To his mother, expressing the hope that he would soon be mustered out, though “it is all guess work with us, we can’t see a day ahead with any certainty…I think they have old Jeff in a safe place but there is no telling what they will do with him. They ought to take him and all the rest that helped starve the prisoners in their hands and hang them to a tree and let every soldier have a shot at them. I don’t believe there would be much left of them then…” Shackelford was a Private of the 22nd Independent Battery, Ohio Light Artillery, which fought at Gettysburg and Cumberland Gap and was moved to Knoxville for garrison duty in 1864. This letter was written two months after Lee’s surrender, one month after Jefferson Davis was imprisoned in Virginia – and less than a month before Shackelford’s Battery was indeed mustered out.