|
In September, 1862, he enlisted as a private in the Seventy-eighth Regiment
Illinois Volunteers, which belonged to the Second Brigade, Second Division, Fourteenth
Army Corps, commanded by Major-General Jeff. C. Davis, of Indiana. The first general
engagement in which the regiment participated was the battle of Chickamauga, at which
he was taken prisoner on September 21, 1863. He was sent directly from the field to
Richmond, Virginia, where he was first confined in a prison called Scott Block, then
transferred to the Pemberton, and thence to Libby prison, where he remained till
January 1, 1864. These prisons had formerly been occupied as tobacco warehouses, but
they were comfortable quarters in comparison to Belle Isle, where he was next sent.
Here there was no shelter of any kind, only the clouds above and frozen sand beneath; it
being in the midst of the winter season, there was intense suffering among the prisoners.
On March 15, 1864, he was started for Andersonville, Georgia, where he arrived on
March 25, being ten days on the railroad. The stockade at this place comprised
seventeen acres of ground, and contained sixteen hundred prisoners when he arrived
there, which number was increased to thirty-two hundred on April 1, 1864. The increase
in the number of prisoners was so rapid that the capacity of the stockade was enlarged so
that it comprised twenty-seven acres, and on June 1, 1864, contained thirty-six thousand
prisoners. It is needless to dwell upon the privations and sufferings at Andersonville. He
was confined there until September 10, 1864, when the place was abandoned, part of the
prisoners being sent to Savannah, Georgia, and the remainder to Florence, South
Carolina. He was among those who were sent to Savannah, Georgia, where they were
kept in an open field surrounded by a guard. Here, he says, they were treated very
kindly, many people coming to see them, some out of mere curiosity, while others
brought acceptable baskets of provisions, the first token of kindness received since being
a prisoner.
He remained here only one month, when he was sent to Millin, Georgia, where
he was confined in a stockade similar to the one at Andersonville, remaining there until
an exchange was effected on November 10, 1864; he had thus been a prisoner for almost
fourteen months, and been an inmate of all the principal Southern prisons. He then went
home on a furlough, remaining until March 10, 1865, when he rejoined his regiment at
Goldsborough, North Carolina, which he found sadly decimated, as most of the battles in
which it participated occurred during his long term of imprisonment. He was
mustered out of the Service at the close of the war, on June 25, 1865. He returned immediately to
his former home at Macomb, Illinois, where he has continued to reside up to the present
time, being engaged in farming and brickmaking, in which pursuits he has been very
successful.
His religious preferences are Presbyterian. In politics, he is a Democrat.
He was married March 16,
1881, to Miss May A. Smith, of Macomb, Illinois. They
have no children.
Source: "Memorialia
of the Class of '64 in Dartmouth College" complied by
John C. Webster, Shepard & Johnston, Printers, 1884,
Chicago
|
