Tuesday, December 25, 2012

A Slave-Catching General

General Hooker, commanding on the Lower Potomac, is not more addicted to slave-catching than the Gen. McCook at Nashville, referred to by our own correspondent – himself a Kentuckian.  The following corroborating testimony is by the correspondent of the Pittsburgh Gazette, writing from Nashville:

The Jackson Mississippian, in recording the feats of Lieut. Trotter, at Fort Donelson, says that while he was engaged in shooting down five Federals in a pile, with a single revolver, his servant, a negro boy, ran up to assist him, “and while fighting manfully by his side, was shot down by the enemy, when his mater, with one wipe of his bowie-knife, killed the man who slew his servant.”  Terrible monster, and devoted servant, were they not?  Some of our Generals make it a rule to see that none of the negroes become devoted to them in the same style.  When one comes into the camp of Gen. McCook – “a big bellied and profane Brigadier” – he takes particular care to have the man spotted, recorded, guarded, and returned to the man who first applies for him.  Gen. McCook received a lengthy notice in the secesh papers here for his liberality in returning the slaves of individuals who have been engaged in the rebellion.  He swears “he’ll have no G-d d----d Abolitionist in his command.”  He is the individual to whom the correspondent of the New York World lately referred in a letter from this place.  He has long been a disgrace to the army – is a man without sense, modesty or discretion, and is entirely out of place as the commanding and superior officer of such a man as Gen. Lovell H. Rousseau, of Kentucky, whose brigade is in his division, or Gen. Negley, whose brigade was in the same deplorable condition.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, April 5, 1862, p. 2

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