The neighbors hurried in with clothes.
The newspaper of Savannah of the new regime, _The Republican_, published
and republished with gleeful comments the most sensational accounts of
the brutal scene of the shackling of Davis. Maggie composed a prayer and
taught her little brothers to repeat it in concert for their grace at
the table morning, noon and night:
"Dear Lord, give our father something he can eat, and keep him strong,
and bring him back to us with eyes that can see and in his good senses,
to his little children, for Jesus' sake."
Nearly every day the child who composed the prayer was so moved by its
recital she would run from the table and dry her tears in the next room
before she could eat.
Hourly scenes of violence increased between the whites and the inflamed
blacks. A negro sentinel leveled his gun at little Jeff and threatened
to shoot him for calling him "Uncle." With prayers and tears the mother
sent her children away to the home of a friend in Montreal.
A year passed before President Johnson in answer to the wife's desperate
pleading permitted her to visit her husband in prison. She arrived from
Montreal on the cold raw morning of May 10, 1866, at four o'clock before
day. There was no hotel at the fort at that time and the mother was
compelled to sit in the desolate little waiting room with her baby
without a fire until ten o'clock.
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