5th May (Tuesday).—We breakfasted at Huntsville at 5.30 A.M. The Federal officers captured in the Harriet Lane are confined in the penitentiary there, and are not treated as prisoners of war. This seems to be the system now with regard to officers since the enlistment of negroes by the Northerners.
My fellow-travellers were mostly elderly planters or legislators, and there was one judge from Louisiana. One of them produced a pair of boots which had cost him $100; another showed me a common wideawake hat which had cost him $40. In Houston, I myself saw an English regulation infantry sword exposed for sale for $225 (£45).
As the military element did not predominate, my companions united in speaking with horror of the depredations committed in this part of the country by their own troops on a line of march.
We passed through a well-wooded country—pines and post oaks—the road bad: crossed the river Trinity at 12 noon, and dined at the house of a disreputable looking individual called a Campbellite minister, at 4.30 P.m. The food consisted almost invariably of bacon, corn bread, and buttermilk: a meal costing a dollar.
Arrived at Crockett at 9.30 P.m., where we halted for a few hours. A filthy bed was given to the Louisianian Judge and myself. The Judge, following my example, took to it boots and all, remarking, as he did so, to the attendant negro, that “they were a d—d sight cleaner than the bed.”
Before reaching Crockett, we passed through the encampment of Phillipps’s regiment of Texas Rangers, and we underwent much chaff. They were en route to resist Banks.
