On a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, a man stood and looked down at the fast waters twenty feet beneath him. His hands were tied behind his back. The neck was pulled by a rope .. One end of it was attached to a transverse beam above his head and hung up to his knees. Several boards laid on the sleepers served as a platform for him and for his executioners two soldiers of the federal army under the command of a sergeant, who in peacetime most likely served as an assistant sheriff. A few distances away, on the same improvised scaffold, stood the officer in full captain's uniform, with weapons. At both ends of the bridge there was a sentry with a gun "on guard", that is, holding the gun vertically, against the left shoulder, in a arm bent at right angles, a tense posture that requires an unnatural straightening of the trunk ... "