Diary of Sidney Andrews

Diary of Sidney Andrews

I ran the blockade this morning, and am now thirty-seven miles from Albany and my friends of knives and pistols and horsewhips.

It appeared to me that if I was in such danger as my advisers represented, I might be waited upon at the depot about the time of leaving the city. Having already fallen back once, it did not seem advisable to get into further trouble at the last moment. Wherefore, I concluded to take the advice of the hotel-clerk and give my friends the slip, by taking the freight train at half-past five instead of the mail train at half-past seven.

While I walked on the platform of the depot in the breaking morning, laughing at the ridiculous position in which I found myself, one of the train hands spoke to one of the station hands: "Jest be 'round when the mail goes out, an' I reckon you 'll see fun." "Why?" said the other. "O, wa'al I do' know, but there 's a Yankee he 's got in trouble with some o' our folks, an' they 's comin' down to see him off this mornin'."

"Thank you, good friends," said I, to myself, "but I shall not be here when you come down." We made the run hither in about four hours, stopping half an hour for breakfast.

An hour and a half after my arrival the passenger train came along up. Finding that one of the men who stopped here was from Albany, I engaged him in conversation; and finally, telling him I had heard something about a fuss down there, led him along to give me the whole story.

He had n't seen the Yankee, he said, but genlemen told him that he seemed a civil enough sort of fellow. He 'lowed the Yankee might ha' interfered on the nigger's side if thar 'd been any 'casion to do so; but gentlemen told him he 'd only told the nigger to go 'long home and mind his business and not get up a row with the soldiers. He did n't know for certain where the Yankee slept last night; some
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said he went off with the Federal captain, and some said he cum up to next station horseback, and some said the landlord had hid him away; and for his part he could n't tell nothin' about it 'cept that he did n't stay at the hotel. He knew about that; the men they went up to his room and got some newspapers he left, some Yankee papers; and then they kinder sarched the house all over like, but they could n't find nothin' of him.

"I don't know," he continued, "whar he stayed, sir. The Yankees is right smart, and I reckon he knew what he was about, like, all the time. Some on 'em reckoned as how they'd find him at the depo' this mornin', but somebody else said he'd gone off on the freight train, and they did n't come down. I ha'n't got no feelin' agin the Yankees, but some o' our folks has, and they don't like them interferin' so much with the niggers."

From another source I have also learned that there was much noise and excitement about the hotel till midnight; that there were twenty or more half-drunken men around there for a long time; that some of the rooms were searched for the offending Yankee. So many of the leading men were in the spree that very little could be done to put down the row, which exceeded any that had occurred there for a dozen years.

Thinking of the affair now and at this distance, it still seems as if everybody had conspired to exaggerate its proportions to me. Three days ago I should have deemed it utterly impossible for anything I could say or do to produce such an exhibition of feeling. While the result indicates the under-current of passion, I cannot believe that any sober citizen of Albany sanctions the work of his townsmen on yesterday.