The Daily Dispatch: April 1, 1864., [Electronic resource]

Affairs in East Tennessee.

‘ If the half of what we hear from this unfortunate region is true, it bids fair to rival Mexico in its palmiest days of anarchy and social crime. A low Dutchman, from from the political cesspools of Northern Europe, is in command of the district between Knoxville and Greenville. is said to have twelve thousand ruffians under his command staff fled along the railroad from Strawberry Plains to Mossy Creek. Their conduct is most wanton and outrageous, exceeding anything that has transpired during the war. A few days since they burned the fine mills and private dwelling of Mr. Massengill, on the Holston river Massengill was an old man some eighty years of age. His wife, about seventy years of age, was lying at the point of death when the ruffians applied the torch to her bed room. She asked them to carry her out of the room, and not to burn her alive in her own houses. After some hesitation the leader of the clan — a member of Brownlow's regiment — carried her out into the back yard on her bed, and remarked to the dying woman that she was getting her "Southern rights" The old man, they tied to a tree and whipped him with hickory wythes until they supposed him dead. Another band of out laws — members of another renegade. Tennessee regiment — hung a Dr. Mynatt near New Market, after making him dig his own grave. After he had expired the ruffians bent his head with rocks and cut off his ears.

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