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authority.
1 Inquiring of a leading
Nashville secessionist, on the evening after hearing
Pillow's harangue, what authority the
General had for his magnificent offer, he smiled and said, in a manner, indicative of the disesteem in which the conspirator was held in his own State, “The authority of
Gid.
Pillow.”
In the course of the war that ensued, which this disloyal Tennessean strove so hard to kindle, the hand of retributive justice fell upon him, as upon all of his co-workers in iniquity, with crushing force.
Our detention at Grand Junction was fortunate for us. We intended to travel eastward through East Tennessee and Virginia to Richmond, and homeward by way of Washington and Baltimore.
The car in which we left our place of detention was full of passengers, many of them from the North, and all of them excited by the news in the Memphis pagers of that morning.
The telegraphic dispatches from the East were alarming and distressing, and the tone of the papers containing them was exultant and defiant.
It was asserted that on the day before,
eight hundred
Massachusetts troops had been captured, and more than one hundred killed, while trying to pass through
Baltimore.
The annunciation was accompanied by a rude wood-cut, made for the occasion, representing the
National flag tattered and humbled beneath the secession banner, that was waving over a cannon discharging.
2 It was also announced that
Harper's Ferry had been seized and was occupied by the insurgents; that the New York
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Wood-out from a Memphis newspaper. |
Seventh Regiment, in a fight with Marylanders, had been defeated with great loss; that Norfolk and Washington would doubtless be in the hands of the insurgents in a day or two; that General Scott had certainly resigned his commission and offered his services to Virginia;3 and that President Lincoln was about to follow his
