What always puzzled me much was why the hounds took only Yankee trails, in the vicinity of the prison.  There was about the Stockade from six thousand to ten thousand Rebels and negros, including guards, officers, servants, workmen, etc.  These were, of course, continually in motion and must have daily made trails leading in every direction.  It was the custom of the Rebels to send a pack of hounds around the prison every morning, to examine if any Yankees had escaped during the night.  It was believed that they rarely failed to find a prisoner’s tracks, and still more rarely ran off upon a Rebel’s.  If those outside the Stockade had been confined to certain path and roads we could have understood this, but, as I understand, they were not.  It was part of the interest of the day, for us, to watch the packs go yelping around the pen searching for tracks.  We got information in this way whether any tunnel had been successfully opened during the night.

The use of hounds furnished us a crushing reply to the ever recurring Rebel question: 

“Why are you-uns puttin’ niggers in the field to fight we-uns for?”

The questioner was always silenced by the return interrogatory: 

“Is that as bad as running white men down with blood hounds?”

CHAPTER XXVIII.

May—­influx of new prisoners—­disparity in numbers between the eastern and Western armies—­terrible crowding—­Slaughter of men at the creek.

In May the long gathering storm of war burst with angry violence all along the line held by the contending armies.  The campaign began which was to terminate eleven months later in the obliteration of the Southern Confederacy.  May 1, Sigel moved up the Shenandoah Valley with thirty thousand men; May 3, Butler began his blundering movement against Petersburg; May 3, the Army of the Potomac left Culpeper, and on the 5th began its deadly grapple with Lee, in the Wilderness; May 6, Sherman moved from Chattanooga, and engaged Joe Johnston at Rocky Face Ridge and Tunnel Hill.

Each of these columns lost heavily in prisoners.  It could not be otherwise; it was a consequence of the aggressive movements.  An army acting offensively usually suffers more from capture than one on the defensive.  Our armies were penetrating the enemy’s country in close proximity to a determined and vigilant foe.  Every scout, every skirmish line, every picket, every foraging party ran the risk of falling into a Rebel trap.  This was in addition to the risk of capture in action.

The bulk of the prisoners were taken from the Army of the Potomac.  For this there were two reasons:  First, that there were many more men in that Army than in any other; and second, that the entanglement in the dense thickets and shrubbery of the Wilderness enabled both sides to capture great numbers of the other’s men.  Grant lost in prisoners from May 5 to May 31, seven thousand four hundred and fifty; he probably captured two-thirds of that number from the Johnnies.