From the Nay 30, 1987, Northwest Herald (McHenry County, Illinois) "The captain's word disappears" by Jeff Kuyper.
On February 16, 1862, at 10 a.m., the Confederate command at Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River in Tennessee, surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant.
An hour later Captain Harley Wayne and the others with the 15th Illinois Volunteer Infantry were on the scene.
"I never saw such confusion and excitement as existed all around," Wayne wrote his wife later. :We landed and touched on shore and received on board about 500 prisoners.
"I was officer if the day and it was my duty to take entire control of them. I had to examine them individually and take away all weapons, pistols, knives and so firth. There were a great many Bowie knives, hideous looking weapons."
Several prisoners were reluctant to turn over their weapons.
"One, an officer, yet had his sword. I asked him to deliver it up," Wayne wrote in his February 18, 1862 letter home.
(Unfortunately, the article does not say whether Harley Wayne's Confederate officer gave up his sword. Of course, I can't imagine capturing an enemy and not immediately checking for weapons they might still have on them.)
--Old Secesh
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