Just above where we are lying, on the Tennessee shore, in Lauderdale county, resides a family formerly of Iowa, who lived there for the past four of five years and have witnessed the workings of secession in this vicinity. They say that immediately after the declarations that Tennessee had gone out of the Union, bands of armed men went prowling about the country, robbing whomsoever they chose, insulting women, and forcing loyal citizens into the rebel service at the point of a bayonet. They committed the greatest outrages everywhere, and the family of which I speak were deprived of everything valuable in the house, while the head of the household was compelled to fly from home and hide in the woods at least six or seven times to avoid impressment.
A number of Union men refused to embrace treason even when threatened with death, and those brave spirits were carried off and executed by the mob. The wife of the Iowa man, says a great many were hanged, and that she herself knows of six who were suspended from a tree within two miles of her own dwelling, and left a prey to the buzzards and crows. Their bodies were afterward taken down and buried, but not before the rebel outlaws were at a safe distance, as the people were fearful, and without reason, that had it been known the rights of sepulture had been given the poor martyrs, those who performed that common act of charity would probably have shared their fate.
The woman says that one of the Union men who had been impressed and afterward deserted more perhaps because he believed his family were starving than from his abhorrence of joining so unholy a cause, was captured in Lauderdale county while on his way home, and was actually nailed to a tree and left their to perish by inches. The man was found there a week after, merely by accident, as he had been gagged to prevent his outcries, and thus deprive him of all hope of release, and taken to the house of a neighbor. The unfortunate victim was still alive, but so much exhausted from exposure, famine and pain, that he died on the second day after his release, notwithstanding every effort was made to save his life. This story seem most improbably; [too] horrible for belief; but the woman, who has no motive for misrepresentation, declares it true, and I can see no good reason for discrediting her account of the unnatural, cruel and entirely monstrous transaction. – {Ft. Pillow Cor. Of N. Y. Tribune.
– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, May 10, 1862, p. 3
A number of Union men refused to embrace treason even when threatened with death, and those brave spirits were carried off and executed by the mob. The wife of the Iowa man, says a great many were hanged, and that she herself knows of six who were suspended from a tree within two miles of her own dwelling, and left a prey to the buzzards and crows. Their bodies were afterward taken down and buried, but not before the rebel outlaws were at a safe distance, as the people were fearful, and without reason, that had it been known the rights of sepulture had been given the poor martyrs, those who performed that common act of charity would probably have shared their fate.
The woman says that one of the Union men who had been impressed and afterward deserted more perhaps because he believed his family were starving than from his abhorrence of joining so unholy a cause, was captured in Lauderdale county while on his way home, and was actually nailed to a tree and left their to perish by inches. The man was found there a week after, merely by accident, as he had been gagged to prevent his outcries, and thus deprive him of all hope of release, and taken to the house of a neighbor. The unfortunate victim was still alive, but so much exhausted from exposure, famine and pain, that he died on the second day after his release, notwithstanding every effort was made to save his life. This story seem most improbably; [too] horrible for belief; but the woman, who has no motive for misrepresentation, declares it true, and I can see no good reason for discrediting her account of the unnatural, cruel and entirely monstrous transaction. – {Ft. Pillow Cor. Of N. Y. Tribune.
– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, May 10, 1862, p. 3
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