Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2008 - (Page 26) on Front Street. He provided his testimony on June 27, just six weeks after the event. I have resided in this town (Alexandria) twenty-four years, and am a native of Germany — am fifty years old. This town was fired on the morning of Friday, May 13th, between 8 and 9 o’clock, A.M. Several Yankee soldiers broke into the store on Front Street next to mine and pilfered the tobacco, sugar, and lard, which were commencement of the conflagration. The store and those on either side adjoining were wooden buildings. Another witness who appeared before Judge Manning was also a longtime resident of Alexandria, Giles C. Smith. I have resided in this town eighteen years. My residence was on Second Street, with one house (R. C. Hynson’s) intervening between it and the Episcopal the mattress instantly caught fire, and the room was in a blaze. I did not see anything in his hand, and do not know what it was he had, but suppose it was turpentine that he threw upon the mattress, which was ignited by a Lucifer match. I seized the mattress and got it downstairs and in the street where it burned up. But Giles Smith’s home did not escape the arsonists. A squad of Union soldiers visited his home again, and this time they did not leave until it was consumed by flames. A local physician, Dr. J. P. Davidson, collaborated the testimony of both Jacob Walker and Giles Smith. The fire was communicated to a building on Front Street, in a central part of the town — a strong north wind blowing at the time — and from the drought which had prevailed for some weeks, the flames spread rapidly from building to building. At the premises of Frozine, a free woman of color — below the origin of the fire and to the rear of it — men entered the yard with a tin bucket and mop, and sprinkled the fencing and outbuildings with a mixture of turpentine and In June 1864, Confederate governor of Louisiana, Henry Watkins Allen, appointed seven commissioners to collect testimony “to obtain for publication and historical record a careful, accurate statement of the atrocities and barbarities committed by the Federal officers, troops, and camp followers during their late invasion of Western Louisiana.” the sole contents. While the party were below [in the building] another set went into the second story, and immediately afterwards the house commenced burning. The fire was applied in the second story. While this was going on I was standing on the levee which runs along one side of the street, immediately opposite the store, and about eighty feet from it. This was the Church. It was new, built entirely of brick, with slate roof and parapets. Hynson’s house had burned to the ground. It was of wood, about ninety feet from mine. My house had not caught fire; I had wet blankets on the side next to Hynson, and took out the window sashes, which were of wood. Four or five officers came into the lower apartments and ordered my wife and family out. I immediately followed. One of them went into the rooms on one side of the passage and the other into the other side. There was a mattress in one room and the Yankee who went into that room walked up to it and, drawing his hand across it with a wide swoop, camphene, saying that they “were preparing the place for Hell!” At several points where the progress of the fire was arrested by the inter-position of a brick edifice, similar means were resorted to — to continue the conflagration. As Governor Watkins noted in the preface to the report, soldiers in the Union army accused of these atrocities did not have “the privilege of introducing evidence to explain, mitigate or rebut what will be published against them.” Thus, we will never know to what degree these accusations were based on actual occurrences. But one fact, one startling fact, remains beyond dispute. Most of Alexandria burned to the ground in a remarkably short period of time. 26 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2008
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