In ordinary times, no honorable man would open another man’s mail, but these times were decidedly not ordinary. As Pickens would explain it shortly afterward in a letter to Montgomery, “I did this because I consider a state of war is now inaugurated by the authorities at Washington, and all information of a public nature was necessary to us.” One of the men passed the mail bag to Judge Magrath, apparently in hopes that his judicial stature would confer upon the act a level of respectability. The judge would not touch it, according to one witness. “No,” Magrath said, “I have too recently been a
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