He was a man of intuitive ideas and originality of character. Although bred up under the influence of the peculiar institution, poor, and uneducated, he had early formed clear and strong convictions on the subject of slavery. “I was an Abolitionist before I ever heard the word abolitionist.” He believed in true religion, but not in the religion of traitors.
“I never hesitated to tell ’em what I thought. ‘God has no more to do with you all,’ says I, ‘than he has with last year’s rain. I’d as lieves go to a gambling-house, as to go and hear a minister pray that God would drive back the armies of the North. You are on your knees mocking at God, and He laughs at you!’ Events proved that what I said was true. After every Fast, the Rebels lost some important point. There was a Fast-day just before Fort Donelson; another before New Orleans was taken; another before Gettysburg and Vicksburg; another before Atlanta fell; and another before the evacuation of Richmond. That was the way God answered their prayers.”
He corroborated the worst accounts I had heard concerning the state of society in Richmond during the war.
“It seemed as though there was nothing but thieving and robbery going on. The worst robbers were Hood’s men, set to guard the city. They’d halt a man, and shoot him right down if he wouldn’t stop. They’d ask a man the time, and snatch his watch. They went to steal some chickens of a man I knew, and as he tried to prevent them, they killed him. At last the women got to stealing. We had an insurrection of women here, you know. I never saw such a sight. They looked like flocks of old buzzards, picked geese, and cranes; dressed in all sorts of odd rigs; armed with hatchets, knives, axes,—anything they could lay their hands on. They collected together on the Square, and Governor Letcher made ’em a speech from the Monument. They hooted at him. Then Jeff Davis made a speech; they hooted at him too; they didn’t want speeches, they said; they wanted bread. Then they begun to plunder the stores. They’d just go in and carry off what they pleased. I saw three women put a bag of potatoes, and a barrel of flour, and a firkin of butter in a dray; then they ordered the darkey to drive off, with two women for a guard.”
Another of the faithful twenty-one was Mr. L——, whom I found at a restaurant kept by him near the old market. It was he who carried off Col. Dahlgren’s body, after it had been buried by the Rebels at Oak Wood.
“I found a negro who knew the spot, and hired him to go with me one dark night, and dig up the body. We carried it to Mr. Rowlett’s house [Mr. Rowlett was another of the faithful], and afterwards took it through the Confederate lines, in broad daylight, hid under a load of peach-trees, and buried it in a metallic case. It lay there until after the evacuation, when it was dug up and sent home to Admiral Dahlgren’s family.”
Mr. L—— devoted much of his time and means during the war to feeding Union prisoners, and helping Union men through the lines. “I was usually at work that way all night; so the next day I’d be looking sick and sleepy; and that way,—with a little money to bribe the doctors,—I kept out of the Rebel army.” In January, 1865, he was arrested for sending information through the lines to General Butler, and lay in prison until the evacuation.
One of the most interesting evenings in my Richmond experience I passed at the house of Mr. W——, on Twenty-fifth Street. A Northern man by birth and education, he had remained true to his nativity at a time when so many from the Free States living at the South had proved renegades and apostates. Arrested early in the war for “disloyalty,” he had suffered six months in Salisbury Prison because he would not take the oath of allegiance to the Confederate Government.
“I could have got my liberty any day by taking that oath. But I never would, and never did. As good and true men as ever trod the earth died there because they would not take it. Mr. Buck, of Kentucky, was one. Almost his last words were, ‘Tell my wife I would be glad to go home, but I’d rather die here than take an oath that will perjure my soul.’ He was happy; he died. Dying was not the worst part of it, by any means; our sufferings every day were worse than death.”
Liberated at last, through the intercession of his wife, Mr. W—— came home, and devoted himself to feeding and rescuing Union prisoners, and to serving his country in other perilous ways.