Saturday, February 22d, the prisoners began to arrive. Sunday and Monday they continued to come, when it was found that no more could be accomodated in Camp Morton, and about sixteen hundred were sent to Lafayette and Terre Haute.
...
Their dress was not military, but almost uniform in texture and color, being of home-made cloth dyed a dingy yellowish brown with the juice of butternut. It fit their arms and legs as close as the skin, showing all the bows and angles which nature in her step-motherly way bends or sharpens in the neglected children of poverty and ignorance. Three-fourths of the number wore strips of carpet around their shoulders, while the remainder were wrapped in white or in grey blankets, in piano-covers and quilts. Their heads were covered with hats and caps of every hue and shape, with here and there a bare poll, surmounted by an enormous quantity of hair. Some carried frying-pans or tea-kettles. Some fearing starvation in a northern prison, had provided themselves with crackers and bacon, which now were slung over their backs. Nearly all had bundles of bedding or clothing, not in knapsacks, but tied up in old quilts, or stuffed into meal-bags. Gray old men of apparently sixty years tumbled along by the side of slender boys of fourteen.
The Soldier of Indiana, Indianapolis, IN 1866. Vol. 1. pp. 317-318.
...
Their dress was not military, but almost uniform in texture and color, being of home-made cloth dyed a dingy yellowish brown with the juice of butternut. It fit their arms and legs as close as the skin, showing all the bows and angles which nature in her step-motherly way bends or sharpens in the neglected children of poverty and ignorance. Three-fourths of the number wore strips of carpet around their shoulders, while the remainder were wrapped in white or in grey blankets, in piano-covers and quilts. Their heads were covered with hats and caps of every hue and shape, with here and there a bare poll, surmounted by an enormous quantity of hair. Some carried frying-pans or tea-kettles. Some fearing starvation in a northern prison, had provided themselves with crackers and bacon, which now were slung over their backs. Nearly all had bundles of bedding or clothing, not in knapsacks, but tied up in old quilts, or stuffed into meal-bags. Gray old men of apparently sixty years tumbled along by the side of slender boys of fourteen.
The Soldier of Indiana, Indianapolis, IN 1866. Vol. 1. pp. 317-318.
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