Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 35.djvu/320

306 board the steamboat, and before daylight drop down to a point on the Arkansas shore, about fifteen miles below this, near Elm-grove Postoffice, and there disembark. He will then proceed to destroy all the houses, farms and corn fields from that point up to Hopefield.

This is done to let the guerrillas, who attacked the Catahoula, feel that certain destruction awaits the country for firing on steamboats. By order of Major-General Sherman.

J. H. Assistant Adjutant-General."

But a darker chapter yet remains to record. On September 7, 1862, a detachment of the 6th Illinois Cavalry, under Major Reuben Loomis, appeared at a point on the Hernando Road, twelve miles below Memphis, where a skirmish had occurred the day before. Two aged men, Alfred Hutchinson and Mr. Gillespie, together with a frail young man named William White, were then burying a Federal officer who had been killed in the skirmish near the latter's house. The house was fired, and when the ladies screamed, young White came on the scene. Major Loomis ordered his men to shoot White in the presence of his wife and mother. The men hesitated to commit the butchery, and the major threatened them with death unless they fired. Several of them then fired, but with faltering hands, slightly wounding White, who ran and caught an apple tree for support.

The major, despite the entreaties of Miss Linnie Hutchinson, who put her arms around the young man's neck and told the major that he was a unionist and helpless, deliberately shot young White to death right before his wife and mother's eyes with his own pistol. He then ordered his men to shoot the two old men, but they flatly refused and they escaped.

After burning all the houses in the vicinity the detachment left.

Colonel Benjamin H. Grierson, of the 6th Illinois, in reporting the affair to General Sherman the same day, said: "Here (Hernando) I arrested twelve men, and having fifteen of my command whose horses were unfit for further rapid travel, I sent them with the prisoners, under Lieutenant Nathaniel B. Cunningham, of Company G, to Memphis, who, however, were