“What of our prisoners?”
“There would be no prisoners,” exclaimed the fiery captain. “Do they take
any prisoners from me? Surrounded, I do not surrender; hunted, I hunt my
hunters; hated and made blacker than a dozen devils, I add to my hoofs the
swiftness of a horse and to my horns the terrors of a savage following.
Kansas should be laid waste at once. Meet the torch with the torch,
pillage with pillage, slaughter with slaughter, subjugation with
extermination. You have my ideas of war, Mr. Secretary, and I am sorry
they do not accord with your own or with the ideas of the government you
have the honor to represent so well.”
Disappointed, Capt. Quantrell left without his commission. He had felt
the truth of his fiery speech.
Our tenders of exchanges of prisoners had been scorned by the officers of
the militia. There was a boy who was an exception to this rule, to whom I
want to pay a tribute. He was a young lieutenant from Brown county and if
my memory serves me right, his name also was Brown. We had taken him
prisoner at Olathe.
At Leavenworth they had one of our boys named Hoy, who had been taken at
the Tate house, and we paroled Brown, and sent him to Leavenworth to ask
the exchange of Hoy.
Brown went, too, and was laughed at for his earnestness. Exchange was
ridiculed. “You are free,” they said to him, “why worry about exchanges?”
But Brown had given his word as a man and as a soldier and he came back to
our camp and surrendered. He was told to return to the lines of his own
army, and given safe conduct and money to provide for his immediate wants,
but he vowed he would never fight again under his country’s flag until he
had been exchanged in accordance with his parole.
There was a cheer for that man when he left the camp, and anyone who had
proposed shooting him would himself have been riddled.