FOSTER, John Y. New Jersey and the Rebellion.

History of the Services of the Troops and People of New Jersey in Aid of the Union Cause.  Published by Authority of the State.

Newark: Martin R. Dennis & Co., 1868.

Thick 8vo.; purple cloth stamped in gilt and blind.

First edition, with engraved frontispiece.  Sabin 25251.  Tipped-in printed note: “With Compliments of Marcus L. Ward, Governor.”

“Please accept my thanks for the note and narrative [about]…your wanderings while escaping from a rebel prison,” Grant wrote to J. Madison Drake (1837-1913). Captain Drake and fourteen other men from the Ninth New Jersey volunteers were taken prisoner at the battle of Drewry’s Bluff in May 1864. After a brief confinement in Richmond’s Libby Prison, he was transferred to a Charlestown facility that was “the filthiest place upon the American continent…where pestilence raged, and over and around which bursting shells shrieked wildly, as I lay in the shadow of a hideous gallows.” In October, while Lee and Grant were negotiating prisoner exchanges, Drake and three other officers leapt from a train that was transporting them to a stockade in Columbia, South Carolina. Drake was the last to jump. Seeing the first two depart, a rebel sergeant “threw up his hands in dismay, exclaiming ‘My God!’” Drake, seeing his chance, “sprang out of the doorway with the bound of a man determined to be free. I shall never forget the thousand and one thoughts that crowded through my mind as I leaped...and whirled through the air on the principle of a buzz-saw….Regaining my feet, I hastened along the railway embankment until I found my three companions….At once striking off into a dismal swamp, which lined the river’s bank, we placed as much space as was possible between ourselves and our infuriated pursuers.”

Living off the land and helped by sympathetic strangers, the men trudged through swamps, enemy-infested woods, and over snow-covered mountains. Late in November, they reached Union territory. After convalescing in Trenton, New Jersey, Drake returned to his regiment in North Carolina. Discharged in April 1865, he was later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and made a general in the New Jersey militia. In addition to this memoir he wrote a History of the Ninth New Jersey Volunteers and Historical Sketches of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Tales of the horrible conditions endured by prisoners of war glutted the market after Appomattox, but Drake’s was one of the few written from personal experience. It was well-received by critics and veterans like Grant, who promised Drake that he would “take an early day to read over [your] thrilling account.”