One of Morgan's Men: Memoirs of Lieutenant John M. Porter of the Ninth Kentucky Cavalry

14 With Three Days' Rations, We Started Home

189 14 WITH THREE DAYS’ RATIONS, WE STARTED HOME John M. Porter was exchanged in February 1865. He and other prisoners from Johnson’s Island were transported by rail from Sandusky, Ohio, through Pittsburgh, to Baltimore, and then down the Chesapeake Bay from Baltimore to the James River. Porter was finally set ashore at Rockets, the location of the Confederate navy yard and a southern suburb of Richmond, Virginia. Within days, Robert E. Lee’s army evacuated the defenses of Petersburg and Richmond. Porter then observed, firsthand, the final collapse of the Confederacy. He traveled west by railroad, not far behind the train carrying President Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge, and the rest of Davis’s cabinet officials. He entered the lines of General Joseph E. Johnston in North Carolina, where his old regiment, the Ninth Kentucky Cavalry, was still in the field. Porter finally reached Atlanta and then Macon, Georgia , where he met his kinsman and friend, James M. Hines. From there he traveled to Madison, Georgia, and Augusta. Returning to Madison, Porter wound up in the home of his father’s first cousin John Watson Porter. There he met kinsmen Edward L. Hines and John H. Hines and Hugh Gwynn, all of whom served with Morgan. By then, Lee and Johnston had surrendered and President Davis had been captured. Searching for a way to join the fighting , Porter learned that General Edmund Kirby Smith had surrendered in the Trans-Mississippi. The Confederacy had finally collapsed. ONE OF MORGAN’S MEN 190 Porter and the Hines brothers started home. When they reached Bowling Green, Kentucky, they visited the Hines brothers’ mother, Ann Porter, then rode home to Sugar Grove in neighboring Butler County. Incredibly, all of his family members were still alive. He had ended an odyssey unlike anything any Americans would ever experience again. The Civil War defined Porter—and the nation. It defines the nation today. Finally about last of January or first of February 1865, a cartel of exchange was agreed upon by the two Governments. The reason exchanging prisoners had ceased was that the United States demanded that the negro soldiers captured by the Confederate forces should be put on a footing of other prisoners and exchanged, while the Confederate Government very properly refused to do this, claiming the negro soldiers were, in truth and fact, the property of the Southern people, and, as such, when captured should be returned to their respective masters and owners. This was the barrier to an exchange; this was the reason so many men languished and died in prison. It was, however, agreed to begin the transportation of prisoners about January 1865 and about the last of that month, I think, or first of February , about three hundred of us were called out and started off for Richmond. The bay had been frozen for weeks and we were compelled to walk over on the ice, a distance of about four miles, which was almost like killing us, because we were unused to exercise, and it was tiresome in the extreme, every rod nearly one would fall. We were sent by railroad by Pittsburgh to Baltimore. At Baltimore we were put on a steamer and sent down the Chesapeake Bay to the mouth of the James River, and up the James River to the Confederate lines. During this entire route, which consumed some week or two, perhaps, we had a hard time, yet better than in prison. Besides, we were elated at the prospect of being again in a short time WITH THREE DAYS’ RATIONS, WE STARTED HOME 191 among our own country-men in the South. Nothing unusual occurred on the trip from Johnson’s Island to Richmond. We passed Fortress Monroe and other historic places on the bay and on the James River, the sight of which brought to mind sad thoughts.1 At last I stepped from a Confederate transport near the “Rockets,” and was in the city of Richmond, no longer under the control nor in the power of the Yankees. I at once went to a hotel and procured something to eat and a place to sleep. For a truth, I think I had been hungry for a year. I mean by hunger this: I had not eaten at any one time enough to satisfy me. This is sounding strangely, but I have a recollection of incessant...