They were men in the prime of life—young, vigorous, and active—when they surrendered themselves as prisoners of war. And as prisoners, they were entitled to the care and treatment acknowledged by the general laws and usages of civilized nations, and expected even more from those who boasted of having revived the generosity and chivalric tone of the feudal ages. Besides justice to all men, we owe special grace and benignity to those who come into our power from the hazard of battle. However degraded the suppliant may be, there is always some commerce between them and us, some bond of mutual relation.
Why these men did not receive that respect which true courage always accords to the vanquished brave, why they did not receive even that atom of compassion which belongs to the nature of man, and which is seen even among the lower animals, history, which loves to avenge the weak and oppressed, and which affords to all men, to all nations, the opportunity for their justification, their vengeance, their glory, will surely exhibit in burning characters of horror and shame. There are men even now who would sanctify the acts of cruelty of the rebellion over the very ashes of this the nation’s sepulchre. There are men even now who would outrage virtue, and deify the crime. There are men living, like those of the past, but not forgotten iron age, possessed of that remorseless fury, that implacable hatred, which nothing could arrest, nothing could disarm, and which could no more receive a sentiment of compassion than that sophistry which allowed outrage and death to the tender and guiltless child of Sejanus.
“Ut homo hominem, non iratus, non timens, tantum spectaturus occidat.”
II.
The intention which directed the formation of this vast camp was Cruelty. The system which governed, or rather the want of system which neglected, each department, whether hospital or commissariat, meant Death. The evidence against the leaders of the Confederacy is not wanting, neither is it obscure. It is true that most of the witnesses have perished, or are fast passing prematurely away; but the chain of circumstantial evidence is so connected, so apparent, that, unless the faith of humanity changes, that voice, which Tacitus calls “the conscience of the human race,” will, until the end of time, overwhelm with withering scorn the memory of these men as the assassins of sedition, rather than the heroes and saints of a just revolution.
We may search history in vain for a parallel in modern times. Civilization, in its known vicissitudes, cannot point out a spectacle so horrible.
The massacre, in hot blood, of the Tartars of the Crimea by Potemkin, will not compare with this slow, merciless, implacable process of murder by starvation, and violation of those hygienic laws upon which the principle of life depends. The fusilades of that saturnalia of blood, the French Revolution, which swept away whole generations, had the pomp of military executions, which threw a gleam of brilliancy over the scene, and gave momentary enthusiasm to the victims. Those great immolations of the Saracens and Persians by the Tartars were as rapid as the cimeters could flash. “The fury of ideas,” says Lamartine, “is more implacable than the fury of men; for men have heart, and opinion none. Systems are brutal forces, which bewail not even that which they crush.”
“See,” said Timour to the learned men of Aleppo, “I am but half a man, and yet I have conquered Irak, Persia, and the Indies.” “Render glory, therefore, to God,” replied the Mufti of Aleppo, “and slay no one.” “God is my witness,” said, with apparent sincerity, the destroyer of so many millions of men, “that I put no one to death by a premeditated will; no, I swear to you I kill no one from cruelty, but it is you who assassinate your own souls.”
III.
The world has never seen such a display of courage and devotion as was exhibited by the intelligent masses of the freemen of the North, when the liberties of the great republic were menaced by the fierce gestures of the slave faction and their misguided supporters.