We started off on
our railroad destroying this morning at 7 o'clock. Our corps destroyed about
ten miles of road, from Millen down to Station No. 70, where we went into camp
for the night. The Fourteenth and Twentieth Corps are off on our left,
destroying the railroad from Millen toward Augusta. At Millen there was located
one of those hell-holes, a rebel prison, where the rebels kept about thirteen
hundred of our men as prisoners. They rushed them off on the train for
Charleston, South Carolina, just before our army arrived. I never saw a
feed-yard looking so filthy and forsaken as this pen.1 We
burned everything here that a match would ignite.
_______________
1 The treatment which our soldiers received
in the Confederate prisons is the one dark, damnable stain that the South of
that time will always have to carry. The North can forgive, but it cannot
forget. — A. G. D.
Source: Alexander
G. Downing, Edited by Olynthus B., Clark, Downing’s Civil War Diary,
p. 234
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