(Part 2 of 2) In his book, Auman quotes from Confederate Congressman J.M. Leach’s letter to Confederate Governor Zebulon Vance on September 18, 1864, urging him “for humanity’s sake” to restrain those soldiers and giving examples of how they were treating their fellow citizens:
“. . . the choking & dragging some hundred yards on the ground of an old lady, skinning her knees [and] hips till they bleed — & she a respectable and respected woman, — insulting delicate women with children at their breast, cursing them & their little ones for asking for bread after having been arrested & held for days out in camp — following women of admitted respectability in obeying the calls of nature taunting them hissing obscene language seizing another & dragging her by the arms & head etc etc — eating up & wasting & destroying the little that a deserter’s wife or child or mother may have etc etc — arresting & taking to camp & insulting the sister of one of our merchants of this place who is also a magistrate & tax assessor for this county & a terribly strong Vance man.”
Auman also quotes from lawyer Thomas Settle’s letter to Governor Vance on October 4, 1864, protesting the legality of the order by which all of these things were taking place:
“I found in Chatham, Randolph, and Davidson that some fifty women in each County & some of them in delicate health and far advanced in pregnancy were rudly (in some instances) draged from their homes & put under close guard & there kept for some weeks. The consequences in some instances have been shocking. Women have been frightened into abortions almost under the eyes of their terrifiers. . . . I know that your Excellency never has intended by any order to justify torture & yet in many cases where the treatment has been equally as bad as it was in the Owens Case, the officers boldly avow their conduct & say that they understand your orders to be a full justification. Last week in Randolph I tried a man who had actually hung his neighbor until he was senseless, in order to extort confessions from him.”
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