On his return home in 1865, Major Screws was entirely reliant on his pen for a livelihood, and became connected with The Advertiser as an associate. Great consideration was shown him by the editor, Mr. Reid, who finally put him in possession of the paper. Here has been the orbit of his great service to the state. His tripod was his throne, and though the paper was suppressed for a period of months, under the bayonets of reconstruction, it was not throttled, and its columns radiated with exposures of the corruption of those corrupt days. Under Major Screws, The Advertiser was the vent of heroic expression and the champion of the liberties of the people of Alabama. In those days of darkness and of trial, when Major Screws wrestled with poverty in the maintenance of his journal, the people of Alabama little knew what he was undergoing in their behalf. But in cool heroism he labored on, as though he had the purse of a prince at his command, and unselfishly served the people, undergoing perhaps as much privation as anyone who has ever served the state. Under conditions like these the unselfishness of Major Screws was put to the test on more than one occasion. At one time during the agitation caused by the Stantons in the notorious struggle to obtain the issue of bonds in behalf of the Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad, the history of which struggle is too long to be gone into here, an agent of the Stantons appeared at Montgomery and proposed to Major Screws to pay him $51,000 for the use of the Montgomery Advertiser in the promotion of the fraudulent scheme. Major Screws was to remain the editor of the paper, and the sum proposed was merely to purchase the right to use its columns, through another, in fixing this burden on the people of the state. He was a poor man, grappling with the difficulties incident to the times, but he flatly declined the offer, and bravely continued his opposition to the issue of the bonds.