USA > Georgia > Stories of Georgia > Part 17
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As the locomotive neared Calhoun, Engineer Knight gave several loud blasts on the whistle; and it was well he did so, for the passenger train had just begun to pull out of Calhoun on its way to Adairsville. If the whistle had been blown a moment later than it was, the passen- ger train would have been under full headway, and the signal would not have been heard; but the passenger
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train had just begun to move, and was going slowly. The whistle was heard, and the engineer backed his train to Calhoun again. But when Andrews and his men arrived, they found a new difficulty in the way. The passenger train was such a long one that the rear end blocked the track. Andrews tried to get the con- ductor to move on to Adairsville and there meet the upbound passenger train; but that official was too badly scared by the danger he had just escaped to take any more chances, and he refused to budge until the other train should arrive. This would be fatal to the plans of Andrews, and that bold adventurer made up his mind that the time had come for force to be used. The con- ductor was finally persuaded to allow Andrews to go ahead with his powder train. He ran a little more than a mile beyond Calhoun, stopped his train, ordered the wire cut and another rail torn up. While they were busily engaged in this work, they were both amazed and alarmed to see a locomotive approaching from the direction of Calhoun. They had only bent the rail, and were compelled to leave it and get out of the way of their pursuers.
Andrews and his men were bold and intrepid, even reckless ; but the men who were pursuing them had all these qualities, and some others besides. They had an energy and a determination that nothing could stand in the way of.
We have seen how Superintendent Murphy, Conduc- 1
tor W. A. Fuller, and Engineer Jeff. Cain leaped from the breakfast table at Big Shanty, and went running after the flying locomotive, followed by the laughter
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and jeers of the thousands of loitering soldiers who enjoyed the spectacle ; but Murphy and Fuller had hit upon a plan of pursuit the moment they saw that their locomotive had been captured, and the plan formed in the mind of each was the same: consequently they had no need to stop and discuss the matter. They ran
along the track a considerable distance until they came to a hand car such as the track hands use. With this they made tolerable speed; but suddenly, while they were poling along at a great rate, the car tumbled from the track. They had now come to the place where the raiders had torn up the first rail. The pursuers were not hurt by the fall. They jumped to their feet, pushed the car over the obstruction, and were soon on their way again, going even more rapidly than before. In this way Murphy and Fuller came to Etowah station, where they found a superannuated locomotive engaged in hauling wood.
To this rickety old machine they attached a flat car loaded with soldiers, and made their way to Kingston. As Andrews and his men had been delayed at Kingston for more than an hour, waiting for the three freight trains to pass, Murphy and Fuller reached Kingston only ten minutes after the raiders had left. Here one of the best locomotives on the road was pressed into service, and the pursuit continued. It was at this time that Andrews and his men were engaged in tearing up the track beyond Kingston, and where they were so much amazed to hear the whistle of the pursuing locomotive. Murphy and Fuller, who were on the watch for breaks in the road, saw the lifted rail in time to avoid trouble. They left their locomotive; with
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the flat car and soldiers, standing on the track, and again set out on foot in pursuit of the stolen locomotive. After running and walking hard for two miles, they met a freight train which had left Adairsville coming south just as Andrews and his men had left that station going north. They flagged the train down, reversed it, and ran it back into Adairsville.
Andrews and his men had left Adairsville not long before, in spite of the fact that a passenger train going south was overdue there. Murphy and Fuller did not hesitate an instant. They got together a force of track- men and soldiers, and, without telling them of the dan- gers ahead, went rushing to Calhoun. Andrews, as. has been seen, had caused the overdue passenger train to remain at Calhoun, and had finally induced the con- ductor to let the "powder train " pass. Beyond Cal- houn he stopped to cut the wire and tear up another rail, and had actually pried it above the stringers and bent it, when they heard the pursuing locomotive, and then saw it rounding a curve some distance away. Murphy and Fuller saw the bent rail, but, being deter- mined to take all the chances, drove their engine over it under a full head of steam. The rail settled back in its place, and the pursuing train went over safely.
