June 3, 1863, The Charleston Mercury
One good lesson, says the Richmond Enquirer, may be learned from late events; and especially from the manner in which that Yankee raid through North Alabama into Georgia was met and ended. The lesson is, that old men, boys, and even girls, may and can, by a little timely preparation, be enabled to resist, capture, or destroy a large band of mounted brigands making what they call a […..] ‘– that is, riding through an unprotected, thinly– peopled country, where they expect to meet no resistance, destroying and stealing as they go. Sixteen hundred Yankee horsemen were held in check and frightened out of their senses by the sudden gathering of the peaceable folk in the counties through which they passed; harassing their march, menacing their front and gathering in their rear, until at last the farmers and the women of Floyd county closed them up, barred their passage, and handed them over to FORREST’S handful of cavalry. Nothing alarms the Yankee forager like any force collecting in their rear; and the truth is, they are not sufficiently at home on horseback, nor sufficiently confident in their own hardihood to carry their marauding operations very far where they have reason to expect resistance at all.
Hereafter we may look out for these villainous plundering expeditions in all directions; and the only way to prevent them entirely (as army corp and divisions cannot be everywhere) is, local organization for local defence, and for co-operation with neighboring districts, in case of necessity. Every town and village should agree upon signals which are to arouse the surrounding country. This can be done for the immediate neighborhood by some concerted chime upon a Church bell; for a wider circuit by fires to be lighted upon eminences which are far visible, or by couriers, for whom swift horses should always kept ready. The alarm could be spread in this way from county to county; and where such alarms are expected, so that the people are not surprised in their beds, or in their workshops; and where some pains have been taken to have rifles and ammunition ready for all who can handle them, and local leaders appointed whom all will implicitly obey, there can be no doubt that the levee en masse of each county could be rapidly formed on emergency and positions taken to receive the banditti as hotly as they deserve. We venture to predict that if one or two parties of the brigands be met and surrounded and captured, or (what would be far better), exterminated, with a stern and unsparing vengeance, those pestilent enemies would be much more shy of their […..] cavalry dashes.’ The first peal of a town bell in the distance, the first red flash of a beacon fire shooting up by night, would make them understand that they were riding not into a county of peaceful hamlets, all asleep, but into an ambuscade of wakeful and vengeful men. It is a kind of entertainment Yankees do not relish.