Captain Charles Wright Wills: July 17, 1864

June 17, 1864.

After erecting some good works at Roswell (the best we have yet built), capable of holding at least 25,000 men, we were provided with three days’ rations and cartridges “ad libitum,” for another of what an Augusta paper calls “Sherman leap-frog-like advance.” Our corps is the extreme left of the army. We moved out this morning, our brigade in advance of our division, and Osterhaus and Smith's Divisions following on the Decatur road. Did I tell you in my last among the “locals,” that these Roswell factories have been turning out 35,000 yards per day of jeans, etc., for the Confederate Army, that there is the greatest abundance of blackberries and whortleberries here, that one of the 48th Illinois was drowned in the Chattahoochie while bathing, and that of several hundred factory girls I have seen, hardly one who is passably handsome? Some fine fat ones, and a few neat feet, but they are not “clipper built,” and lack “get up” and “figure heads.”

We moved six miles without meeting a Rebel, and then only a squadron of cavalry that lacked a devilish sight of being “chivalry,” for they more than ran without just cause. We only went two miles farther and then bivouacked. Our brigade was thrown half a mile in front and across the road. We put up a rail barricade across the road and a temporary rail-work along our front, and then abandoned ourselves to the longings of our breadbaskets, and desisted not until every man was in himself a miniature blackberry patch. The boys brought me pint after pint of great black fellows they had picked in the shade of dense woods or on a steep bank, and I assure you they disappeared without an exception. This road, the last 10 days, has been filled with refugee citizens running from the Yankees. An old gentleman in whose yard the reserve pickets have stacked their arms, told me that all the men of his acquaintance over 45 years old are, and always have been, Unionists, and are to-day ready and willing to give up slavery for our cause. I have been a deluded believer in the hoax of fine “Georgia plantations,” but I assure you I am now thoroughly convalescent. I haven't seen five farm houses equal to Mrs. James ———, and only one that showed evidences of taste. That was where I saw the Rebel General Iverson dead among the flowers. The country is all hilly, and the soil, where there is any, is only fit for turnips. The timber is all scrub oak and pine, and some more viney bushes peculiar to the climate.

I notice some of the white moss hanging from the trees, like that there was so much of at Black river. The 16th Corps is on our right moving on a parallel road, and the 23d joins them. I don't know whether our other corps have crossed yet or not.

SOURCE: Charles Wright Wills, Army Life of an Illinois Soldier, p. 280-1