Sinatobia, July 16, 1862.U. S. Grant: sir: We have seen your infamous and fiendish proclamation. It is characteristic of your infernal policy. We had hoped that this war would be conducted upon principles recognized by civilized nations. But you have seen fit to ignore all the rules of civilized warfare, and resort to means which ought to and would make half-civilized nations blush. If you attempt to carry out your threat against the property of citizens, we will make you rue the day you issued your dastardly proclamation. If we can't act upon the principle of lex talionis in regard to private property, we will visit summary vengeance upon your men. You call us guerrillas, which you know is false. We are recognized by our government, and it was us who attacked your wagon-train at Morning Sun. We have twenty-three men of yours, and as soon as you carry out your threat against the citizens of the vicinity of Morning Sun, your Hessians shall pay for it. You shall conduct this war upon proper principles. We intend to force you to do it. If you intend to make this a war of extermination you will please inform us of it at the earliest convenience. We are ready and more than willing to raise the “black flag.” There are two thousand partisans who have sworn to retaliate. If you do not retract your proclamation, you may expect to have scenes of the most bloody character. We all remember the manner in which your vandal soldiers put to death Mr. Owens, of Missouri. Henceforth our motto shall be, blood for blood and blood for property. We intend, by the help of God, to hang on the outskirts of your rabble like lightning around the edge of a cloud. We don't intend this as a threat, but simply a warning of what we intend to do in case you pursue your disgraceful and nefarious policy towards our citizens, as marked out in your threat of recent date. Respectfully,
This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
General grant received the following communication from a rebel.
The letter was written on three leaves out of a memorandum book, about four by three inches in size:
Van Nostrand. New York, New York. 1862.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.