Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 27.djvu/138

 180 Southern Historical Society Papers.

Colonel (now General) Shafter, fearing an outbreak, offered Charlie Hemming his liberty if he would report all combinations made by the Confederates, which offer he unhesitatingly declined, and as a result was put in irons for three days.

Colonel Shafter no doubt thought that Charlie Hemming was of Northern birth, from the fact that he had an aunt living in the State of New York, to whom he frequently wrote.

On the 28th of September, 1864, he escaped from prison, dressed as a Federal soldier, having obtained different articles of the uniform from comrades in the prison. He went immediately to Canada, and by order of the Confederate Consul there, was attached to the raiders under Captain John Y. Beall, who was later captured and hung as a spy. Hemming was with him when captured, but made his escape and visited all the Federal fortifications from Niagara Falls to Chi- cago, in disguise, and obtained many maps and charts. While thus engaged he was three times captured, but escaped each time. Had he been held and tried, he would, of course, have been executed. He was sent from Canada in January, 1865, as a bearer of dispatches to the War Department of the Confederate Government, and after travelling through New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and going to West India Islands, he secreted himself on board a ship sailing out of Havana, and landed in an open boat on the coast of Florida, and from thence made his way, partly afoot, to Richmond and delivered his dispatches. He immediately rejoined his regiment near Greens- boro, N. C., and was promoted for meritorious conduct as a soldier, and remained with the command until it surrendered, having served four years and five months in the Confederate army. When he re- moved to Texas in 1866, he was without means and acquaintances there, and during that year worked as a laborer on the docks at Galveston. In 1870, he entered the bank of Giddings & Giddings at Bronham as cashier, which position he held until 1881, when he removed to Gainesville, and has since been connected with the Gainesville National Bank as cashier or president.

Mr. Hemming is now also president of the Texas State Bankers' Association, and regards Texas as the grandest country in the world.

It has been the ambition of Mr. Hemming since the period of his patriotic service to erect a monument to the heroic dead of the Con- federacy in the city of his birth.

At the State reunion of the United Confederate Veterans, held at Ocala, February 22, 1896, he took his comrades by surprise by an- nouncing that his plans for the erection of the monument had been