From this point the chase was the most thrilling and reckless of any of which we have record. In order to delay pursuit, Andrews and his men began to drop on the track behind them the cross-ties they had intended to use to burn the bridges. Fuller seated himself on the cowcatcher, and when a cross-tie was found to be in a dangerous position, the locomotive would slow up,
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and he would run forward and remove the tie. Seeing that this would not do, Andrews uncoupled one of his box cars and left it on the track. Murphy and Fuller pushed it to a siding, and there left it. A second car was dropped, and this was disposed of in the same way. The fugitives failed to gain on their pursuers. The chase went on until Andrews found his supply of fuel running short. He ran his locomotive to a wood rack ; but before the tender was half full, Murphy and Fuller. came in sight; and while they were removing an ob- stacle that had been placed on the track, the soldiers they had brought with them opened such a hot fire on Andrews and his men, that they had to take refuge in the box car. The raiders then, without having secured as much wood as they wanted, continued their flight.
The chase now became more interesting than ever. The people standing near the stations in towns and vil- lages knew not what to make of the scene. Before they could recover from the surprise of seeing a locomotive with one box car dashing madly over the switches, they would be struck dumb with amazement at seeing an- other train come thundering along, carrying a flat car full of excited soldiers. Although all the odds were now against Andrews, he was still intent on doing what he set out to do. If he could burn the first Chicka- mauga bridge, he would be safe. He would then have ample leisure to burn the whole series of bridges, and go on to Chattanooga without further trouble. Bent on this, he ordered his men to throw a good part of the fuel on the track; and while the pursuers were remov- ing this, the raiders made an effort to tear up a rail.
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To make the matter more certain, they selected one of the many curves not far from the Chickamauga River. They had hardly got under way again, when they saw the smokestack of the pursuing locomotive. They watched to see it pause or be dashed to pieces, but instead of that it went around the curve that had been derailed as swiftly and as smoothly as if the track had been newly laid and well ballasted. This seemed to be ·in the nature of a miracle to Andrews and his men, and the mystery was not explained to the survivors for years afterwards; then Mr. Antony Murphy showed that the rail had been removed from the inside of the curve. If it had been removed from the outside, nothing would have prevented the destruction of the pursuers.
Andrews, fertile as he was in expedients, had now come to his last one. He ordered the box car to be set on fire. To carry this out, nearly all the fuel in the tender was piled up in the car. Soon the car was in a blaze, and the locomotive hauled it swiftly along. A volume of roaring flames streamed far behind. Soon the first bridge over the Chickamauga was reached. It was a covered bridge. A full stop was made by Andrews, the blazing car uncoupled, and more fuel piled on the flames. A heavy rain had come up, and it was falling in torrents at that moment : consequently the flames were not easily communicated to the struc- ture of the bridge.
The emergency that the pursuers had to meet was a serious one, but Murphy and Fuller were quite equal to it. Antony Murphy was running the locomo- tive; and he hesitated not a moment, but went thunder-
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ing into the covered bridge, and pushed the flaming car from it. Once off the bridge, where the rain could get at it, the blazing car was no longer dangerous. It was rolled out of the way; and by this time Andrews and his men were out of sight again, but not for long. The pursuing locomotive soon began to overtake the fleeing raiders. Andrews had well-
nigh exhausted all his fuel, and the
steam in the boiler of his loco-
motive began to get low. There was now but one
thing to do, and that was to abandon it. So, while it was still going at a good rate of speed, Andrews gave the word and set the example ; and he and his daring band tum- bled from the loco- motive as best they could, and fled through the woods in all directions. All were finally caught and put in prison in Chattanooga.
