This journal is the exciting personal narrative of a Texan who was a prisoner of the Union Army during the Civil War, escaped to Canada, and finally made his way back into the Confederacy through the blockade. It was written while the war was still in progress. The journal was issued anonymously in Houston early in 1865. Its author, Decimus et Ultimus Barziza, was a colorful, competent, truly remarkable Texan—well educated, well traveled, and sophisticated as an observer. Barziza came to Texas from Virginia in 1857. He left a growing law practice at Owensville to enter Confederate service as first lieutenant of the “Robertson Five-Shooters,” an infantry company which was one of the original units of the Fourth Texas Infantry, Hood’s Brigade. After fighting in many battles, he was wounded at Gettysburg and left lying on the field. The Yankees picked him up and imprisoned him at Johnson’s Island. A year later, as Barziza was being shipped to another prison, he escaped by diving through a window of the moving train at midnight. Making his way across Pennsylvania to New York, he took a train for Canada. There he became one of the first beneficiaries of an underground system which eventually returned him to North Carolina. Too ill from his wounds and the hardships of his escape to return to active duty, he spent the next few months writing his memoirs. They cover the period from the drive for Gettysburg to Barziza’s return to the Confederacy. Before the original publication of this book, only two copies of The Adventures of a Prisoner of War were known to exist. R. Henderson Shuffler, then director of the Texana program of the University of Texas, felt that it was intriguing and important enough to merit editing for republication. The journal has the further attraction of describing the then little-known machinery which was set up in Canada to help Rebel soldiers who had escaped Northern prisons make their way back to the Confederacy by way of Nova Scotia and Bermuda. Shuffler supplements the narrative with limited yet helpful documentation, providing introductory sections explaining Barziza’s background and his career as a Texas legislator and lawyer, as well as carrying the war story up to the sequence where Barziza’s account begins.

During the last nine months of the Civil War, virtually all of the news reports and President Jefferson Davis's correspondence confirmed the imminent demise of the Confederate States, the nation Davis had striven to uphold since 1861. But despite defeat after defeat on the battlefield, a recalcitrant Congress, naysayers in the press, disastrous financial conditions, failures in foreign policy and peace efforts, and plummeting national morale, Davis remained in office and tried to maintain the government -- even after the fall of Richmond -- until his capture by Union forces on May 10, 1865. The eleventh volume of The Papers of Jefferson Davis follows the last tumultuous months of the Confederacy and illuminates Davis's policies, feelings, ideas, and relationships, as well as the viewpoints of hundreds of southerners -- critics and supporters -- who asked for favors, pointed out abuses, and offered advice on myriad topics. Printed here for the first time are many speeches and a number of new letters and telegrams. In the course of the volume, Robert E. Lee officially becomes general in chief, Joseph E. Johnston is given a final command, legislation is enacted to place slaves in the army as soldiers, and peace negotiations are opened at the highest levels. The closing pages chronicle Davis's dramatic flight from Richmond, including emotional correspondence with his wife as the two endeavor to find each other en route and make plans for the future in the wreckage of their lives. The holdings of seventy different manuscript repositories and private collections in addition to numerous published sources contribute to Volume 11, the fifth in the Civil War period.