of them men who had respected positions and refined surroundings at home. These were the victims who looked vacantly with glazed eyes and could mumble no intelligent response when asked their names, where was their home, what was the name of the mother that bore them.

At Salisbury the pen in which part of the prisoners had been kept was still to be seen. There were, as I remember it, two levels or "benches" in it, and in the little bluff or slope from one to the other were still to be seen the holes the poor prisoners had dug to make a little cave in the earth that would drain itself and give some shelter from the winter weather. I talked to women of the place who with tears upon their faces told of the efforts some of them had made to have the worst of the treatment corrected, or to procure some mitigation of the want and hardship. The evidence seemed conclusive that any marks of common sympathy or Christian pity were repelled by the officials in charge of the prisoners and treated as indications of disloyalty to the Confederate government.