Our duty at the substitute camp was to perform the guard duty necessary to keep the men from escaping, and also to act as guard in taking men from this post to the front. This camp was used as a rendezvous for substitutes, to equip them preparatory to sending them to the army. The larger proportion of the men sent to this post seemed to be composed of the refuse of all society, whose entire aim seemed to have been to enlist and desert as often as opportunity offered. They were a lawless set of men, and it was only by enforcing the most rigid discipline, that they were kept within bounds.
When a squad of substitutes was to be taken to the front, one or two commissioned officers were usually detached, together with a compliment of non-commissioned officers and privates, sufficient to carefully guard against desertions on their way. Ordinary freight cars were used for transportation, into which were crowded from 35 to 40 men, allowing five men in each car as a guard. It was a shameful way of treating human beings, crowded together for two days with barely room to move in, and being required to assume all manner of positions at night in order to get a little rest. Although sufficient rations were purported to be issued for the journey, yet they never sufficed, and the men often suffered from hunger. Yet in time Baltimore was reached, where all the men were generally put into comfortable quarters for a day or so, and then placed on board transports to be taken to different points on the Potomac or James Rivers.
These transports were often condemned, or at least unsafe vessels in the employ of the Government, with no conveniences for the accommodation of the number of men crowded on them. The writer had the misfortune to be on one of these miserable crafts. On the night of Friday, Sept. 9th, we left Baltimore with 1100 men, en route for City Point, on an old condemned English emigrant steamer. We were 55 hours making the trip (more than twice as long as we should have been), and twice the vessel was turned to be run ashore, as she leaked so badly, and the pumps giving out for a time, it was feared by her commander the water might put out the fires under the boilers, and at no time could the old tub be kept on an even keel. There were only a few casks of water, and no provisions of any kind on board. The rations issued to the men on starting were all gone long before we reached our destination, and not a little suffering was experienced by the poor fellows for want of something to eat. This is but one of many instances in which one portion of the men in the Government employ were made to suffer by the neglect and ill-treatment of another portion.