“Well, now, it does ’pear to me like the white folks is determined to put the devil into the colored people’s heads anyhow. Now, we’re honest in this matter, and only want to have a nice militia company like the white folks does, and like free citizens has got a right to, and to protect the State when it needs it and the Governor calls for us; but they just goes to work, and by talking about what they pretend the colored people is a going, or _intending_ to do, they just makes the colored people mad, and puts these bad ideas into their heads, and by-and-by the colored people, maybe will get courage enough to undertake to do as they is really instructing us to do. And then there’s more’n that in it too. Mor’n two months ago Hanson Baker tole me and John Peters, Press Wells, and John Bade, and if I mistake not, Lem Panesly, that the Democrats had made it up in their own minds, and they had gone over the State, and also had about thirty men from Texas and Mississippi to come into this State, and they were feeding them, and organizing all the white men into certain different clubs; and before election that there had to be a certain number of negroes killed—leading men; and if after that they found out they couldn’t carry the State that way, they was gwoine to kill enough so that they could carry the majority. He said it is a fact that that has to be done, and he said in the presence of these men, that it had to start right here in Baconsville. He said Baconsville is the leading place in the county (for the niggers, you know), and if they could be successful in killing them that they wanted to in Baconsville, they could carry the county; but the same has to be done in all the counties, that there was no way to prevent it. I told him we had some laws, and a Governor and a President. He says he didn’t belong to none o’ the clubs, and hadn’t nothing to do with it, but it would be done, shor. I says, ‘Suppose the colored men have a poll to themselves, and the white men to themselves,’ and he said, ‘It don’t make a bit o’ difference what sort o’ polls they have; it is the voting we want to stop; and these voting niggers has got to be killed. The white men has declared that the State has got to be ruled by white men again, and we have got to have just such a government as we had before the war; and when we git it, all the poor men and the niggers has got to be disfranchised, and the rich men will rule! And he tole me then that our town marshal, John Carr and Dan will certainly be killed. I asked why? and he said there was plenty of men that had plenty against them, and they would kill them _shor_. Says I, ‘Mr. Baker will I be in that number?’ he says, ‘No, I don’t know whether yo’r name is down or no, but it depends on how yo’ behave yo’self.’ He’d been drinking some, or he wouldn’t ha’ been so free to tell. Well, then I received a note the other day—a letter with my name, and specifying a dozen or more in this