previous next

[54] to make them. The general cartel on which we acted was established in 1862.

The first item was: All prisoners captured by either party should be paroled and delivered at certain points specified within ten days after their capture, or as soon thereafter as practicable. Second: Commanding general after a battle, on the battlefield might parole their prisoners by agreement. Third: No other paroles were valid; for example, if a partisan command or a guerrilla band captured a foraging party, and attempted to parole those who constituted the party, such paroles would not hold. In such cases the cartel would not be violated by ordering those composing the party immediately back to service.

Several individual cases arose which gave us much annoyance: for example, a Confederate major, Armesy, from West Virginia, went back to his State, now within our lines, and began quietly to recruit soldiers for the Confederate army. While engaged in this secret business he was caught and tried by courtmartial. The court, treating him as a spy, condetmned him to be hanged.

A little later Major Goff, from West Virginia, was captured by the Confederates as a prisoner of war and taken to Libby Prison. When Armesy's case became known at Richmond, Goff was sent from Libby to Salisbury, N. C., and closely confined for many months. Goff belonged to a strong Union family, and was held as a hostage for the life of Armesy.

Another difficulty arose which affected us more directly. It was that the officers in command of negro troops received special contumely and ill treatment. It took strong measures of retaliation to protect such

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Salisbury, N. C. (North Carolina, United States) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Nathan Goff (3)
Thomas D. Armesy (3)
Libby (1)
hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
1862 AD (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: