Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 34.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

‘ [298] have to hurry forward reinforcements rapidly—as rapidly as possible to prevent trouble here,’ and with a postscript adds: “A party on the other side of the river is firing on our men, collecting forage and provisions.”

This is the very last of Colonel Hayes' dispatches on that expedition, and the light of his pen flickers and goes out, and no doubt the Colonel and his men for the next few days were engaged in business that forbade much writing. What happened to General Milroy at the village of McDowell on the 8th day of May, of the same year, has long been a matter of public history—an event the old, grizzled Confederate soldiers yet love to commemorate. The jolt Stonewall Jackson gave him on that memorable day so completely knocked the wind out of him that he never had any luck afterwards as a military man. From this man's own pen, his character, too, is a remarkable revelation. Somebody in the village of McDowell, where he had his headquarters, a few days before the battle, had cut his saddle to pieces, and he, thereupon, had arrested some twenty or more of the most prominent old men of the country and brought to his headquarters upon the charge of being rebel sympathizers, but the real offense was the mutilation of his saddle, and at the trial the fact was developed that he believed Jefferson Davis had connived at the destruction of his saddle.

General Milroy was a foreigner by birth, and when relieved of his command, and under military arrest for allowing his whole brigade being gobbled up, he wrote Mr. Lincoln on the 13th of September, 1863 (see same Vol., page 1087), a long and most pitiful letter, in which he says: ‘If this cannot be granted, I would for many reasons desire a command in Texas. I have traveled through and resided there for a time, and became a naturalized citizen there before the annexation. I would be greatly pleased to help avenge the terrible wrongs of the Union citizens on the monsters there, and desire to be down there when the rebellion ends, to be ready to pitch into the French in Mexico;’ and from this letter we see, althoa his wind and luck were gone, his zeal for war was still consuming him. Gen. Geo. Crook met with better fortune at Lewisburg, when on the 23d day of May, 1862, he partially defeated the Confederate General Heth, but that country became too hot for him,