"After my escape from Johnson's Island I went to Canada, where I met a number of Confederates. They asked me if I was willing to go on an expedition. I replied: 'Yes, if it is in the service of my country.' They said: 'It is all right,' but gave me no intimation of its nature, nor did I ask for any. I was then sent to New York, where I stayed some time. There were eight men of our party, of whom two fled to Canada. After we had been in New York three weeks we were told that the object of our expedition was to retaliate on the North for the atrocities in the Shenandoah Valley. It was designed to set fire to the city on the night of the Presidential election; but the phosphorus was not ready, and it was put off until the 25th of November. I was stopping at the Belmont House, but moved into Prince Street. I set fire to four places—in Barnum's Museum, Lovejoy's Hotel, Tammany Hotel, and the New England House. The others merely started fires in the house where each one was lodging, and then ran off. Had they all done as I did, we would have had thirty-two fires and played a huge joke on the fire department. I know that I am to be hung for setting fire to Barnum's Museum, but that was only a joke. I had no idea of doing it. I had been drinking and went in there with a friend, and, just to scare the people, I emptied a bottle of phosphorus on the floor. We knew it would not set fire to the wood, for we had tried it before, and at one time had concluded to give the thing up. There was no fiendishness about it. After setting fire to my four places, I walked the streets all night, and went to the Exchange Hotel early in the morning. We all met there that morning and the next night. My friend and I had rooms there, but we sat in the office nearly all the time reading the papers, while we were watched by the detectives, of whom the hotel was full. I expected to die then, and if I had it would have been all right; but now it seems rather hard. I escaped to Canada and was glad enough when I crossed the bridge in safety. I desired, however, to return to my command, and started with my friend for the Confederacy via Detroit. Just before entering the city he received an intimation that the detectives were on the look-out for us, and giving me the signal he jumped from the cars. I did not notice the signal, but kept on and was arrested in the depot. I wish to say that the killing of women and children was the last thing thought of. We wanted to let the people of the North understand that there were two sides to this war, and that they could not be rolling in wealth and comfort while we at the South were bearing all the hardships and privations. In retaliation for Sheridan's atrocities in the Shenandoah Valley, we desired to destroy property; not the lives of women and children, although that would, of course, have followed in its train."
Done in the presence of
Lieut. Col. Martin Burke and
J. Howard, Jr.March 24th, 1865, 10.30 P.M.
Kennedy, in the presence of death, made this free and full confession, carefully confining himself to the narration of his own and the acts of his fellow incendiaries. He does not tell who planned this enterprise of death and destruction for the great metropolis of the country, and whilst honestly confessing his own part in it, is very careful not to compromise anybody else. But we are not left without information as to who were the employers of him and his gang; and here again Thompson and his fellow agents of the rebel government in Canada are made to appear as its originators, and must be held responsible, not only for the attempt thus made to destroy New York by fire, but also for the worst consequences that could have happened had their attempt proven successful.[3] Kennedy says they did not desire to destroy the lives of women and children, although that would of course have followed in its train. Thompson, Clay, Cleary, Sanders, and any others that had any hand in setting this expedition on foot, could not fail to know what would necessarily follow in its train if successful, but were not deterred by the knowledge of the fact that it involved not merely the destruction of property, but of necessity also the destruction of women and children; for the firing of a city like New York in many places, simultaneously, if successful in its object, the destruction of the city, must necessarily result in the same kind of indiscriminate destruction of human life that resulted at New Berne, from the dissemination of pestilence sent there in the clothing that that inhuman fiend, Dr. Blackburn, had carefully infected and sent there for that very purpose. In the early ages of the world war meant the indiscriminate destruction of all that belonged to the enemy. The spirit of war then was to exterminate the foe. Prisoners of war were slaughtered after the battle was ended. Women and children were killed or carried into slavery. Men had not learned to exercise mercy in war. It meant universal destruction of life, and confiscation of the property of the enemy. It meant even the confiscation of the territory or country in which he lived. It is so yet among the savage tribes of the earth. With them the murder of a woman about to become a mother is nothing, and the dashing out of the brains of her children against a stone or a tree, before her eyes, yields to them a fiendish satisfaction. Civilized nations, however, do not so carry on war, and the laws of war do not permit this mode of warfare. The annals of no age of the world, or of the most rude and savage people of the earth, afford examples more atrocious than those planned and executed, or attempted to be executed, by these agents of Jefferson Davis in Canada, and by other agents, as we shall see, whose deeds were sanctioned and paid for by Davis and his Secretary of State Benjamin.
The prison-pen at Andersonville was evidently planned for the destruction of the lives of the prisoners of war that were sent there; and if any escaped death, it was intended that they should be so physically injured that they could never again render any service to the Union cause. In a country abounding in forest shade and pure water, there can be no excuse given for locating a prison-pen in a little intervale, wholly destitute of shade, where men without tents or shelter of any kind were huddled together by the thousands, with a very meagre supply of water, for a long time, even for quenching thirst, and none at all for the purposes of cleanliness, and what they had for the former purpose being contaminated with all the filth from the drainage of the town just above.
