We established a
regular camp here. This last march has been a very hard one, and only a
distance of thirty miles. But it took us from Wednesday to Saturday, through
snow, rain and mud ankle-deep and without rations. Kinston is a perfect ruin,
as the Yankees have destroyed everything they could barely touch, but it must
at one time have been a very pretty town-but now nothing scarcely but chimneys
are left to show how the Yankees are trying to reconstruct the Union.
SOURCE: Louis Leon, Diary of a Tar
Heel Confederate Soldier, p. 17
