From this sad scene, walking to the Soldier's Home, my attention was arrested on seeing a white man with a ball and chain attached to his ankle, with brick and his ball in the wheelbarrow, wheeling toward the soldier's camp, guarded by a black soldier. As I stood looking at the black soldier walking leisurely beside the white man in irons, an officer accosted me with, "Madam, that prisoner you see wheeling brick to our camp is a strong secessionist, and was a hard master over a large plantation with more than one hundred slaves, and he was taken prisoner, and all his slaves came into our camp. The younger men enlisted as soldiers, and that man made an attempt to escape and we put him in irons and set a black soldier, who had been his own slave, to guard him."
"What a turning of tables!" I said.
"Yes, you will find the same turning of tables within our lines all over the South."
At the door of a tent I saw a large, square block of iron, weighing sixty or eighty pounds, to which was attached a ring. I inquired of a colored man what it was for.
"That belonged to our plantation, and when master had a mind to punish us he ordered us locked to that block, and from one to a dozen of us sometimes were locked to it with a long chain; and when we hoed corn we'd hoe the chain's length, then the one next the block had it to tote the length of the chain, and so on till we did our day's work. Since we've been here we've seen nine of our masters chained to that same block and made to shovel sand on that fortification yonder. There were forty of us that belonged to our plantation standing in this yard looking on."
"How did you feel to witness such a scene?"
"O, I can't tell you, madam; but I cried like a baby."
"Why did you cry?"
"O, to think what great things God is doing. Man could never, never do it."
"Did the others feel as you did?"