The Mockingbird's Ballad

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The bed was hard, rough boards with soiled ticking stuffed with horsehair, he hoped. The cell was damp, lice infested, with malaria carrying mosquitoes and little or no circulation of air through the high two by two foot barred window.

Retired from the Confederate army, thanks to Union forces in the Georgia thickets not far from Atlanta, Colonel Stevenson had been in prison for three weeks. Before he was captured, he had put his notebook in an old Bible he's found somewhere and had been able to save it. A short pencil was hidden in his boot. The sun of late June cast enough light for him to read his notations. He turned to the page that began, "March 12, 1865, near Fayetteville, N. Carolina. Such a hard, hard time. We are able to pester Sherman's march but he has everything we don't - men and equipment. Another dance with "Kill Cavalry" and his troopers two days ago. Our morning attack caught him in his nightshirt. Our wounded include Generals Humes, Hannon and Hagan. Generals Ashby and Allen had mounts shot from under them. Carmargo, number three, got me through. That little black is a gamer"

"The General made me colonel. Don't feel right but little it matters. We cannot continue for much longer. In Wellington's army against Napoleon's Legions, there was at one battle a unit of 'forlorn hope'. Feels like that's true of the A. of Tenn. Calvary. We're sacrificial, that's for sure. I sure don't want to try to count up the lives I've taken and bodies I've maimed."

He turned two pages and read, "April 27, 1865, near Durham Station, N. Carolina. Gen'l. Joseph E. Johnston surrendered the Army of Tennessee. I cried like a baby when General Wheeler said farewell to his troopers. I made a copy of it from his order's book."

Solon read, "'You have fought your battles; your task is done. During a four years' struggle for liberty, you have exhibited courage, fortitude and devotion: you are the sole victors of more than two hundred severely contested fields; you have participated in more than a thousand successful conflicts of arms. You are heroes, veterans, patriots. The bones of your comrades mark battlefields upon the soil of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. You have done all that human exertion could accomplish.'"

"'In bidding you adieu, I desire to tender my thanks for your gallantry in battle, your fortitude under suffering, and your devotion at all times to the holy cause you have done so much to maintain. I desire also to express my gratitude for the kind feeling you have seen fit to extend toward myself and to invoke upon you the blessings of our heavenly Father, to whom we must always look in the hour of distress.'"