Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/160

Confederate troops in Pennsylvania than within our own borders. Upon one occasion General Lee himself dismounted and with his own hands began to put up a fence which some of the soldiers had left down, and at another time he personally ordered the arrest of some soldiers who were committing slight depredations and of the officers who permitted it. When Gen. John B. Gordon, of Georgia, led his command into one of the Northern towns, and the frightened women crowded around him begging for protection, he said: "Ladies, these are Southern men, and you will find that you need no protection from them. But if one of them should so far forget himself as to destroy property or to offer the slightest insult to a woman, just point out the man to me and he shall be brought to summary punishment. Your soldiers have invaded our Southland and inflicted on the mothers, wives, sisters and daughters of these men every manner of wanton insult and outrage. But we are not here to imitate their example. We make no war on women or children or peaceable citizens, and you are as safe in your homes while we occupy your town as you would be if your own men were here. Indeed, safer, for we will give you better protection." While that gallant and accomplished soldier, Gen. Clement A. Evans, then colonel of the Thirty-first Georgia regiment of Gordon's brigade, was busily engaged with his brave men in an effort to extinguish the flames of a little town on the Susquehanna which the retreating Federals had fired, he chanced to pick up a newspaper lying on the street, and the first paragraph that caught his eye was a telegraphic account of the burning of Darien, a seacoast town in his own State of Georgia, by a party of Federals who had landed and set the town on fire. The Georgians were, of course, deeply indignant at this fresh outrage of the enemy upon their people, and it would have been but human nature if they had at once ceased their efforts to extinguish the flames and save the property of