Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 1.

[348]

We left New Orleans for the North on the morning of Wednesday, the 17th,

April, 1861.

and spent that night at the little village of Canton, in Mississippi. We went out in search of a resident of the place, whom we had met at Niagara Falls the previous summer. He was absent. A war-meeting was gathering in the Court House, on the village green, when we passed, and a bugle was there pouring forth upon the evening air the tune of the Marseillaise Hymn of the French Revolution.¹ We had observed that every National air which hitherto had stirred the blood of all Americans was discarded throughout the “Confederacy,” and that the performance of any of them was presumptive evidence of treason to the traitors. We felt great desire to respond to the bugle with Yankee Doodle or Star-spangled Banner,² but prudence counseled silence.

We went on to Grand Junction the next morning, where we were detained thirty-six hours, in consequence of our luggage having been carried to Jackson, in Tennessee. All along the road, we had seen recruiting-officers gathering up men here and there from the sparse population, to swell the ranks of the insurgents assembling at Pensacola under General Bragg, who had abandoned the old flag. The negroes were quietly at work in the fields, planting cotton, little dreaming of their redemption from Slavery being so nigh.

The landlord of the “Percey House” at Grand Junction was kind and obliging, and made our involuntary sojourn there as agreeable as possible. We were impatient to go forward, for exasperation against Northern men was waxing hot. We amused ourselves nearly half a day, “assisting,” as the French say, at the raising of a secession flag upon a high pole. It was our first and last experience of that kind. After almost five hours of alternate labor, rest, and consultation, during which time the pole was dug up, prostrated, and re-erected, because of defective halliards, the flag was “flung to the breeze,” and was saluted by the discharge of a pocket-pistol in the hands of a small boy. This was followed by another significant amusement at which we “assisted.” At Grand Junction, four railway trains, traveling respectively on the New Orleans and Jackson and the Charleston and Memphis roads, which here intersect, met twice a day, and the aggregation of passengers usually formed a considerable crowd. On one of these occasions we heard two or three huzzas, and went out to ascertain the cause. A man of