The horrors of rebel supremacy in East Tennessee have not yet been told. A member of the Forty-ninth Indiana regiment now at Cumberland Ford, says that three hundred refugee East Tennesseeans have enlisted within a week from whom he gathers the following almost incredible stores of the barbarities inflicted on Union men by their rebel tyrants:
One man sixty-five years old, attacked by a large force, refused to surrender, and after being mortally wounded, having first slain four of his assailants, was propped up on the road side and sixty balls fired into his body. – Another was hanged without trial, and his son compelled to sit beneath the gallows and witness the agonies of his dying father. Two other unobtrusive, quiet citizens, were called at midnight from their beds, and in the presence of their wives and children brutally shot down, and not content with this villainy, their homes were stripped of everything. Even the wearing apparel was taken from their wives and little ones, and they turned naked into the street. Many equally brutal instances are related by honest, candid men, whose testimony none would doubt. Such are the sufferings of a people whose only crime is a refusal to become traitors.
– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, March 8, 1862, p. 1
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