Recognizing a Brother in Nashville

(Extract from an Officer’s Private Letter.)

CAMP NEAR SPRING HILL, TENN.,

March 22, 1862.

We left Nashville day before yesterday, with colors flying.  The place is full of secesh.  They don’t like us; notwithstanding our conduct is peaceful, quiet and orderly, they are very bitter.  An example of this feeling occurred the other day.  We have a man here, brigade wagon-master, seventy-five years of age – a well-to-do farmer in Hamilton – in fact, rich.  He has gone into this thing from pure patriotic motives.  We call him Uncle, and Father Battie.  He reply to my salutation, “Good morning Uncle Battie, how do you feel this morning?” always is, “Oh, very well my son, for a young man.”  There is a preacher in Nashville, of the same denomination as B.  He came from Hamilton, too.  When preacher Elliot, some two years ago, came to Hamilton, Battie took him round that place, also to Cincinnati, paying his expenses – treating brother Elliot like a prince.  When Battie came to Nashville, he went to see brother E. dressed in his soldier’s clothes.  Battie rung the bell – E. appeared around the corner of the house. – “How do you do, brother Elliot?”  “Mr. Battie, I don’t recognize my brother in such a garb as you have on,” and broke out into a torrent of abuse.  It astonished B., but recovering, he held out his foot, and said “May be you’d recognize that?”  E. disappeared.  The old man got a big blacksnake whip and tried to find E. out of his house.  The day before we left he met him. – Battie exclaimed, “The Lord favors me, there is brother Elliot.”  He strode up to him – “Brother Elliot, do you recognize me?  “As much, Mr. Battie, as I did before.”  “Then the Lord forgive, you do not know what you do.”  He gave him a tremendous lashing across the face, until E. begged for mercy.  Battie says he thinks E. will know him in future.  Now, E. is a fair example of the rest, only they are not punished. – Will they be?  Does the Government intend to give them their deserts?

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