After the battle of Chickamauga, while we were at McLaw’s Division Hospital, our Surgeon took charge of a rebel soldier lad not more than sixteen years of age, who in addition to a severe wound, was suffering from an attack of fever. One morning the surgeon went to him and asked, “how are you this morning my boy?” “Well I feel a heap bettah, but I’m powahful weak yet, doctah,” was his reply. Notwithstanding these people know nothing of numbers, or of Geography, or of Orthography and not much of any ology, or ism, yet they are good riders, good marksmen, good card players, good whiskey drinkers, and barring the troubles which grew out of the “late unpleasantness” and “moonshining” they are in the main kind-hearted people to the whites. These remarks apply to the poorer class of whites in the time of the war. I understand there has been much improvement since that time, in some respects, there was certainly room for it. But the trusty unfailing friend of the Union soldier, the caterer and guide of the escaped prisoner, the one on whom he could depend under any, and all circumstances was the negro. The poor black man knew that “Massy Lincum’s sogers” were solving a problem for them which had remained unsolved for more than two hundred years. They knew that the success of the Union arms meant the freedom of the slaves, and they always worshipped a Federal soldier. Any prisoner who escaped from rebel prisons, and succeeded in reaching the Union lines, owes his success to the negroes for without their friendly aid in the way of furnishing food, and pointing out the way, and in most instances acting as guide, they could never have succeeded. He was never so poor but that he would furnish food for a fugitive prisoner and the night was never so dark but that he would guide him on his way, usually turning him over to a friend who would run him to the next station on the “underground railroad.” The negro was, on his part, the innocent cause of much trouble, for speculate and explain as much as you will, he was the cause of the war. On his account the exchange of prisoners was suspended and he was, at once, the cause of nearly all our trouble, and our only friend. I said our only friend, I mean in a general sense, for there was a class of men, though small in numbers, who never forgot the men of their own faith. There was never a prison so dark and filthy but that a Catholic priest would enter it, and there was never a dying prisoner so lousy and besmeared, but that he would administer the consolations of the church to him in the hour of his extremity.