[824] See Memorial of William H. Smith, J. J. Giers, and D. C. Humphreys to Congress, Feb., 1866, in Ho. Mis. Doc., No. 42, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. Testimony of the same and of M. J. Saffold in Report of Joint Committee on Reconstruction, 1866; letter of D. H. Bingham from West Point, New York; Reid, “After the War,” passim.
[825] See Le Conte, “Autobiography,” p. 236; Montgomery correspondent in N. Y. Daily News, May 7, 1866.
[826] A newspaper correspondent, the guest of ex-Governor C. C. Clay, wrote: “While the Yankee boldly marched in at the front door into his [Clay’s] parlors and best chambers to dream loyal dreams and rest now that the warfare’s o’er, the quondam aristocrat N. Y. Times, Aug. 17, 1865. The Times usually had very little of such correspondence. The Times, the Herald, and the World had good correspondents in the South, especially during Reconstruction.
[827] An old Alabama river steamboat captain had had his boat burned by Wilson, but had secured another. The Federal army regarded him as a most unmitigated “rebel.” He would play “Dixie” in spite of all prohibitions. He was finally arrested on a more serious charge.
“What do you answer to the charge against you?”
“Faith, an’ which one?”
“That you refuse to take the bodies of dead Federal soldiers on your boat to Montgomery.”
“No, no, that’s not true. God knows it would be the pleasure of my life to take the whole Yankee nation up the river in that same fix.” “Our Women in the War,” p. 281.
Colonel Robert McFarland returned to Florence in the only suit he possessed—a gray uniform. He was peremptorily ordered by the Federal officers not to wear it. He was in a quandary until a friend secured a long linen duster for him to wear. “Northern Alabama,” p. 291.
[828] Gen. T. Kilby Smith, on Sept. 14, 1865, in Mobile, made a statement for Carl Schurz in which he asserted that one of the most intelligent, well-bred, pious ladies of Mobile wanted the military authorities to whip or torture into a confession of theft two negroes whom she suspected of stealing. She considered it a hardship, he said, that a negro might not be whipped or tortured in order to force a confession, when there was no evidence against him. “I offer this,” he wrote, “as an instance of the feeling that exists in all classes against the negro.” See Doc. No. 9, accompanying the report of Schurz.