He had gone through a
painful experience, he said, and as it would pretty surely come to
my ears, he preferred I should hear it from himself, before enemies
or tale-bearers should present it with such coloring as they might
choose. During the Confederate occupation he had maintained his
secluded life and kept aloof from contact with the military
authorities. Their officers, however, summoned him before them,
charged him with treason to Virginia and to the Confederate States,
and demanded of him that he take the oath of allegiance to the
Southern government. He demurred to this, and urged that as he had
scrupulously avoided public activity, it would be harsh and unjust
to force him to a test which he could not conscientiously take. They
were in no mood to listen to argument, and charged that his
acquiescence in the rule of the new state government of West
Virginia was, in his case, more injurious to the Confederate cause
than many another man's active unionism. Finding Mr. Summers
disposed to be firm, they held him in arrest; and as he still
refused to yield, he was told that he should be tied by a rope to
the tail of a wagon and forced to march in that condition, as a
prisoner, over the mountains to Richmond.
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