Bushwhackers by William R. Trotter

Author:William R. Trotter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Civil War / History
ISBN: 9780895875518
Publisher: Blair
Published: 1988-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

It makes me mad to even think of the Home Guard for the way they done my daddy and grandmammy. When the war come, they drove off all the men into one army or the other, and then after a while they said they had to have a Home Guard to take care of the women and children. Hit was a militia they raised up, but they didn’t take care of ’em. They tuck from ’em. They was the hatefullest, most thievin’ bunch there ever was. Down at Jim Bailey’s they come in and found a little cloth in the loom Aunt Polly was weavin’ to make John some clothes and they cut it out and took it with ’em. If a family hadn’t a thing to depend on but their own cow’s milk, they’d kill her for beef right in the yard and leave ’em with nothin’.

My daddy was Allison Hoppas that was the son of Abe Hoppas that’s buried with Yankee soldiers at Knoxville. His daddy was Adam Hoppas that come from across the water in Ireland. When he come in this country he married Old Link’s daughter and heir-ed all the Grassy Creek land from him, but he lost it again puttin’ up money for slaves.

My grandmammy seen hard times after grandpap we with the Union. She was a Buchanan, sister to Lewis Buchanan that was my wife’s grandpap. This here militia knowed Grandpap was with the Union but they suspicioned he was home layin’ out. One day they come and got grandma and said they’d make her tell where he was so they could get him. She told them the truth—all she knowed. He was gone to the war and she hadn’t seen him no more’n they had. They wouldn’t believe her and kept at her until finally they dragged her out to the fence and lifted up the top rail where it sits…and put her fingers in between and walked on the rails. They thought then she’d have to tell, but she couldn’t tell what she didn’t know. When she was give out, and they got tired of that, they picked on my daddy that was just a little boy. He had a great big pet dog and they figured he’d tell anything to keep them from hurting his dog. Of course he couldn’t tell neither. Then they said if he wouldn’t they’d make him chop up his dog with the axe. And that’s what they done. He had to hack him to pieces on the door stone to the house. When I heard him tell that when I was growing up, I turned Republican right then, and I been so ever since. Two of us children was Democrats and two Republicans, so we just killed each other’s votes regular, come election….2

Allegheny County was so beset by bushwhackers in mid-1863 that its Confederate citizens appealed to neighboring Surry County for the loan of some militia. About 100 men answered the call and crossed into Allegheny, via Thompson’s Gap in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

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