young man been drowned, as at first supposed—was small and easily examined, no one of the searching party had discovered any trace of it. Therefore, on hearing Burnett's report, the conclusion was adopted that Maury had been captured by some scouting party from the army across the river, and had been borne, a prisoner, to the other shore.
Next morning Major Flowerer, Adjutant-General of Maury's division, was sent under a flag of truce to General Grant to make inquiry about Lieutenant Maury. To our grief and surprise, he returned in the evening with the report that nothing was known of him by the Federal Commander; but with the courteous assurance from General Grant and Admiral Porter, who knew young Maury well, that they would take all possible means to ascertain whether he had been made a prisoner by any of their party, and would communicate to General Maury the earliest intelligence they could procure.
General Grant had been personally acquainted with General Maury at West Point and in Mexico, where they had served together; and the unfortunate young officer whose fate was under investigation was known to Admiral Porter and to other officers of the United States Navy, who had met him while he was a boy at the Observatory of which his father was so long the Chief. The conviction was then positive, as it is now, that those officers were sincere in their desire and active in their efforts to find the poor boy.
Soon after the fall of Vicksburg (July, 1864), General Maury, then in Mobile, received an ill-written letter (from an unknown and evidently uneducated writer) informing him that his young cousin had been made prisoner, and had died of pneumonia, on the third day after his capture, on board a Federal gunboat lying off Vicksburg. At the time very little importance was attached to this letter. But not long after. Colonel Underhill, a gallant young Scotchman who had resigned his commission in the British army to serve in that of the Confederacy, wrote to General Maury a very clear and consistent narrative, which he had received from a Captain Smith of the 13th Iowa Regiment. United States Army.
Captain Smith and Colonel Underhill were natives of the same county in Scotland, and met during a truce before the lines of Vicksburg, Underhill then being aide-de-camp to General Stephen D. Lee. During a sociable conversation on one
