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Updated: May 13, 2025
These persons are rightfully and very expressively divided into four different and distinct classes: 1st. The Rebels. 2d. The skedadlers. 3d. Refugees. 4th. Bounty jumpers and escaped criminals.
As early as the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of August last, at the request of Jacob Thompson, secretly and quietly circulated all through the Canadas, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, all the Rebels, Skedadlers, Refugees, and others who could be relied upon to take part in the expedition, began to assemble in Toronto, Canada West, at the different hotels and boarding houses; of these, at that time, it was generally reported that there were about three hundred; but so far as positive evidence goes, out of this number only about seventy-five men were induced to join this expedition and go to Chicago.
In this way Mr. Holcombe enlisted, besides the feelings, the interests of a great many prominent business men, whose means had been advanced to rebels, and all along the Grand Trunk and Great Western railway, in all the principal towns and cities, he succeeded in establishing such agencies, which although at first intended only for those who were rebel soldiers, finally became nothing more than recruiting rendezvous for the rebel army, which all the skedadlers, refugees from the Northern and Border States who wished to join the Southern army, were received, fed, clothed and quietly transported to the South.
Skedadlers, as they are called, are those persons who having been drafted, or seeing a possibility of it, in the United States army, had fled to Canada to avoid the service.
This last class exceeds by far all the others in point of numbers, and the low degree of infamy to which they are reduced rebels, skedadlers, refugees and bounty jumpers, with a mixture of escaped criminals, forming an almost indescribable mass of people, from all nations, all climes, and of almost every imaginable description, and chiefly distinguished for being more frequently found in the bar-rooms, billiard saloons, gambling halls, &c.
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