en 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 re