As political affairs were the only topic of conversation, we had excellent opportunity for preventing any similar misunderstanding touching ourselves. Courteously, but frankly, we told them that we were in favor of the war, of emancipation, and of arming the negroes. They manifested considerable feeling, but used no harsh expressions. Two questions they invariably asked:—
"What are you going to do with us, after you have subjugated us?" and, "What will you do with the negroes, after you have freed them?"
They talked much of our leading officers, all seeming to consider Rosecrans the best general in the Union service. Nearly all used the stereotyped Rebel expression:—
"You can never conquer seven millions of people on their own soil. We will fight to the last man! We will die in the last ditch!"
We reminded them that the determination they expressed was by no means peculiar to them, referring to Bancroft, in proof that even the Indian tribes, at war with the early settlers of New England, used exactly the same language. We asked one Texan colonel, noticeably voluble concerning the "last ditch," what he meant by it—if he really intended to fight after their armies should be dispersed and their cities taken.
"Oh, no!" he replied, "you don't suppose I'm a fool, do you? As long as there is any show for us, we shall fight you. If you win, most of us will go to South America, Mexico, or Europe."
Interview with Jacob Thompson.
On Monday evening, Major-General Forney, of Alabama, sent an officer to escort us to his head-quarters. He received us with great frigidity, and we endeavored to be quite as icy as he. With some of his staff officers, genial young fellows educated in the North, we had a pleasant chat.
Jacob Thompson, of Mississippi, Buchanan's Secretary of the Interior, and now a colonel on the staff of Lieutenant-General Pemberton, was at the same head-quarters. With the suavity of an old politician, he conversed with us for two or three hours. He asserted that some of our soldiers had treated his aged mother with great cruelty. He declared that Northern dungeons now contained at least three thousand inoffensive Southern citizens, who had never taken up arms, and were held only for alleged disloyalty.
Many other Rebel officers talked a great deal about arbitrary arrests in the North. Several gravely assured us that, in the South, from the beginning of the war, no citizen had ever been arrested, except by due process of law, under charges well defined, and publicly made. We were a little astounded, afterward, to learn how utterly bare-faced was this falsehood.