On the 3d of July, as we were bivouacked in a little wood, news came that the whole Rebel army in Vicksburg had prepared to surrender the next day, the Nation's jubilee day. Instantly the regiment was ordered to fall in. I had no little pride in reading to the men the dispatch from General Grant announcing the great news. It was the first order I had ever read to the regiment as its adjutant, and its great importance gratified me much. The whole command acted as if they were drunken or had suddenly lost their minds. Privates and officers shook hands and laughed and wept, while majors and colonels turned somersaults on the grass. It was indeed a great moment to us all. Twenty-seven thousand men, with twenty-four generals and one hundred and eighty cannon, was a great capture. We all knew we had made history on that day.
Now the whole Rebel army passed out along the roads where we lay. I sat on a rail fence near our bivouac and watched the host go by. The officers all looked depressed, but the soldiers seemed glad the suspense and danger were over and that now they could have enough to eat. Our regiment freely divided with them all we had.
"After a few days pursuit of Johnston's army at our rear (now suddenly our front), my regiment is ordered into Vicksburg. We pass in over the breastworks that had been so terrible to us a few days before. Looking at them, I wonder at our hardihood in assaulting them. It would be hard to climb through these ditches and into these forts even were no cannon and no deadly muskets behind them.
"My regiment is put on duty as a city guard. It now seems strange enough to be guarding the very town and the very forts we had so recently been assaulting. There are other troops here, but the Fifth Iowa is the guard proper. We find the town badly battered up, with terrible signs of war everywhere. There, too, were the graves of the dead and brave defenders. If wrong, they still had been brave men." Years afterward, a shaft was put up to their memory, and on it I read these words:
"We care not whence they came,
Dear in their lifeless clay,
Whether unknown, or known to fame,
Their cause and country's still the same,
They died, and they wore the gray."
The weather continued hot while we were there guarding the town, and the place was very sickly; many citizens and very many colored soldiers died. It was pitiable to see how little people cared, even our own soldiers, whether these poor negro soldiers died or lived. Our own regiment suffered little, yet on July 28 seventy were in the hospital. We camped at Randolph and Locust streets, and spite of the mercury's being 100 degrees in the shade, had pleasant soldier times. I mounted the guard every morning and then spent most of the day reading to the colonel, who was sick.
In September I secured a leave of absence to go North. For the only time during the four years' war I visited my home. I was there but eight days, half of my time having been lost by the steamer I was on sticking on sandbars.
I saw strange sights in the North in those few days—women and children and old men reaping the fields; home guards training at every village; cripples and hospitals everywhere. Yet in spite of war prosperity was blessing the North.