It is evident that this location was made with a view to the destruction of life and the ruin of health. Then, for the further carrying out of this purpose, the rations supplied were not only wholly insufficient in quantity, but most unwholesome in quality, exactly adapted to aid the effects of miasmatic exposure, and foul water, in bringing on stomach and bowel troubles and low forms of fever, which were kept up until life was literally drained out, and death from exhaustion ensued. Here, without any sympathetic medical assistance or proper medicine, men were dying daily by the fifties and the hundreds, and the survivors becoming mere ghostly spectres; whilst the inhuman monster, Wirtz, stood gloating over the scene in devilish glee, and his inhuman guards were constantly on the look-out for pretexts to shoot down their fellowmen, as though the terrible harvest of death, secured by their arrangements and management of this graveyard of the living, was too meagre, and required their bullets to enrich it. Such was Andersonville. The purpose of its location and management are too obvious to need remark; and for all this, Jefferson Davis and his Secretary of War are to be held responsible. Far be it from me to bring up this matter for the purpose of giving a fresh impulse to sectional enmity. I only do it to show the low moral status of those who were responsible for the conduct of the war on the side of the rebellion, in order that from all this we may be prepared for the evidence presented to the world through the Commission, sustaining the grave charges of the government.
There was no doubt an element, perhaps a large element of the population of the Southern States, that was in full sympathy with this policy; but such a policy could only have been abhorrent to the honorable foe who bravely confronted us on the field of conflict. It was the stay-at-home-and-fight element that sanctioned these atrocities. War is cruel when conducted on the strictest rules of civilized warfare. War is destructive; it is harsh and unrelenting. Foeman must meet foeman with his steel. It is a game in which human life is always the price of success and the cost of failure. The enemy must be met and overcome; his resources must be reached and cut off if it can be done, thus starving him into submission, as a more humane way of getting the victory over him than by taking his life. But amongst civilized people no enemy is to be deprived of life but the armed and active foe in the field, in honorable and open combat, except for crime. The lives of women, children, prisoners of war, and of non-combatants generally, must be held sacred. Thus we see how much the horrors of war have been mitigated by the more enlightened sentiments and Christian morality of the world's present state of civilization. When these shall have done their perfect work, wars will cease. The time will yet come when men shall learn war no more. May God hasten the day.
In charging Jefferson Davis, and those associated with him in the conduct of the war with an utter disregard of the laws of war, and of being guilty of atrocities that are only matched in savage life, I wish again to make a distinct disclaimer in behalf of those who fought, and of those who conducted his operations in the field. Whilst I abhor their construction of the Constitution and theory of the union of the States as destructive of the hopes of liberty and of free government, tending continually to disintegration, and making the idea of a nation an impossibility, I admire and honor the courage and bravery with which they maintained their theory, and accord to them the honor, as well as the courage of true soldiers.
To them the idea of winning success by the means we have had under consideration, and for which we have found the political leaders of the rebellion responsible, including the highest officer of the Confederacy, would have been as abhorrent as to myself. Not a word that I have written can tarnish the fame of the true soldier; and I have carefully avoided charging anything against even the politicians of the Confederacy that is not sustained by indisputable evidence. Considered morally, their methods can never be justified; yet it was by these methods, with assassination added, that the political leaders of the rebellion sought to obtain success, and because of this, must for all time in history fall under the condemnation of the enlightened Christian conscience of the world. That they were guilty of all these things has been abundantly proven; but as we shall see, the evidence has not yet been exhausted. They attempt to shield themselves under the claim of justifiable retaliation. Retaliation for what? They answer, "The atrocities committed by Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley." Let us consider this question for a moment. It was the fortune of the writer to be serving under Sheridan at the time these alleged atrocities were committed, and to be an eye-witness of them. What did Sheridan do? He burnt all the stack-yards and barns containing grain and hay, and all the mills and factories found in the valley from above Harrisonburg on down to near Winchester, or perhaps lower down than that. He also appropriated all the horses, cattle, sheep, etc., that could have been made available for the support and aid of an enemy. He dealt merely with property, and that such property alone as would have enabled General Lee again to have threatened the national capital by an invading foe by this route, as he had twice, or oftener, done before, thus making it necessary to employ a large force from our army in guarding this route. General Grant determined to render this division of his forces unnecessary, by rendering the valley impracticable to Lee by this destruction of the abundant supplies that it furnished, in order that he might have the benefit of Sheridan's forces in his investment of Richmond.
It was simply the destruction of property by which the rebellion could sustain itself, and thus prolong its existence, in order to shorten the war, and thus save the expenditure of human life. There was no property destroyed or confiscated but such as could be used for the subsistence and movements of an army. It was simply a question of shortening the war, and thus economizing human life by the destruction of property, and so was a measure fully justified by the laws and usages of war. Sheridan acted under Grant's orders in this matter, and his acts were only atrocious as war itself is atrocious, and can never serve as a justification of schemes that in every instance involved the lives of non-combatants, and even of women and children. All of this destruction of property in the Shenandoah Valley by Sheridan was done, and accounted for, strictly in accordance with the laws and usages of war, and has never been challenged by the civilized nations of the world as an unwarranted atrocity. It was harsh in the extreme; but as a military necessity it was justifiable. It included in its object mercy towards the lives of men.
As the cause of the Confederacy began to lose ground in the summer of 1864, and the signal success of our arms made it clear that it would not be able to maintain the fight to a successful close, the political leaders became desperate and reckless as to the means to which they resorted. The City Point explosion, the burning of a number of steamboats on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and the burning of a soldiers', or United States, hospital at Louisville, Ky., were amongst the occurrences of that eventful summer. The following extract from the report of John Maxwell to Captain Z. McDaniel, commanding Torpedo Company, explains the City Point explosion:—
"Captain: I have the honor to report that in obedience to your order, and with the means and equipments furnished me by you, I left this city (Richmond) 26th July last for the line of the James River, to operate with the 'hozological torpedo' against the enemy's vessels navigating that river. I had with me Mr. R. K. Dillard, who was well acquainted with the localities, and whose services I engaged for the expedition.