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I just finished reading Lt. Colonel Arthur Fremantle's memoir of his travels through the Confederacy titled, Three Months in the Southern States. As I have suggested the reading of Oates' book, I also suggest reading Fremantle's book. It is beautifully written and full of adventure and British wit.
Here are a few of my favorite passages.

"Heaven help those Pennylvanian braves if a score of Hood's Texans had caught sight of them!"

"It has often been remarked to be that, when this war is over, the independence of the country will be due, in a great measure to the women of the South; Naturally proud, and with an innate contempt for the yankees, the southern women have been rendered furious and desperate by the proceedings of Butler, Milroy, Turchin, etc. They are all prepared to undergo any hardships and misfortunes rather than submit to the rule of such people; and they use every argument which woman can empoloy to infuse the same spirit into their male relations."-Col. Arthur Fremantle

"A negro dressed in full yankee uniform, with a rifle at full cock, leading along a barefooted white man, with whom he evidently changed clothes. General Longstreeted stopped the pair, and asked the black man what it meant. The negro replied, "The two soldiers in charge of this here yank have got drunk, so for fear he should escape I have took care of him and brought him through that little town." The cosequential manner of the negro, and the supreme contempt witch which he spoke to his prisoner, were most amusing. This little episode of a southern black leading a white yankee soldier through a Northern village, alone and of his own accord, would not have been gratiying to an abolistionist.Nor would the sympathizers both in England and in the North feel encouraged if they could hear the language of detestation and contempt with which the numerous negroes with the Southern armies speak of their so called liberators."

"I walked about in the neighborhood and saw a company of yankee soldiers on the march, who were being jeered at and hooted by small boys, and I saw a negro pursued by the crowd take refuge; he was followed by loud cries of, 'down with the n--ger! Kill all the nig-ers!' Never having been in New York before, and being totally ignorant of the state of feeling with regard to negroes, I inquired of a bystander what the negroes had done that they should want to kill them? He replied civilly enough "Oh sir, they hate them here.'"-while visiting New York

"I do not mention this difference of spirit by way of making odious comparisons between North and South in this respect, because I feel sure that these Northern gentlemen would emulate the example of their enemy if they could foresee any danger of a Southern General Butler exercising his infamous sway over Philadelphia, or of a Confederate Milroy ruling with intolerable depotism in Boston, by withholding the necessaries of life from helpless women with one hand, whilst tendering them with the other a hated and absurd oath of allegiance to a detested government.
But the mass of respectable Northerners, though they may be willing to pay, do not very naturally feel themselves called upon to give their blood in a war of aggression, ambition, and conquest. For this war is essentially a war of conquest.
If ever a nation did wage such a war, the North is now engaged, in endeavoring to conquer the South; but the more I think of all that I have seen in the Confederate states of the devotion of the whole population, the more I feel inclined to say with General Polk, 'How can you subjugate such a people as this?' and supposing that their extermination were a feasible plan, as some Northerners have suggested, I never can believe that in the nineteenth century the civilized world will be condemned to witness the destruction of such a gallant race."