A Letter to Hon. Charles Sumner, with 'Statements' of Outrages upon Freedmen in Georgia

New York, November, 1861
To the Rev. H. W. Pierson, D.D., President of Cumberland College, Kentucky:
Dear Sir: The undersigned beg leave respectfully to suggest to you the propriety of repeating your paper read before the Historical Society at a recent meeting, on the Private Life of Thomas Jefferson, and making public a larger portion of your ample materials, in the form of public lectures. The unanimous expression of approbation on the part of the Society, which your paper elicited, is an earnest of the satisfaction with which your consent to lecture will be received by the public at large.
We have the honor to be, very respectfully, yours,

Washington, D. C., March 15, 1870 .
My time and labors were sacredly given to the Freedmen. In addition to the usual Sabbath services I visited them in their cabins around the stockades, and in the vicinity of the cemetery, reading the Bible to them, and talking and praying with them. It was in the prosecution of these labors that I saw and heard more of sufferings and horrible outrages inflicted upon the Freedmen than I saw and heard of as inflicted upon slaves in any five years of constant horseback travel in the South before the war, when I visited thousands of plantations as agent of the American Tract society, the American Bible Society, and as President of Cumberland College, Princeton, Kentucky. As illustrations of the sufferings of these oppressed, outraged people, and of their utter helplessness and want of protection from the State or Federal courts, I give a few of the statements that I wrote down from their own lips. I know these men, and have entire confidence in their statements.
STATEMENT OF CANE COOK.
Cane Cook now lives near Americus, Sumter County, Georgia. I heard through the colored people of the inhuman outrages committed upon him, and sent word to him to come to me if possible, that I might get a statement of the facts from his own lips. With the greatest difficulty he got into the cars at Americus, and came here to-day. He says: