officers were there manifesting surprise and chagrin; for they could not
but show both as they looked upon us, whom the day before they were
threatening to crush into submission, and attempting also to execute
their threats that morning, standing out of their power and under orders
from one superior to their Major Commanding E.M. As the bird uncaged,
so were our hearts that morning. Short and uncertain at first were the
flights of Hope. As the slave many times before us, leaving his yoke
behind him, turned from the plantations of Virginia and set his face
toward the far North, so we from out a grasp as close and as abundant in
suffering and severity, and from without the line of bayonets that had
so many weeks surrounded us, turned our backs upon the camp of the 4th
Vermont and took our way over the turnpike that ran through the tented
fields of Culpeper.

At the War Office we were soon admitted to an audience with the Adjutant
General, Colonel Townsend, whom we found to be a very fine man, mild and
kind. He referred our cases to the Secretary of War, Stanton, by whom we
were ordered to report for service to Surgeon General Hammond. Here we
met Isaac Newton, Commissioner of Agriculture, waiting for our arrival,
and James Austin of Nantucket, expecting his son, Charles L. Austin, and
Edward W. Holway of Sandwich, Mass., conscripted Friends like ourselves,
and ordered here from the 22nd Massachusetts.

We understand it is through the influence of Isaac Newton that Friends
have been able to approach the heads of Government in our behalf and to
prevail with them to so great an extent. He explained to us the
circumstance in which we are placed. That the Secretary of War and
President sympathized with Friends in their present suffering, and would
grant them full release, but that they felt themselves bound by their
oaths that they would execute the laws, to carry out to its full extent