Bruce Phillips
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Another little thing that will tell you a little about how the Civil War was. There was no law you could go to. There was no way to protect anything except with your own gun. And there were people who roamed the countryside stealing whatever they could find, anything they wanted. They weren't really Yankees or Confederates either. Just thieves.
If the Union soldiers happened to come through on patrol and catch them, they'd try to claim they were Union Home Guard. If the Confederates caught them, they'd try to claim they were Confederate Home Guard that they were on the Confederate side.
My great great grandfather had been drafted and had joined the Confederate Army. He was in the Confederate Cavalry.
Jim Phillips was his son, and he was my great grandfather. But anyway, he went off to the Army. And his wife was just like those people in Cold Mountain. She tried to plow the fields and sow the crops and tried to keep enough food to keep people alive. She had five kids. And so they came through. Somebody had talked, and these raiders came through, and they asked her and said, "We heard you have two horses and we want them." And she said, "I don't have any horses."
And so they said, "Well, we know you are lying." And they couldn't make her tell it, so they put a rope around her neck, threw it up over a tree limb, and yanked her up off the ground. They let her down after a while, and she still wouldn't talk-still insisted she didn't have horses. So they swung her up a little higher the next time and left her a little longer. She passed out. They brought her down. She came around. They said, "Now, the next time we swing you up there, we'll leave you hanging there for a message to all these other people around here." She told her --- she had a little boy about 12 years old. She said, "Well, you better go get the horses, because they're going to kill me if you don't." That little boy was my great grandfather, who lived just down here out of town.
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