Arrive at Columbia,
S. C., at dawn. The night passed disagreeably. Although our destiny is prison,
men are impatient at delays, growl at "such engineering" though the
best we have had, a negro at that. I ate my last bread yesterday morning; hoped
for rations here; none came. We picked up corn scattered in the cars which
served some purpose. We are mingling freely with our officers, sitting beside
the track some ways from the city. This is the capitol of South Carolina;
population 8,000. A paper I saw today says of the armies in Georgia that
Johnston had retreated from Dalton towards Rome, Hooker and Thomas pressing
him. Details are given of skirmishes and glaring headlines of great disasters
to Yankees; but in important movements they concede failure, then attempt to distort
facts. Lincoln has issued a proclamation for thanksgiving. It looks as well for
us as we ought to expect; we have had to contend against disadvantages; a hard
struggle is before. Some gentlemen engaged in conversation with us. They
evinced a spirit narrowed to mere State pride all for slavery. The bane of
State right had been so profusely imbibed, that they had forgotten what Edmund
Randolph termed the "rock of our salvation" which gave "safety, respectability
and happiness to the American people," namely, "The Union of the
States," and plunged into that which brings destruction. Particularly was
this addressed to the South; nevertheless we are cursed for loving the Union.
They ask us to give it up, to give up principles for which we would preserve the
Union.
Gen. Seymour had his
buttons cut off by Rebels while asleep. He has no hat, it having been lost in
battle; he seems very disconsolate. General Shaler sits beside him with one arm
about his waist trying to console him.
Rebel officers have
been here and offer $5 to $15 Confederate for $1 in greenbacks. They have a
curious faith in success. At noon we left the junction for the South.
Kingsville is a junction of two roads, one for Charleston, the other north to
Wilmington. Four or five miles below we cross the Santee River, or one of its
branches, and an extensive swamp on a tressie, seemingly two miles long. Here I
saw several live alligators. We reached Branchville at dark and switched to the
west. Country is level, woody and in poor cultivation. On much of the cotton
lands trees are standing dead. Fields look like vast swamps. Land is worked in
this way wholly by slaves with little knowledge how to improve land, with
neither facilities or encouragement to do so, and when exhausted, it is left.
We could see the [slaves] toiling in "the cotton and the cane."
SOURCE: John Worrell
Northrop, Chronicles from the Diary of a War Prisoner in Andersonville
and Other Military Prisons of the South in 1864, p. 53-4
