Page:Minutes of the Immortal Six Hundred Society 1910.djvu/17

16 But, I tell you, on my honor, I have not realized one penny from the work in profit and yet owe $150.00 debt. I do not tell you this, comrades, to ask or suggest your aid. It is all a part of our history, as a society, and for this reason I incorporate it in this paper. It took many copies to advertise the book. I gave away books to libraries and schools in the South that our side should be known at least to our own people. There are fully 300 copies in Northern libraries. After the book was ready to put on sale, I again began a system of inquiry of comrades by writing to the postmasters at their residences, as given by comrades while on Morris Island, adding in papers like this:

Secretary Society Immortal 600, wants the names and addresses of the North Carolina Confederate officers who were placed on Morris Island, 1864, by order of the United States Government and subsequently starved on rotten cornmeal and pickle at Fort Pulaski and Hilton Head.

He wants all the information he can get of the deceased and living comrades. Address,

J. Charlestown, Jeff. Co., W. Va.
 * Box 404.

I found dear old Pete Akers and then Capt. J. F. Hempstead, our president, and with their assistance went about the work of perfecting an organization of the survivors of the Six Hundred as I could find them. Often I was on the point of abandoning the work, more from financial reasons than any other, but with God's help I kept at the task until organization was made and today, comrades, we are organized into a society honored and loved by our old veteran comrades and respected by the world that knows our story for the manhood and courage of our convictions and adherence to the right. As I said before I was for financial reasons ready to quit, for reverses had come to me. I wrote to my dear old comrade Hempstead and while he was not at all sanguine of success in getting the survivors he helped me on in the work in a financial way doing all we could. Up until Comrade Hempstead came into the work I had financed it myself.