The raid had given the people and the military authorities such a scare, that Andrews and seven of the men were tried and hanged. Six made their escape, and never were recaptured, and six were regularly exchanged. The hanging of Andrews and his seven companions is to be regretted. They were brave
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enough to deserve a better fate. They were engaged in the boldest adventure of the war, and one of the best planned. It was only by the merest chance that they had two such men as Murphy and Fuller to oppose them. Either of these men was fully the equal of Andrews in intelligence, boldness, and energy, and that is saying a great deal. They took chances and ran risks, in pursuing Andrews and his men, that won the enthusiastic admiration of those brave and reckless raiders. If the daring project had succeeded, the Fed- erals would have been able to strike a severe blow at the Confederacy's main source of war supplies much earlier than they were afterwards able to do.
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THE RECONSTRUCTION PERIOD.
T HE people of the State had not recovered from the chaos and confusion into which they had been thrown by Sherman's march to the sea, when the news came that Lee had surrendered in Virginia, and Gen- eral Joseph E. Johnston (who had been restored to his command) in North Carolina. Thus a sudden and vio- lent end had been put to all hopes of establishing a separate government. General Sherman, who was as relentless in war as he was pacific and gentle when the war was over, had, in coming to terms with General Johnston, advanced the theory that the South never had dissolved the Union, and that the States were restored to their old places the moment they laid down their arms. This theory was not only consistent with the views of the Union men of the North, but with the nature and character of the Republic itself. But in the short and common-sense cut that Sherman had made to a solution, he left the politicians out in the cold, and they cried out against it as a hideous and ruthless piece of assumption on the part of a military man to attempt to have any opinions after the war was over. Any set- tlement that left the politicians out in the cold was not to be tolerated. Some of these gentlemen had a very big and black crow to pick with the South. Some of
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them, in the course of the long debate over slavery, had had their feelings hurt by Southern men; and although these wrangles had been purely personal and individual, the politicians felt that the whole South ought to be humiliated still further.
The politicians would have been entirely harmless if the life of President Lincoln had been spared. During the war, Mr. Lincoln was greatly misunderstood even at the North ; but it is now the general verdict of his- tory, that, take him for all in all, he was beyond all comparison the greatest man of his time, the one man who, above all others, was best fitted to bring the people of the two sections together again, and to make the Union a more perfect Union than ever before. But unfortunately Mr. Lincoln fell by the hands of an assas- sin, and never had an opportunity to carry out the great policy of pacification which could only have been sustained at that time by his great influence, by his patience, that was supreme, and by his wisdom, that has proved to be almost infallible in working out the salva- tion of the Union. After Lee's surrender, the interests of the South could have sustained no severer blow than the death of Lincoln. His successor, Andrew Johnson, was a well-meaning man, but a very narrow-minded one in some respects, and a very weak one in others. It is but justice to him to say that he did his best to carry out Lincoln's policy of pacification, and his failure was no greater than that of any other leading politician of his time would have been.
It would be impossible to describe the condition of the people at this time. There was no civil law in
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operation, and the military government that had been established was not far-reaching enough to restrain vio- lence of any sort. The negroes had been set free, and were supported by means of a "freedmen's bureau." They were free, and yet they wanted some practical evidence of it. To obtain this, they left the plantations on which they had been born, and went tramping about the country in the most restless and uneasy manner.
A great many of them believed that freedom meant idleness, such as they had seen white folks indulge in. The country negroes flocked to the towns and cities in great numbers, and the freedmen's bureau, active as its agents were, had a great deal more than it could attend to. Such peace and order as existed was not main- tained by any authority, but grew naturally out of the awe that had come over both whites and blacks at find- ing their condition and their relations so changed. The
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whites could hardly believe that slavery no longer ex- isted. The negroes had grave doubts as to whether they were really free. To make matters worse, a great many small politicians, under pretense of protecting the negroes, but really to secure their votes, began a cru- sade against the South in Congress, the like of which can hardly be found paralleled outside of our own his- tory. The people of the South found out long ago that the politicians of the hour did not represent the intentions and desires of the people of the North; and there is much comfort and consolation to be got out of that fact, even at this late day. But at that time the bitterest dose of reconstruction was the belief that the best opinion of the North sustained the ruinous policy that had been put in operation.
