The Bushwhackers

As a Confederate Soldier, John Fulton Brown opposed all things pointing to a division of the United States. He felt he was helping to establish a cause that he did not want established. His heart was not in it and it didn’t reflect his interests. He was half-starved all the time and was plagued by the horrid, hungry insects that sucked out what little beef and rice he didn’t get at suppertime. Who wouldn’t move, influenced by a variety of facts such as these? In The Bushwhackers, he recounts how, while traveling in the high, craggy mountains of Tennessee, they discovered the area had been overrun by both Yanks and Rebs. Barns and corncribs were empty with no men in sight, except every now and then a very old man would wander out of hiding. Women with long, peaked faces peeped out through cracks in their huts, looking as scared to death as they undoubtedly were. Children with woolly heads and prominent eyeballs, pale from lack of sufficient food-skedaddled in all directions. Real pretty girls, or those who would have been pretty if there were peace and plenty, looked as though they had never had a full meal in their lives.