Turnage’s flight was similar to that of Newton’s and Aughey’s. He ducked buckshot fired by a patroller in Lowndes County. He leaped a broad ditch to shake the hounds from his heels. He hid in church steeples, rode a log across the Tombigbee River, and stole a rowboat. Five male slaves hid him and fed him near Aberdeen and told him “they gloried in my spunk.”
But Turnage was recaptured when he was betrayed by a frightened slave woman who reported him after he begged for food at her cabin, just half a day’s walk from Corinth. He was set on by dogs and mauled for four or five minutes while a white man with a bullwhip around his neck pointed a pistol at him. A gang of slave catchers hauled him to a cabin where they beat his head against the fireplace bricks and thrust his hands into the flames. He was then chained to the floor until his owner could retrieve him. On the way home, a squad of rebel pickets offered to tie him to a tree and use him for target practice.
Source:
Jenkins, Sally, and John Stauffer. “The Swamp and the Citadel.” The State of Jones: The Small Southern County That Seceded from the Confederacy. Anchor Books, 2010. 91. Print.
Further Reading:
No comments, yet...