“I was in Hancock County when I knew Vice-President Stephens.  I don’t know where he was born but he had a plantation in Toliver [HW:  Taliaferro] County.  Most of the Stephenses was lawyers.  He was a lawyer too, and he would come to Sparta.  That is where I was living then.  There was more politics and political doings in Sparta than there was in Crawfordville where he lived.  He lived between Montgomery and Richmond during the War, for the capital of the Confederacy was at Montgomery one time and Richmond another.

“After the War, the Republicans nominated Alexander Stephens for governor.  The Democrats knew they couldn’t beat him, so they turned ’round and nominated him too.  He had a lot of sense.  He said, ’What we lost on the battle-field, we will get it back at the ballot box.’  Seeb Reese, United States Senator from Hancock County, said, ’If you let the nigger have four or five dollars in his pocket he never will steal.’

Life Since Freedom

“After my father died, my mother stayed where she was till Christmas.  Then she moved back to the place she came from.  We went to farming.  My brother and my uncle went and farmed up in Hancock County; so the next year we moved up there.  We stayed there and farmed for a long while.  My mother married three years afterwards.  We still farmed.  After awhile, I got to be sixteen years old and I wouldn’t work with my stepfather, I told my mother to hire me out; if she didn’t I would be gone.  She hired me out all right.  But the old man used all my money.  The next year I made it plain to her that I wanted her to hire me out again but that nobody was to use a dollar of my money.  My mother could get as much of it as she wanted but he couldn’t.  The first year I bought a buggy for them.  The old man didn’t want me to use it at all.  I said, ’Well then, he can’t use my money no more.’  But I didn’t stop helping him and giving him things.  I would buy beef and give it to my mother.  I knew they would all eat it.  He asked me for some wheat.  I wouldn’t steal it like he wanted me to but I asked the man I was working for for it.  He said, ‘Take just as much as you want.’  So I let him come up and get it.  He would carry it to the mill.

Ku Klux Klan

“The Ku Klux got after Uncle Will once.  He was a brave man.  He had a little mare that was a race horse.  Will rode right through the bunch before they ever realized that it was him.  He got on the other side of them.  She was gone!  They kept on after him.  They went down to his house one night.  He wouldn’t run for nothing.  He shot two of them and they went away.  Then he was out of ammunition.  People urged him to leave, for they knew he didn’t have no more bullets; but he wouldn’t and they came back and killed him.

“They came down to Hancock County one night and the boys hid on both sides of the bridge.  When they got in the middle of the bridge, the boys commenced to fire on them from both sides, and they jumped into the river.  The darkies went on home when they got through shooting at them; but there wasn’t no more Ku Klux in Hancock County.  The better thinking white folks got together and stopped it.