Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 27.djvu/196

 188 Southern Historical Society Papers.

Yankee forces. Next morning Captain White was arrested at his farm, and taken through the town, and three miles beyond, near to the place where Thorn was killed, and there murdered.

It was said that he was first hung and then shot, but the testimony of the two men who prepared his body for burial Major John W. Houghawout and Alexander McCown who are living to-day, is that he was shot in the back, the large ball going entirely through his body. He was told to walk in front of the two men, who were his guards, and they evidently shot him when he was not aware of their intentions.

These two men returned to Lexington and informed Captain White's mother that her son was safe and would not be harmed, and after having, not an hour before, assassinated him. His body was left where it fell, and but for an accident would not have been found. An Irishman named O'Brien, who lived near by, having never been naturalized, and claiming to be a British subject, kept his horses at home: but the old man having two sons in the Confederate service, the Yankees paid no regard to his protestations and the British lion, and took his stock. The bridge that spanned the river between him and town had been burned, and he went down through an unfre- quented wood to where he knew there was a canoe, which he intended using to get to Lexington and see Hunter and get his horses back. He, however, never got them, as Hunter's and Averill's uppermost idea was to denude the country of stock. On his way down through this dense forest he came upon the body of Captain White, and went back and informed the Misses Cameron, on whose land and near whose home this murder had been committed. The Yankees had left the place and gone towards Lynchburg the same day. A mes- senger was dispatched to Lexington, informing Captain White's aged mother and father of the murder of their son, and Dr. James McCleery, with the assistance of several colored men, brought the body to town and interred it in the Lexington cemetery.

Poor Mat, friend of my youth and boyhood days, you deserved a better fate. When he passed through Lexington he seemed to be aware of his fate, for as he went by the residence of his old friend, Houghawout, he said to him, "Good-by, Huck, I am gone up," and marched on to the place of his assassination with the firmness and fortitude of a stoic. He had no trial, and it is presumed that he was shot by the order of David Hunter.