Narrative of Privations and Sufferings of United States Officers and Soldiers while Prisoners of War in the Hands of the Rebel Authorities. Being the Report of a Commission of Inquiry, appointed by the United States Sanitary Commission. With an Appendix, containing the Testimony. Printed by the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Philadelphia.
That uniform thoroughness and accuracy which have marked all that has been done by the Sanitary Commission, not in the field alone, but in the committee-room and the printing-office, were never better shown than in this Report. It attempts something which, unless done thoroughly, was not worth doing; since, on a subject which appeals so strongly to the feelings, mere generalities and gossip do more harm than good. It is the work of a special Commission of Inquiry, composed of three physicians, (Drs. Mott, Delafield, and Wallace,) two lawyers, (Messrs. Wilkins and Hare,)and one clergyman (Mr. Walden). This commission has performed a great amount of labor, and has digested its result into a form so systematic as to be logically irresistible. The facts on which the statement rests are a large body of evidence, taken under oath, from prisoners of both armies, and confirmed by the admissions, carefully collated, of the Rebel press. The conclusion is, that, in the Southern prisons, "tens of thousands of helpless men have been, and are now being, disabled and destroyed by a process as certain as poison, and as cruel as the torture or burning at the stake, because nearly as agonizing and more prolonged."
The next step is to fix the responsibility for all these horrors. All theories of apology—as that the sufferings were accidental or exceptional, or that, badly as our soldiers may have fared, the Rebel soldiers fared little better—are taken up and conclusively refuted, the last-named with especial thoroughness. The inevitable inference drawn by the Commission is, that these inhumanities were "designedly inflicted on the part of the Rebel Government," and were not "due to causes which such authorities could not control."
The immediate preparation of this able report is understood to be due to the Rev. Treadwell Walden, an Episcopal clergyman of Philadelphia, not unknown to the readers of the "Atlantic." His present work will be the permanent authority for the facts which it records, and will justify to future generations the suggestion with which it ends, that these cruelties are the legitimate working of a form of government which takes human slavery for its basis. The record of such a government is fitly written in these pages: it is as appropriate as is, for a king of Dahomey, his funeral pyramid of skulls.
Freedom of Mind in Willing; or, Every Being that Wills a Creative First Cause. By Rowland G. Hazard. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 12mo. pp. 455.
The State of Rhode Island is the most metaphysically inclined of all the sisterhood, not excepting South Carolina. A superficial observer or a passing traveller might take just the opposite view of her tendencies. The stranger who should complete a cycle of sumptuous suppers in Providence, or spend but a day or two in Newport at the height of the season, might conclude that Matter with its most substantial appliances, or Fashion with her most fascinating excitements, had combined to exclude all thoughts of the spiritual from the few square miles over which this least of the States holds dominion. Should he leave the two capitals of luxurious wealth and giddy fashion and seek for the haunts of Philosophy among the quiet nooks which her few valleys and her splendid sea-coast afford, he might judge that meditation had been effectually frightened from them all, for nowhere can he escape the whir of countless spindles and the clash of thousands of looms.
But inferences like these may not be trusted, as history demonstrates. The most admirable of modern treatises in the subtile science, that masterpiece of speculation in matter and style, "The Minute Philosopher" of Bishop Berkeley, was composed in Rhode Island, and the place is still indicated where the musing metaphysician is said to have written the greater portion of the work. That Berkeley's genius did not abandon the region, when he left it, is manifest from the direction taken by the late Judge Durfee, whose "Pan-Idea," if it cannot be accepted as in all respects a satisfactory theory of the relations of the spiritual universe, may be safely taken as an indication of the lofty and daring Platonism of the ingenious author. The anonymous author of "Language by a Heteroscian" is another thinker of somewhat similar tastes. If common report do not greatly err, it is the same thinker who in the volume before us solicits the attention of the philosophic world to his views of the Will. It adds greatly to the interest of the volume itself, in our view, and we trust will do so in the view of our readers, to know that he is no studious recluse nor professional philosopher, but active, shrewd, and keen-sighted, both in his mills, when at home in a fitly named valley, and upon Change, when in Boston or New York.
Surely Roger Williams, that boldest of idealists, did not live in vain, in that he not only set apart the State which he founded as a place of refuge for all persons given to free and daring speculation, but made it a kind of Prospero's Isle, that should never cease to be haunted by some metaphysical spell.
The appearance of such a work from such a source is of itself most refreshing, as an indication that a life of earnest devotion to material pursuits is not inconsistent with an ardent appreciation of the surpassing importance of speculative inquiries. One such example as this is enough to refute the oft-repeated assertion that in America all philosophy must of course give way before the absorbing interest in the pursuit of wealth. A few years since we chanced to send a copy of an American edition of Plato's "Phaedo" to a German Professor. "Eine wirkliche Erscheinung," was his reply in acknowledgment, "to see an edition of a work of Plato from America." What would be his amazement at receiving a copy of a disquisition on the Will written by an American mill-owner!
It is still more refreshing to find the author so sincere and so earnest an advocate of the elevating tendency of philosophical studies. There is a charming simplicity in the words with which his Preface is concluded:—"Whatever opinion may be formed of the success or failure of any effort to elucidate this subject, I trust it will be admitted that the arguments I have presented at least tend to show that the investigation may open more elevated and more elevating views of our position and our powers, and may reveal new modes of influencing our own intellectual and moral character, and thus have a more immediate, direct, and practical bearing on the progress of our race in virtue and happiness than any inquiry in physical science." Such testimony, coupled with the impression made by his argument, is most gratifying, not only in consideration of the source from which it comes, but also as contrasted with the course of so much of the speculative philosophy of the day, towards Materialism in Psychology, Necessarianism in Morals, Naturalism in Philosophy, and Pantheism in Theology.