The leading men of the State were all disfranchised, - deprived of the privilege of voting, a privilege that was freely conferred on the negroes. A newspaper editor in Macon was imprisoned, and his paper sup- pressed, for declaring, in regard to taking the amnesty oath, that he had to "fortify himself for the occasion with a good deal of Dutch courage." The wife of General Toombs was ordered by an assistant commis- sioner of the freedmen's bureau to vacate her home with only two weeks' provisions, the grounds of the order being that the premises were "abandoned prop- erty," and, as such, were to be seized, and applied to the uses of the freedmen's bureau. The superior offi- cer of this assistant commissioner, being a humane and kindly man, revoked the order.
These were the days when the carpet-bagger and
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the scalawag flourished, -the camp followers of the Northern army, who wanted money and office ; and the native-born Southerner, who wanted office and money. There is no doubt that the indignities heaped on the people led to acts of retaliation that nothing else could excuse ; but they were driven to desperation. It
seemed, in that hour, that their liberties had been entirely withdrawn. Governor Brown, who had for- merly been so popular, was denounced because he advised Georgians to accept the situation. He, with other wise men, thought it was a waste of time and opportunity to discuss constitutional questions at a mo- ment when the people were living under bayonet rule. Joe Brown's plan was to accept the situation, and then get rid of it as quickly as possible. Ben Hill's plan was to fight it to the last. There was a fierce con- troversy between these two leaders; and such strong expressions were used on both sides, that General Pope made them the subject of a curious letter to his com- mander in chief, General Grant.
General Pope seemed to be afraid that war was about to break out again, and he assumed charge of everything. He removed and appointed mayors of cities, solicitors, and sheriffs. He closed the State University because a student made a speech which was in effect a defense of civil law. After a while the general said he would reopen the institution if the press of the State would say nothing about the affair. In 1867, General Pope ordered an election to be held for delegates to a State convention. The polls were kept open five days, and voters were allowed to
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vote in any precinct in any county upon their making oath that they were entitled to vote. The convention met, but, in the nature of things, could not be a repre- sentative body. Thousands of the best and most rep- resentative men of the State were not allowed to vote, and thousands of other good men refused to take part in an election held under the order of a military com- mander : consequently, when the convention met, its membership was made up of the political rag-tag-and- bobtail of that day. There were a few good men in the body, but they had little influence over the igno- rant negroes and vicious whites who had taken advan- tage of their first and last opportunity to hold office.
The authority of this convention was not recognized by the State government, and this contest gave rise to a fresh conflict between the State officials and the mili- tary dictators who had been placed over them. The convention needed money to pay its expenses, and passed an ordinance directing the treasurer of the State to pay forty thousand dollars for this purpose to the disbursing officer of the convention. General Pope issued an order to the treasurer to pay this amount. The treasurer declined to pay out the money, for the simple reason that he was forbidden by law to pay out money except on an order or warrant drawn by the gov- crnor, and sanctioned by the comptroller general.
About this time General Meade was appointed to rule in Georgia in place of General Pope, and he found this matter unsettled when he took charge. So he wrote to Governor Jenkins, and requested him to draw his war- rant on the treasury for forty thousand dollars. The
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governor could find no authority in law for paying over this sum, and he therefore refused. But civil gov- ernment was not of much importance to the military at that time; so, when he had received the governor's letter, General Meade drew a sheet of paper before him, called for pen and ink, and issued "General Order No. 8," in which the announcement is made that "the fol- lowing-named officers are detailed for duty in the dis- trict of Georgia : Brevet Brigadier General Thomas H. Ruger, Colonel 33d Infantry, to be Governor of the State of Georgia; Brevet Captain Charles F. Rockwell, Ord- nance Corps U. S. Army, to be Treasurer of the State of Georgia."
