unteer again, and
sooner than be conscripted I'll take to the woods."

"Now, sergeant, you know you wouldn't do any such thing," said the
captain.

"Yes, I would," Dick insisted. "There is a principle at the bottom of
this whole thing that is most contemptible; but what more could you
expect of men who induced us to enlist by holding out the promise of an
easy victory? 'The North won't fight!' This looks like it. We're whipped
already."

These were the sentiments of thousands of men who wore gray jackets in
the beginning of 1862, but it wasn't every one who dared express them as
boldly as Dick Graham did, nor was it every officer who would have
listened as quietly as did Captain Jones. Everything went to show that
the officers had been drilled in the parts they were expected to perform
long before the men dreamed that such a thing as a Conscription Act was
thought of; for, as a rule, all discussion regarding the policy of the
Richmond government was "choked off" with a strong hand. In some armies,
Bragg's especially, the men were treated "worse than their niggers ever
were." They dared not speak above a whisper for fear of being shoved
into the guard-house; and "when some regiments hesitated to avail
themselves of this permission (to volunteer) they were treated as
seditious, and the most refractory soldiers, on the point of being shot,
only saved their lives by the prompt signature of their comrades to the
compact of a new enlistment." Things were not quite as bad as this in
Price's army, but still Captain Jones thought it best to tell his men,
especially the out-spoken Dick Graham, that they had better be a little
more guarded in their language, unless they were well acquainted with
those to whom they were talking. They went to Memphis, as the captain
said they would, marching over a horrible road and leaving some of their
artillery stuck in the mud at Desarc on White River, and from Memphis
they went to Corinth forty miles farther on, packed in box cars like
sheep, and on top like so much useless rubbish. Their train was rushed
through at such a rate of speed that the men on top shouted to the
engineer:

"Go it. Let out two or three more sections of that throttle. Run us off
into the ditch and kill us if you want to. There are plenty more men
where we came from."

Rodney Gray afterward declared that he had never seen a grander sight
than Beauregard's camp presented when the troops from the West marched
through