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[[newspaper clipping]] 
[[?]] are now worth from four to ten thousand dollars.  A prominent citizen of Columbus told me there was a freedman there who is not worth twenty thousand dollars, nearly all acquired since the war, and by legitimate means.
   A late number of you paper referred to matters in Neshobe [[Neshoba]] county.  I recently formed the acquaintance of some men who  formerly lived there.  If their statements were half true, and we have no cause to question any of them, that place has been one of the worst this side of that tropical locality often mentioned.  They told me that one white man had been hung there since the war because he was a Union man; that many negroes had been murdered, and many more whipped cruelly; that the freedmen had been robbed even of their clothes, and that such had been the reign of terror, that the people were afraid to give information against them.
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Bureau Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands,
Office Assistant Commissioner
for the State of Mississippi
Vicksburg, Miss., August 7th 1867

Genl O.O. Howard
Commissioner Bureau R.F. and A.L.
Washington, D.C.

General
   I enclose a slip cut from the "Vicksburg Republican" claiming to give an account of affairs in Neshoba County in this State, and would merely remark tht such paragraphs are calculated to injure me in the Estimation  of the Public and also officially if any attention is given them.
   Sometime in the Spring (May, I think) it was reported to me that a man had been hung in Neshoba County