James B. Jordan (8 June 1836-27 April 1899) was born in Raleigh, Wake County, North Carolina. In business in Tennessee at the outbreak of war, he returned to his home state and enlisted in the Confederate service on 29 May 1861. He was subsequently elected 1st lieutenant in Company D of the 26th North Carolina Infantry, and at organization was appointed regimental adjutant. Jordan was wounded in the hip at Gettysburg on 3 July 1863, as the regiment suffered severe losses in the failed assault on Cemetery Ridge. He was captured two days later on the retreat south and, after time in a Federal hospital, was sent to the prison camp at Johnson's Island, Ohio, where he was confined for the duration of the war. Jordan's place of internment was an officers' prison located on a 300-acre island off the south shore of Lake Erie, in Sandusky Bay. By the often horrifying standards of Civil War prisons Johnson's Island was benign, with a probable mortality rate of under two per cent. A report dated 5 February 1865 — the day of Jordan's letter — observes that 3014 prisoners were on the island, of whom only 55 were in hospital (Official Records, Series II, Volume 8, p. 183). Circumstances at the prison became more difficult from the spring of 1864, when the Federal government cut rations and other privileges in response to public outcry about the Confederate treatment of Northern prisoners. At the time of Jordan's letter many prisoners at Johnson's Island were suffering from lack of food, due to inadequate rations and restrictions on gifts and prisoner purchases. Following the war James and Mattie Jordan moved to Volusia County, Florida, where in 1888 James Jordan became clerk of the circuit court.