Down The Mississippi

EFFECT OF THE BATTLE OF SHILOH.

The refugees corroborate the statement that the battle of Shiloh, though claimed as a triumph, is regarded throughout the South as a great calamity by the leaders and abettors of the rebellion; and that the people, though deceived at first by the press, have, from interviews with the wounded soldiers, learned what was so carefully sought to be concealed. There is no doubt that Shiloh has been a terrible blow to the enemy, and one from which they can hardly recover.


LIBERTY OR DEATH.

Within the past three months a large number of slaves have been sent further South and sold to new masters; and the scenes in the auction marts have been often harrowing to witness – families being separated without the least regard for humanity, or that kind of external decency which the slave-owners frequently affect to observe.

A week or two since, a large and rather intelligent mulatto was taken from his wife and children and sold to a Texas planter at James’s mart. He, poor fellow, was greatly depressed, and seemed for a time unconscious of everything passing around him. At last he aroused himself from his introspection, and asked if he had been sold, and to whom? The name of his planter was given, and the location of his plantation.

An expression of agony, succeeded by a cloud of despair, passed over the man’s face; but without speaking, he walked quietly into the middle of the street, and before any one could divine his motive, or anticipate his intentions, he drew a pistol, which he had concealed upon his person, and placing the muzzle to his forehead pulled the trigger.

The upper part of the mulatto’s head was fairly blown off; and he fell a mangled corpse in the mist of the crowded thoroughfare.

The bondsman was free. Suicide had saved him from slavery.

The crowd, ever curious, but rarely sympathetic, especially when a negro is the sufferer or the victim, gathered for a moment about the body; but no one pitied, no one bestowed more thought upon the heart-broken, self-slain husband and father than if he had been a butchered ox.

A few asked, “What the devil was the matter with the nigger?” Others observed: “The d----d cursed darkey. I could have sold him for two thousand dollars. I’m just so much out of pocket. If he’d come to life again, I’d give him forty lashes.”

But the crowd went hurrying on, and the negro, and the great tragedy, deeper, and grander and more awful than “Othello,” were forgotten; and the heroic martyr was hauled away like a poisoned dog.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, May 10, 1862, p. 2