oning, and was accompanied by a fresh emigration to eastern
Virginia of a considerable number of the more pronounced
Secessionists. I have said [Footnote: _Ante_, p. 154.] that Mr.
George Summers, formerly the leading man of the valley, had
studiously avoided political activity after the war began; but this
did not save him from the hostility of his disloyal neighbors. Very
shortly after my re-occupation of Charleston he called upon me one
evening and asked for a private interview. He had gone through a
painful experience, he said, and as it would pretty surely come to
my ears, he preferred I should hear it from himself, before enemies
or tale-bearers should present it with such coloring as they might
choose. During the Confederate occupation he had maintained his
secluded life and kept aloof from contact with the military
authorities. Their officers, however, summoned him before them,
charged him with treason to Virginia and to the Confederate States,
and demanded of him that he take the oath of allegiance to the
Southern government. He demurred to this, and urged that as he had
scrupulously avoided public activity, it would be harsh and unjust
to force him to a test which he could not conscientiously take. They
were in no mood to listen to argument, and charged that his
acquiescence in the rule of the new state government of West
Virginia was, in his case, more injurious to the Confederate cause
than many another man's active unionism. Finding Mr. Summers
disposed to be firm, they held him in arrest; and as he still
refused to yield, he was told that he should be tied by a rope to
the tail of a wagon and forced to march in that condition, as a
prisoner, over the mountains to Richmond.

He was an elderly man, used to a refined and easy life, somewhat
portly in person, and, as he said, he fully believed such treatment
would kill him. The fierceness of their manner convinced him that
they meant to execute the threat, and looking upon it as a sentence
of death, he yielded and took the oath. He said that being in duress
of such a sort, and himself a lawyer, he considered that he had a
moral right to escape from his captors in this way, though he would
not have yielded to anything short of what seemed to him an imminent
danger of his life. The obligation, he declared, was utterly odious
to him and was not binding on his conscience; but he had lost no
time in putting himself into my hands, and would submit to whatever
I sh