In this way the rag-tag-and-bobtail convention got its money, but it got also the hatred and contempt of the people; and the Republican party, - the party that had been molded and made by the wise policy of Lin- . coln, -by indorsing these foolish measures of recon- struction, and putting its influence behind the outrages . that were committed in the name of "loyalty," aroused prejudices in the minds of the Southern people that have not died away to this day. Some of the more vicious of the politicians of that epoch organized what was known as "The Union League." It was a secret political society, and had branches in every county of the State. Through the medium of this secret organiza- tion, the basest deception was practiced on the ignorant negroes. They were solemnly told that their old mas- ters were making arrangements to reënslave them, and all sorts of incendiary suggestions were made to them. It was by means of this secret society that the negroes
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were made to believe that they would be entitled to forty acres and a mule for voting for the candidates of the carpet-baggers.
The effect of all this was to keep the blacks in a con- stant state of turmoil. They were too uneasy to settle down to work, and too sus- picious to enter into con- tracts with the whites : so they went wandering KKK= about the State from town to town and from county to county, com- mitting all sorts of crimes. As the civil system had been en- tirely overthrown by the military, there was neither law nor order; and this con- dition was very seriously aggravated by the incen- diary teachings of The Union League. The people, therefore, in some parts of the South, offset this secret society with another, which was called the "Ku Klux Klan." This organization was intended to pre- vent violence and to restore order in communities ; but the spirit of it was very frequently violated by lawless persons, who, acting in the name of the " Klan," sub- jected defenseless negroes to cruel treatment.
There is no darker period in the history of the State
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than that of reconstruction. The tax payers were robbed in the most reckless way, and the rights of citizens were entirely disregarded. Even when the Republican Congress, responsive to the voice of con- servative Northern opinion, turned its back on the carpet-bag government of Georgia, these men made a tremendous effort to extend their rule unlawfully. The carpet-bag Legislature was in session three hundred and twenty-eight days, and cost the State nearly one million dollars; whereas the cost of legislation from 1853 to 1862, nine years, was not nine hundred thousand dol- lars. In one year the State Road took in a million dollars and a half; and of this immense sum, only forty-five thousand dollars was paid into the treasury. Added to this, the road had been run into debt to the amount of six hundred thousand dollars, and it had been run down to such an extent that five hundred thousand was needed to place it in good condition.
During this trying period, Joseph E. Brown, who had been so popular with the people, was under a cloud. He had advised accepting the reconstruction measures in the first instance, so that they might be carried out by men who had the confidence and the esteem of the State; but this wise proposition brought upon his head only reproaches and abuse. The public mind was in such a state of frenzied uneasiness, the result of carpet- bag robbery and recklessness, that the people would listen to no remedy except passionate defiance and denunciation. When the name of Brown was men- tioned only as a handle of abuse, Benjamin H. Hill became the leader and the idol of the people. When,
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in 1870, Hill issued an address declaring that the recon- struction must be accepted by the people, he was at once made the object of the most violent attacks. But Brown was right in 1864, and Hill was right in 1870, and the people were wrong. They paid dearly for their blindness in the wrongs imposed on them by men who were neither Republicans nor reconstructionists at heart, but public plunderers.
In 1871 the carpet-bag government began to totter. The governor left the State, and staid away so long that the State treasurer, a man of stern integrity, re- fused to pay warrants that were not signed by a resi- dent governor. Finally the governor returned, but almost immediately resigned. In a short time the real representatives of the people took charge of affairs, and since that time the State has been in a highly pros- perous condition.
"THE NEW SOUTH."
W HEN the people of Georgia had once more gained control of their State government, the political tempest that had been raging slowly quieted down. A pot that has been boiling furiously doesn't grow cool in a moment, but it ceases almost instantly to boil; and though it may cool slowly, it cools surely. There was not an end of "prejudice and unreason the moment the people had disposed of those who were plundering them, but prejudice began to lose its force as soon as men had the opportunity to engage in calm discussion, and to look forward hopefully to the future. In the midst of bayonet and carpet-bag rule, the State could not make any real progress. It is only during a time of peace and contentment that the industrial forces of a community begin to display their real energy.
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