“‘You dare not! You shall not kill him!’ she cried, her face blanched to the dreadful whiteness of death.
“‘Who will stop us, you cursed Rebel?’ asked the Colonel, who of all those brutal creatures seemed to me the most inhuman. ‘Here, men, pull her off, and if she won’t keep her distance make her.’”
“Rudely they tore her hands from the rope, and held them firmly despite her efforts to free herself. Then I saw the rope tighten once more and my poor brother swing into mid-air. A fresh chorus of shouts, mingled with a woman’s scream—a scream of intense relief and deep, heartfelt thankfulness—called me back to the scene of violence, where I found the work of death had been suddenly and mercifully stayed!”
Ruffianism of a similar character is described by Mrs. Nora M. Canning, of Macon, Ga. Her husband, who had been absent for some days, was brought in on a bare-backed mule, escorted by a party of Northern soldiers. Mrs. Canning says:
“I got my husband to his room as soon as possible, and found that he was very faint, as I thought, from fatigue. Imagine my horror, therefore, when he revived sufficiently to talk, to hear that the fiends had taken him to the swamp and hanged him. He said that he suspected no harm until he had gotten about two miles from the house, when they stopped, and, taking him from the mule, said: ‘Now, old man, you have got to tell us where your gold is hidden.’ He told them he had no gold. They then took him to a tree which bent over the path, tied a rope around his neck, threw it over a projecting limb and drew him up until his feet were off the ground. He did not quite lose consciousness when they let him down and said: ‘Now, where is your gold?’ He told them the same story, whereupon one of them cried: ‘We will make you tell another story before we are done with you. So pull him up again boys!’ They raised him up again, and that time, he said, he felt as if he were suffocating. They again lowered him to the ground and cried out fiercely: ‘Now tell us where that gold is or we will kill you, and your wife will never know what has become of you.’ ‘I have told you the truth—I have no gold,’ he again repeated, adding: ‘I am an old man and at your mercy. If you want to kill me you have the power to do it, but I cannot die with a lie upon my lips. I have no gold, I have a gold watch at the house, but nothing else. One of them, who seemed to be the leader, said: ‘Swing the old Rebel up again; next time we will get all the truth from him.’ They then lifted him up and let him fall with more force than before. He heard a sound as of water rushing through his head, and then a blindness came over him, and a dry choking sensation was felt in his throat as he lost consciousness. The next thing he remembered he was some distance from the place where he was hanged, lying with his head down the hill near a stream of water, and one of the men was bathing his face and another rubbing his hands. For some time he was unable to speak. Then he heard one of the men say: ‘We liked to have carried that game too far.’ When he was able to sit up they placed him upon the mule and brought him to the house to get his watch.”
Mrs. Henrietta E. Lee wrote to Gen. David Hunter a burning protest against the burning of her house, together with the house of Col. A. R. Boteler and Andrew Hunter in the lower valley of Virginia, and Governor Letcher’s and the Virginia Military Institute at Lexington, together with other acts of vandalism. In her letter she says:
“A Colonel of the Federal Army has stated that you deprived forty of your officers of their commands because they refused to carry on your malignant mischief. All honor to their names for this, at least! They are men—they have human hearts and blush for such a commander!”
“I ask, who that does not wish infamy and disgrace attached to him forever would serve under you? Your name will stand on history’s page as the Hunter of weak women and innocent children; the Hunter to destroy defenceless villages and refined and beautiful homes, to torture afresh the agonized hearts of widows; the Hunter of Africa’s poor sons and daughters, to lure them on to ruin and death of soul and body; the Hunter with the relentless heart of a wild beast, the face of a fiend and the form of a man. Oh, Earth, behold the monster!”
“Can I say, ‘God, forgive you?’ No prayer can be offered for you! Were it possible for human lips to raise your name heavenward, angels would thrust the foul thing back again, and demons claim their own. The curses of thousands, the scorn of the manly and upright, and the hatred of the true and honorable, will follow you and yours through all time and brand your name with infamy!
“Again, I demand why you have burned my home? Answer, as you must answer before the ‘Searcher of all hearts,’ why have you added this cruel, wicked deed to your many crimes?”