From the Richmond Daily Dispatch November 30, 1864:
From Petersburg.
During the past two days a good deal of unimportant skirmishing and cannonading has taken place on the Petersburg lines. About one o’clock on Monday, our troops on General Mahone’s line captured sixty of the Yankee pickets in their front.
The Petersburg Express of yesterday contains an account of the capture of the Hon. Roger A. Pryor by the enemy under the following circumstances: Mr. Pryor, who, for some time past, has been acting as an independent scout, went out on the lines on Monday morning to exchange papers with the Yankees. He advanced, waving a paper, as is the custom in such cases, and a Yankee officer came out and met him and exchanged papers with him. As he was on his way back into our lines, several Yankees sprung from an ambush and seized and carried him off a prisoner. A number of our men witnessed the affair, but from too great a distance to be able to render any assistance. While this is undoubtedly a piece of treachery on the part of the enemy, it must, we fear, be submitted to. Mr. Pryor’s going forward to exchange papers was an unofficial act, not warranted, that we have learned, by any truce or treaty with the enemy. The exchange of papers along the lines is a thing which has existed only by the sufferance of the belligerents, to be broken up at the pleasure of either party.
The date of the incident was up in the air, but according to The New-York Times of November 30, 1864 the capture of Roger Pryor was in retaliation for the Confederate capture of a Massachusetts Captain Burbridge, who apparently was also caught while trading papers. Captain Burbridge had been since dismissed from the Union “service for having disobeyed orders forbidding an exchange of papers or holding intercourse with the enemy under any pretext whatever.”
