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How the stockade was built.

The stockade was built by the negroes belonging to. the neighboring farms, either hired or pressed into service by the Confederate authorities to cut down the immense pine trees growing on the ground intended for the stockade; and these same trees were then cut into proper lengths and hewn upon the spot, and then planted in a ditch dug four feet deep to receive them. In this manner was the stockade made. Before it was completed the prisoners were forwarded in great numbers; and it being impossible to keep them in the cars, we had to put them in the completed end of the stockade and double the guards, and our whole force kept ever ready [165] day and night for the slightest alarm; for at first we had only the shattered remnants of two regiments — the Twenty-sixth Alabama and the Fifty-fifth Georgia--numbering in all some three hundred and fifty men. This constituted the guard. In about ten days thereafter my regiment — the First Georgia Reserves, composed of young boys and old men (I was not sixteen), just organized — were sent to take the place of the Twenty-sixth Alabama and Twenty-sixth Georgia, so they could be sent to the front for duty. In a few days after our arrival the 2d, 3d and 4th Georgia Reserves, all composed of lads and hoary-headed men (for we were reduced to the strait of “robbing the cradle and the grave for men to make soldiers of” ), joined us as rapidly as they could be organized. The author of Jaunt in the South says: “When the stockade was occupied in 1864, there was not a tree or blade of grass within it. Its reddish sand was entirely barren, and not the smallest particle of green showed itself. But now the surface is covered completely with underbrush; a rich growth of bushes, trees and plants has covered the entire area, and where before was a dreary desert there is now a wild and luxurious garden.” I have before said the ground was covered with a pine forest, and the trees were utilized to build the stockade. Any one who has traveled south of Macon, Georgia, knows the pine is abundant, and in fact almost the only tree. In these forests the ground is covered by wire grass or other grass peculiar to them.


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