Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 3.

[586] of the war, amounted to nearly $22,000,000, which sum was subsequently enlarged by new decisions. The value of the vessels captured and destroyed, (1,149 captured and 355 destroyed), was not less than $7,000,000, making a total loss, chiefly to British owners, of at least $30,000,000.

The writer, accompanied by his friends already mentioned in these pages, (Messrs. Dreer and Greble), visited the theater of some of the events recorded in this chapter, immediately after the evacuation of Richmond. We had been to the front of the Army of the Potomac, and the Army of the James, a few months before, after the return to Hampton Roads of the first expedition against Fort Fisher on the evening of the 28th of December.

1864.

On the following day we went up the James River, with General Butler, on his elegant little dispatch steamer, Ocean Queen, to City Point, where, after a brief interview with General Grant, we proceeded to Aiken's Landing, the neutral ground for the exchange of prisoners. It was dark when we arrived there. We made our way in an ambulance, over a most wretched road, to Butler's Headquarters,¹ within seven miles of Richmond, where we passed the night. On the following day we rode through the camp of the Army of the James, on horses kindly furnished us by the general, first visiting the Headquarters of General Weitzel's Twenty-fifth (colored) corps, whose huts were decorated with evergreens, it being the Christmas holidays. We rode to the Headquarters of General Ord, on New Market Heights, where we were joined by Major Seward, of his staff, who accompanied us along the lines for several miles, to the Dutch

Interior of a Chapel of the Christian Commission.2

Gap Canal.³ On the way we visited a chapel of the United States Christian Commission; also,. Battery Harrison, captured by the colored troops not long before,⁴ and Fort Brady.

Near the Dutch Gap Canal, just then completed, we dismounted, and took a pathway like a shelf along the steep bank of the James, where the. excavators had made their subterranean huts,⁵ when we found ourselves in much peril. The battery at Howlett's, which, as we have observed, cast. a shell among the workmen about once an hour, now hurled one at the end of every five minutes, compelling us to seek shelter in the caves. We succeeded in peeping into the canal, and then made our way back, finding warm fragments of a shell in the path. We found the orderly in in charge of the horses much disturbed by the explosion of one of them