Opium Eating: An Autobiographical Sketch by an Habituate

A sixteen‑year‑old boy joins the Union army as a drummer, the only position open to him. When battles erupt he takes up a rifle and fights alongside his regiment at Stone River and Chickamauga. In September 1863, amid the chaos of combat, he is captured and marched with thousands of other prisoners toward Richmond.

The march offers little more than hunger and exhaustion, and the tobacco‑factory prison that receives them provides rations so scant that even standing becomes a struggle. Constant starved weakness turns men into shadows of themselves, and the narrator describes the relentless gnaw of hunger with stark, unvarnished honesty. Though his mind is clouded by the opium he begins to rely on, he feels compelled to record these early months of captivity, hoping his experience might illuminate the suffering of those forgotten by history.