AN ANECDOTE OF JEFFERSON DAVIS.

Bruce Herald, Volume XXI, Issue 2180, 4 July 1890, Page 5

AN ANECDOTE OF JEFFERSON DAVIS.

A year before the close cf the War army orders brought me to Columbus, Georgia. At that place the Confedt rate Government had located a large ordnance establishment. An ordnance officer, Colonel Oladowski — not vi known, I believe, in the old service — one day handed me a heavy black object some six inches in diameter, saying, ' What is that ? ' I answered, ' A lump of coal.' Examine it closely,' said he. Taking a knife and cutting it, I found it to be a hollow iron castiDg roughly shaped to resemble coal, and covered with asphaltum or some such subetance in which was baked coal dust and small lumps of coal, giving the whole the exact appearonce of ordinary coal. A number of similar pif ces were exhibited, of various sizes and shapes. The officer explained that he had had them made, had carried some of them to Richmond, and had exhibited them to President Davis, with a carefully-prepared plan by which he proposed to have them sent by suitable men to various points on the Mississippi river where the Federal guuboats coaled, and, after being filled with a most powerful explosive, deposited among the coal designed for the gunboats, or even introduced into their bunkers. He had also perfected a plan to have them introduced into the Northern navy yards and in various foreign coaling stations of the United States Navy. That it could have been done by shrewd and desperate men is beyond a doubt. As the explosive with which they were to be filled was one of the most powerful, and only exploded by heat, they would not have been detected, and, exploding in tbe furnace of a gunboat, would have sent all on board to the bottom. The officer told me that when he exhibited them to Jefferson Davis, the President was horrified, and furiously declared himself insulted that any man should have dared to suppose that he would be a party to any such unjustitiab'e mode of warfare • ' and,' said the officer, ' the President's eye fairly blazed, while he gave me such a blessing that I would have bren glad to crawl into a rat-hole to get aw ay from him. When he had exhausted his fury, he said abruptly, ' Return to your station, sir, this very day,' I firmly believe he would have put me in arrest and preferred charges, but that he did not want the matter to become public' — Charlse Terry, M.D , in Century Magazine.