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If General Linares, when he retreated, had left behind a squad or two of sharp-shooters and bushwhackers to harass our advance at narrow and difficult places in the road, what a chance they would have had when the pack-mules jumped into that battery!

And one of his brigadier-generals, Steinwehr, has seized innocent and peaceful inhabitants, to be held as hostages, to the end that they may be murdered in cold blood if any of his soldiers are killed by some unknown persons whom he designates as "bushwhackers."

To corps commanders alone is intrusted the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton-gins, etc.; and for them this general principle is laid down: In districts and neighborhoods where the army is unmolested, no destruction of each property should be permitted; but should guerrillas or bushwhackers molest our march, or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads, or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless, according to the measure of such hostility.

"But you won't find any Injuns here to ambush you," said Red Blaze, "though I don't make any guarantee against bushwhackers and guerillas, who'll change sides as often as two or three times a day, if it will suit their convenience. They could hide in the woods along the road an' pick us off as easy as I'd shoot a squirrel out of a tree. They'd like to have our arms an' our big coats.

Finally, however, I succeeded in quieting the almost uncontrollable rage that seemed to possess him, and he remained with me during the Tullahoma and Chickamauga campaigns; but when we reached Knoxville the next winter, he took his departure, informing me that he was going for the bushwhackers who had killed his brother.

They didn't have no ropes, but they would take grapevines and tie them across the road about breast high when a man would be on horseback. The Ku Klux would run against these vines and be knocked off their horses into the road and then the bushwhackers would shoot them. When Ku Klux was killed in this manner, it was never admitted; but it was said that they had gone to Texas.

Brice, some 20,000 strong, and sent them into Missouri, where they had made the homes of many Union people desolate, and spread terror throughout that State and a portion of Kansas. Brice had organized bands of marauders and bushwhackers, as they were termed, in the same way and under the same character of agreements as made with Blackman and others.

Rumors of outrages and doings of desperadoes were rife, and the soldiers were somewhat dubious in going far into the country, for fear of running up against bushwhackers, of which the country was said to be full.

I wuz willin' t' surrender t' either one that'd save me from being drownded, but none of 'em seemed t' care a durn about my drowndin'; they only wanted t' plug me." "Please save me, Mister," begged Jeff, "an' I'll do anything under the shinin' sun for yo'; I'll jine the Yankee army; I'll lead you' to whar thar's nests o' the pizenest bushwhackers. I'll do anything yo' kin ax me.

At length Murrell and his band were driven out, and sought a new field of operations on the Lower Mississippi. They left germs behind them, however, that developed into horse thieve counterfeiters, and later into guerrillas and bushwhackers. When the Rebellion broke out the region at once became the theater of military operations.