Timeline of West Virginia: Civil War and Statehood
Undated
January 1863

A letter to a gentleman of this city, from Mr. J. D. Parsons, of Tucker county, who has been an especial object of the persecutions of the Yankee General Milroy, states that the Yankee General is assessing heavily the citizens of that section who are friendly to the South, after he has stripped them of all means of paying the assessment. "W. R. Parsons is assessed at $707; N. & G. M. Parsons, $450; Abraham Parsons, $340; James E. Parsons, $170; and others in accordance with their principles. They robbed W. R. Parsons of all his property previous to the assessment, and had him in prison at the time." Since the time when Pharaoh required the Israelites to make bricks without straw, we have never heard the parallel of the tyranny which deprives men of their property and then levies heavy assessment upon them.

But pre-eminent above all other tyrants since the days of the Egyptian despot, as Milroy has shown himself by these acts; neither he nor his foreign myrmidons are as despicable and villainous as the native traitors, who play the part of pilot fish to the Yankee sharks, guide him to his prey, and instigate him to fresh acts of persecution and ferocity. And this is not only true of Western Virginia, but of every part of the South where the Yankees have penetrated. Whilst happily the number of disloyal persons in the South is small, they make up in vindictiveness what they lack in strength, and whenever an opportunity offers, surpass the Yankees in cruelty to the loyal people. It matters not that they themselves have received toleration and indulgence from the Southern Government, and from Southern citizens; that they have not been arrested and thrown for years into prison, as Lincoln treats men and women suspected of disloyalty in the North; that, instead of this, they have in many cases made large fortunes out of the war and the Government. The very moment a Yankee army gets possession of their town or section they turn upon the loyal portion of the community with the malignity of fiends, and if the Yankees relax for a day their habitual ferocity, complain of them at Washington as negligent of the duty they owe to "the Union." Of all the despicable dogs in human shape whom this war has developed, none are so bloody and base as those Southern traitors, whom toleration and clemency only make more uculent and outrageous. The blackest Yankee of New England, in comparison with these irredeemable knaves, is as white as the driven snow. The Yankee, bad as he is, is not a traitor to his own home, and does not seek the destruction of his own section, the ruin of its interests, and the humiliation of its honor. But these wretches, knowing that they are a miserable minority of the Southern community, and in the face of the horrid cruelties and abominations practiced and threatened by Yankee despotism against the people of the South, turn their poisoned, viperous fangs against their persecuted country, and hound on the Yankees to greater crimes against their own kith and kin than even Yankee diabolism had ever conceived.

Timeline of West Virginia: Civil War and Statehood: Undated: January 1863