Department and that of
the Rebels, by which all seamen and marines among us were exchanged.
Lists of these were sent to the different prisons and the men called for.
About three-fourths of them were dead, but many soldiers divining, the
situation of affairs, answered to the dead men's names, went away with
the squad and were exchanged. Much of this was through the connivance of
the Rebel officers, who favored those who had ingratiated themselves with
them. In many instances money was paid to secure this privilege, and I
have been informed on good authority that Jack Huckleby, of the Eighth
Tennessee, and Ira Beverly, of the One Hundredth Ohio, who kept the big
sutler shop on the North Side at Andersonville, paid Davis five hundred
dollars each to be allowed to go with the sailors. As for Andrews and
me, we had no friends among the Rebels, nor money to bribe with, so we
stood no show.

The rations issued to us for some time after our arrival seemed riotous
luxury to what we had been getting at Andersonville. Each of us received
daily a half-dozen rude and coarse imitations of our fondly-remembered
hard tack, and with these a small piece of meat or a few spoonfuls of
molasses, and a quart or so of vinegar, and several plugs of tobacco for
each "hundred." How exquisite was the taste of the crackers and
molasses!

It was the first wheat bread I had eaten since my entry into Richmond
--nine months before--and molasses had been a stranger to me for years.
After the corn bread we had so long lived upon, this was manna. It seems
that the Commissary at Savannah labored under the delusion that he must
issue to us the same rations as were served out to the Rebel soldiers and
sailors. It was some little time before the fearful mistake came to the
knowledge of Winder. I fancy that the news almost threw him into an
apoplectic fit. Nothing, save his being ordered to the front, could have
caused him such poignant sorrow as the information that so much good food
had been worse than wasted in undoing his work by building up the bodies
of his hated enemies.

Without being told, we knew that he had been heard from when the tobacco,
vinegar and molasses failed to come in, and the crackers gave way to corn
meal. Still this was a vast improvement on Andersonville, as the meal
was fine and sweet, and we each had a spoonful of salt issued to us
regularly.

I am quite sure that I cannot make the reader who has not had an
experienc