Title: Letter from H. A. Gilliam to Secretary of War Simon Cameron

Identifier: 0001-b1-fa   (https://digital.lib.ecu.edu/23814)

Description: Letter from H. A. Gilliam at Fort Warren, Massachusetts to Simon Cameron, United States Secretary of War in Washington D.C. Gilliam writes that he saw in the Northern papers that thirteen prisoners of war held by the Confederacy have been selected by lot to be held as hostages to answer for the safety of the Citizens of the South arrested for piracy. If those arrested for piracy are executed, the Confederates will execute a hostage. Gilliam suggests that if the Confederates go through with this, the federal government should execute equivalent prisoners of war being held by the North. Gilliam then writes that he is willing to be dealt with in the same way. The Civil War correspondence relates the activities of Thomas Sparrow and his Washington Grays from their formation as a volunteer company in April of 1861, until their parole from a Union prison in February, 1862. From the papers of Thomas Sparrow (1819-1884), a lawyer from Washington, N.C. who fought in the Civil War and later represented Beaufort County in the North Carolina General Assembly.