A case of Yankee barbarity.
Among the thousand acts of barbarity practiced by the Yankee invader in Virginia, none have exceeded the murder of Mrs. George R. Smith. at Suffolk, a full account of which we take from the Petersburg Express:Mr. Smith resided about one mile from the town, a well to do farmer, having around him an interesting family, the eldest one a gallant young man in the 16th Va. regiment. When Gen. Longstreet invested Suffolk a sharp artillery and infantry skirmish took place near Mr. Smith's residence, and many balls passed through his house. The Yankees finally advanced and fired the houses, forcing the family to leave. Mrs. Smith, with her seven children, the youngest only ten months old, at tempted to escape to the woods and into the Confederate lines, when she was fired upon by the Yankee soldiers, and a Minnie ball entering her limb just below the hip, she died in thirty minutes, from loss of blood.--The children, frightened, hid themselves in the bushes, while Mr. Smith sat down upon the ground by his wife, to see her breathe her last. After she had been dead for some time, the Yankee commander permitted him to take a cart, and, with no assistance except one of his children, he put the dead body in the cart and carried it into town. On his arrival in town he was not permitted to take the remains of his wife to her brother's residence until he had first gone through the town to the Provost Marshal's offices and obtained permission. On his arrival at the Provost Marshal's office, he was grimly told to take his wife to the graveyard and bury her. He carried her to her brother's, John R. Kilby, Esq., and a few friends prepared her for burial, Mr. Kilby not being allowed to leave the house, or to attend the remains of his sister to the graveyard.
Nor did the ernest of the fiends stop here. Mr. Smith was denied the privilege of going in search of his little children, and for four days and nights they wandered in the woods and among the soldiers without anything to eat or any place to sleep. The baby was taken up by a colored woman and nursed, until some private in the Yankee army, with a little better near than his associates, took it on his horse and carried it to town. Mr. Smith is still in the lines of the enemy, his house and everything else he had destroyed, and his little children cared for by his friends.
Will not the Confederate soldiers now in Pennsylvania remember such acts of cruelty and barbarism? Will not the Nansemond companies remember it? And will not that gallant boy in the 16th regiment remember his mother's fate, and take vengeance on the enemy? Will not such a cruel race of people eventually reap the fruit of their doings? God grant that they may.
