Wednesday, October 14, 2009

A letter from a soldier at Newport News . . .

. . . [relates] the following incident, giving a slave woman’s account of the capture of the rebel batteries on Gen. McClellan’s advance upon Yorktown:– “The attack on the batteries cannot be better described than in the words of an old contraband whom I fell in with on a scout to Young’s Mills the day after the capture. She was secesh, and took us to belong to the same accursed race. On asking her if there was much fighting at the battery, she replied: ‘Why, lordy, you won’t blebe me, massa, but de Yankee he fire just one round, den commence hollering like de debbel, and frew right ober de breastworks; but they couldn’t ketch our folks (secesh) dey run so fast.’”

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, April 26, 1862, p. 2

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