"I was a slave, but I's free now; I's 'fiscated."
"Where were you when the fight was going on at Fort Donelson?"
"At home; but when massa found de fort was took he started us all off for de Souf, but we got away and come down to Dover, and was 'fiscated."
The master was a Secessionist till his twenty-four chattels, which he was trying to run South, became perverse and veered to the North with much fleetness. Not only were these twenty-four started South, but ten times twenty-four, from the vicinity of Dover, and an hundred times twenty-four from Clarkesville, Nashville, and all along the Cumberland. When Donelson fell, the edifice of the Secessionists became very shaky in one corner.
Columbus was occupied on the 5th of March, the Rebels retiring to Island No. 10. Visiting the post-office, I secured several bushels of Southern newspapers, which revealed a state of general gloom and despondency throughout the Confederacy. Inspired by the events of 1861,—the battles of Bull Run, Belmont, and other engagements,—the Southern muse had struck its lyre.
The battle of Belmont had kindled a poetic flame in the breast of Jo. Augustine Signaigo, in the Memphis Appeal. The opening stanza is as follows:—
"Now glory to our Southern cause, and praises be to God,
That He hath met the Southron's foe, and scourged him with his rod;
On the tented plains of Belmont, there in their might the Vandals came.
And gave unto Destruction all they found, with sword and flame;
But they met a stout resistance from a little band that day,
Who swore that they would conquer, or return to mother clay."
After a description of the fight, we have the following warning in the tenth stanza:—
"Let the horrors of this day to the foe a warning be,
That the Lord is with the South, that His arm is with the free;
That her soil is pure and spotless as her clear and sunny sky,
And he who dare pollute it on her soil shall basely die;
For His fiat hath gone forth, e'en among the Hessian horde,
That the South has got His blessing, for the South is of the Lord."
The New Orleans Picayune had an "Ode on the Meeting of the Southern Congress, by Henry Timrod," which opened in the following lofty lines:—