Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 1.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

Mr. Harper was an old gentlemen, over 82 years of age, a cripple,. and can neither read nor write the English language, though a good German scholar. This gentlemen was one of twelve children, had served in the war of 1812, was the son of a Revolutionary soldier who bore his musket during the whole war, inherited a woodland tract, and built up a substantial home in the midst of Western Virginia.

His was only one of a class which swept over West Virginia, and left the beautiful valleys of Tygart and the Potomac rivers in ashes and desolation.

It is to pay for crimes like these, and keep in employment the men who committed them, that created the debt now weighing the people down. It was to pay such monsters, with their tools, that money was refunded by the General Government to the State of Missouri and West Virginia, and the taxes saddled upon the people of the country.

The following letter gives its own explanation:

Macon, Georgia, October 7, 1867.
Henry Clay Dean, Mount Pleasant, Iowa:

Dear Sir — I have read your late communication addressed to “The prisoners of war, and victims of arbitrary arrests in the United States of America.”

You allege that “the Congress of the United States refused to extend the investigation contemplated by a resolution, adopted by that body on the 10th of July, 1867, appointing certain parties to investigate the treatment of prisoners of war and Union citizens held by the Confederate authorities during the rebellion, to the prisoners of war, victims of ‘arbitrary power and military usurpation by the authority of the Federal Administration.’ ”

Appreciating your object “to put the truth upon the record,” and concurring in your patriotic suggestion that “it is the duty of every American to look to the honor of his country and the preservation of the truth of history,” I have felt constrained to respond to the call made in your circular, so far as to acquaint the public, through you, with the following precise, simple, and unexaggerated statement of facts:

When the Capitol of the Confederate States was evacuated, the specie belonging to the Richmond banks was removed, with the archives of the Government, to Washington, Georgia. Early after the close of the war, a wagon train conveying this specie from Washington to Abbeville, South Carolina, was attacked and robbed of an amount approximating to $100,000, by a body of disbanded cavalry of the Confederate army.