knew how to wait for orders.

From this sad scene, walking to the Soldier's Home, my attention was
arrested on seeing a white man with a ball and chain attached to his
ankle, with brick and his ball in the wheelbarrow, wheeling toward
the soldier's camp, guarded by a black soldier. As I stood looking at
the black soldier walking leisurely beside the white man in irons,
an officer accosted me with, "Madam, that prisoner you see wheeling
brick to our camp is a strong secessionist, and was a hard master
over a large plantation with more than one hundred slaves, and he was
taken prisoner, and all his slaves came into our camp. The younger
men enlisted as soldiers, and that man made an attempt to escape and
we put him in irons and set a black soldier, who had been his own
slave, to guard him."

"What a turning of tables!" I said.

"Yes, you will find the same turning of tables within our lines all
over the South."

At the door of a tent I saw a large, square block of iron, weighing
sixty or eighty pounds, to which was attached a ring. I inquired of a
colored man what it was for.

"That belonged to our plantation, and when master had a mind to punish
us he ordered us locked to that block, and from one to a dozen of us
sometimes were locked to it with a long chain; and when we hoed corn
we'd hoe the chain's length, then the one next the block had it to
tote the length of the chain, and so on till we did our day's work.
Since we've been here we've seen nine of our masters chained to that