CXIII
NOW I can answer your question as to what I think has become of George Slade. This very minute I have received a letter from him, dated at Camp Parole, Annapolis. He has just got in from Richmond, where he has been a prisoner at Belle Isle.
I am going to burn just four inches of candle. When not on duty the boys have fine times boating and fishing. As soon as we got off guard today I went a-fishing with two other fellows, and did not get back till the middle of the afternoon. We had a grand time and poor luck. I got only three.
There was a great naval disaster last Saturday. Steve Smiley and three or four other bold mariners have been fitting up a boat that was intended to be the boss of the fleet. Saturday, with a stiff breeze blowing, they set out for a sail. They went down the river in grand style and out into the bay. There was an injudicious combination of a cranky boat, too much sail and too much wind, and the first thing they knew the boat was bottom side up with care and the crew afloat on the fierce rolling tide. A gunboat sent a boat to pick them up, and they returned to camp wiser and wetter men.
We are receiving batches of prisoners every few days now. The Fort Delaware prisoners are being transferred here, a steamer being kept busy all the time. There are said to be about nine thousand there awaiting transfer. Day before yesterday we had an arrival of prisoners taken on Morris Island, S. C.
We are building a stockade across “the neck,” a narrow strip of sand connecting the Point with the mainland. I don’t know whether I wrote you, a short time ago, about five rebels escaping from here. Well, in a squad which was brought in a few days ago who should appear but one of these same fellows, back again! He had made his way to his regiment, got into a skirmish immediately on his arrival, and was again taken prisoner and returned to his old quarters.
Some of our officers are a good deal exercised just now with fears for their positions. Under the new regulations a regiment must have a certain number of men to entitle it to a colonel, and a company more than sixty men to entitle it to a second lieutenant. And the fact that our regiment, with its reduced rolls, is not entitled to anything higher than a major in command, and no company has men enough to give it a second lieutenant, has impressed our officers with a settled conviction that the regiment should be filled up with conscripts. Our second lieutenants have nearly all been made since the first of July, when the order went into effect. But one of them told me, yesterday, that Governor Gilmore had got ahead of the Government by dating their commissions back beyond the first of July. But for all that, some of them who have not yet been mustered are fearful they never will be. It is a solemn fact that we now have more officers, commissioned and non-commissioned, than we have privates doing duty in this regiment.
Last night I was on patrol duty in the prison camp—really a sort of policeman to see that order was maintained, and especially that there were no unusual gatherings which might develope into an attempt to rush the camp guard. The only assemblage permitted was a religious meeting in an open space in camp—a regular old fashioned prayer meeting, the character of which was accepted as a guaranty against treachery. Marston thinks some of the prisoners are plotting an outbreak, which is not at all improbable, as in such a gathering there are sure to be more or less enterprising hot-heads. One of these insisted on passing a sentry’s beat the other night, in spite of all commands to halt. When he did halt he had a wooden “tompion” in his leg, the sentry having forgotten to remove it from the muzzle of his gun.
I have a good mattress, made by filling my bunk with hay, then pulling my old shelter tent over it and nailing down at the sides.