John G.B. Adams

Captain John G.B. Adams, of the 19th Massachusetts Volunteers, survived the harrowing experience of capture and imprisonment by the enemy. While being held at the notorious prison facility at Camp Sorghum, near Columbia, South Carolina, Adams escaped and was recaptured. In the final months of the war, Adams was put on a train along with hundreds of other bedraggled and hungry Union prisoners, bound for Charlotte, North Carolina. Knowing that the Confederacy was in its death throes, the prisoners desperately hoped for an exchange, which would allow them to return home as long as they signed a parole—a promise not to bear arms until a formal exchange was signed. Finally, on March 1, 1865, Captain Adams, along with 200 other Union prisoners, was brought to Rocky Point, North Carolina, and released to the Union lines.

Relieved to have...