This letter was picked up by a member of the Mounted Rifles in a deserted Confederate camp on the Chowan River, about thirty miles from Winton.
It was headed: “Read it if you want to, you thieving scalp-hunter, and forward, postpaid, to the lord high chancellor of the devil’s exchequer on earth, Jeff Davis, Richmond, Va.”
“Headquarters ‘Scalp-Hunters’ Camp Chowan, N. C., January 11.
Excellency Davis: It is with feelings of undeveloped pleasure that an affectionate conscript intrusts this sheet of confiscated paper to the tender mercies of a Confederate States mail-carrier, addressed as it shall be to yourself, O Jeff, Red Jacket of the Gulf and Chief of the Six Nations—more or less. He writes on the stump of a shivered monarch of the forest, with the pine trees wailing round him,’ and ‘Endymion’s planet rising on the air.’ To you, O Czar of all Chivalry and Khan of Cotton Tartery! he appeals for the privilege of seeking, on his own hook, a land less free—a home among the hyenas of the North. Will you not halt your ‘brave columns’ and stay your gorgeous career for a thin space? and while the admiring world takes a brief gaze at your glorious and God forsaken cause, pen for the happy conscript a furlough without end? Do so, and mail it, if you please to that city the windy, wandering Wigfall didn’t winter in, called for short Philadelphia.
The Etesian winds sweeping down the defiles of the Old Dominion and over the swamps of Suffolk come moaning through the pines of the Old State laden with music and sigh themselves away into sweet sounds of silence to the far-off South. Your happy conscript would go to the faraway North whence the wind comes and leave you to reap the whirlwind with no one but your father the devil to rake and bind after you. And he’s going.
It is with intense and multifariously proud satisfaction that he gazes for the last time upon our holy flag—that symbol and sign of an adored trinity cotton, niggers, and chivalry. He still sees it in the little camp on the Chowan, tied to the peak of its palmetto pole, and floating out over our boundless confederacy, the revived relic of ages gone, banner of our King of few days and full of trouble. And that pole in its tapering uprightness typifying some of the grandest beauties of our nationality; its peak pointing hopefully toward the tropical stars and its highest end—run into the ground. Relic and pole, goodbye. ‘Tis best the conscript goes; his claim to chivalry has gone before him. Behind he leaves the legitimate chivalry of this unbounded nation centered in the illegitimate son of a Kentucky horse-thief.
But a few more words, illustrious President, and he is done done gone.
Elevated by their sufferings and suffrages to the highest office in the gift of the great and exceeding free people, you have held your position without a change of base, or purpose of any sort, through weary months, of war and want, and woe; and though every conscript would unite with the thousands of loyal and true men in the South in a grand old grief at your downfall, so too will they sink under the calamity of an exquisite joy when you shall have reached that eminent meridian whence all progress is perpendicular.
And now, bastard President of a political abortion, farewell.
‘Scalp-hunters,’ relic, pole, and chivalrous Confederates in crime, goodbye. Except it be in the army of the Union, you will not again see the conscript.
NORM. HARROLD, of Ashe County, N. C.”
>>Moore, Rebellion Record (Rumors and Events), vol. VII, 87-88.
