fficers and others" not invested by law with adequate
authority.

Neither general orders nor the expiration of the statute, however,
seemed able to put an end to the interference with the local courts on
the part of local commanders. The evil apparently grew during 1863. A
picturesque instance is recorded with extreme fullness by the Southern
Advertiser in the autumn of the year. In the minutely circumstantial
account, we catch glimpses of one Rhodes moving heaven and earth to
prove himself exempt from military service. After Rhodes is enrolled by
the officers of the local military rendezvous, the sheriff attempts to
turn the tables by arresting the Colonel in command. The soldiers rush
to defend their Colonel, who is ill in bed at a house some distance
away. The judge who had issued the writ is hot with anger at this
military interference in civil affairs. Thereupon the soldiers seize
him, but later, recognizing for some unexplained reason the majesty of
the civil law, they release him. And the hot-tempered incident closes
with the Colonel's determination to carry the case to the Supreme Court
of the State.

The much harassed people of Alabama had still other causes of complaint
during this same year. Again the newspapers illumine the situation. In
the troubled autumn, Joseph Wheeler swept across the northern counties
of Alabama and in a daring ride, with Federal cavalry hot on his trail,
reached safety beyond the Tennessee River. Here his pursuers turned back
and, as their horses had been broken by the swiftness of the pursuit,
returning slowly, they "gleaned the country" to replace their supplies.
Incidentally they pounced upon the town of Huntsville. "Their
appearance here," writes a local correspondent, "was so sudden and... the
contradictory reports of their whereabouts" had been so baffling
that the townspeople had found no time to secrete things. The whole
neighborhood was swept clean of cattle and almost clean of provision.
"We have not enough left," the report continues, "to haul and plow
with... and milch cows are non est." Including "Stanley's big raid in
July," this was the twenty-first raid which Huntsville had endured that
year. The report closes with a bitter denunciation of the people of
southern Alabama who as yet do not know what war means, who are accused
of complete hardness of heart towards their suffering fellow-countrymen
and of caring only to make money out of war prices.

When Davis sent his