Viewing page 147 of 191

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

the evening, under color of this authority, a short time since, a member of respectable colored women returning to their homes from a religious meeting shortly after that hour, were arrested and locked up for the night

Upon the other hand in many places they are treated kindly and their rights cheerfully accorded to them, Genl. Withers, the present Mayor of Mobile, manifests in all his official acts, an honorable and candid appreciation of their condition and rights. and by his fair winded course, shows his determination to see them protected.

General Swayne informed me that there were frequent complaints of serious outrages in Coosa and Chambers Counties, and that he had contemplated sending a strong garrison there. 

Frequent complaints are made by freedmen of refusal to pay their wages, or to divide the crops with them according to the terms of their contracts, and that they are forced to leave the plantations before their term of service expires, by cruel treatment, and are turned off entirely unprovided for. The failure of the crops will in a great measure render it difficult for the employers to pay their houde and to discharge their other obligations, but this furnished as excuse