Delaware gazette. [volume] (Delaware, Ohio) 1855-1886, 1865-06-09
From Arthur's Home Magazine for June.
SnUTHERH pRIS0NS.

/ L Ell0k we OuguB iii 70 Take sudluc ~
ourselves, almost, that we have eaten and
drunken that we have lain down and ris.
en- up and gone about our business and
our pleasure, while our soldlers-the he
roes and patriots whose breasts have made
a living wall Of defence betWixt us and
our foes, were starving to death in the
! South.
For long time 1 thought what you
probably did, reader, that the stories
could not be true-that they must be ex-
| aggerated, that it was not In the heart of
man to treat his brother as we were told
| that Southern soldiers treated Northern
ones. Fiends might do these things !; but
men were not devils, and anything that
fell below these could not practice the
systematic, sickening barbarities which
we read and heard that our own country
men perpetrated upon each other. But
at last the evidence accumulated from
sources that rendered the facts indlspu-
table as the sun at MONDAY, and we knew
that man-our own countrymen, IN our
own land, in this nineteenth century,
were being absolutely frozen, tortured.
starved to death
While [ write this, it still seems incred-
ible, but the awful horrors of Libby
Prison, of Andersonville, Salisbury, are
facts One seized at any shadow OF
apologies for such cruelty; and when we
heard that the South fed her prisoners as
we'll as she did her armies, we hoped that
this might in some degree, extenuate their
treatment of our men. But Sherman
path through the fruitful fields of Georgia
and the Carolinas, has settled all doubts
on that head; neither before God or men
has the South the faintest shadow of an
excuse for booming her prisoners of war
to slow death of freezing, starvation,
cruelty. Read of them unclothed, un-
fed, haggard, staggering in dirt, In distress
reduced to idiocy, and longing for death,
Oh, brothers, whose suferings have
wrought our deliverance, and made our
country the proud, free nation she is this
day, my heart grows sick remembering
how you suffered and died, and thinking
of the low dark graves where you lie to-
day. buried as good men would scorn to
bury dogs and horses, with brutal jest,
and sneer, and exultatiOn. Who shall
tell the story of your sorrows-Who shall
sing the song of your silent herolsms !
We, your debtors, can never do It. YoQ
bought for us the victory and the peace
which we enjoy to-day, and to you, under
God, be the honor and the glory y
We all know that magnaqimity and gener-
osity become conquerer, that courtesy and
clemencey are the part of Yietors toward
the vanquished, and that the first duty of
a Christian nation is to set an example OF
forbearance and forgiveness.
But because of this shall we open the
doors of our prisons? Shall we smile
unon and take to our confidence highway
men and murderers Shall the men who
rolled into Lawrence with the early dawn,
and Stayed her helpless fathers, and sons,
and brothers-shall the men who could
see day by day, the famishing eyes, the
pinched faces, the skeleton forms of our
starving men-shall they go unrebuked
and unpunished?
At least let the names of those who had
charge of these prisons, and who COM
mitted these appalling crueltles, be given
to the world, and to the undying infamy
which they deserve! Why, the names of
Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr grow
luminous beside them.
have heard Northern people say that
j efferson Davis was not "at the core
bad-hearted man. Did he know that
in his own dominions stood, with their
burdens of sin and suffering, these prison
walls of agony crying unto God? Was IL
by his consent and authority that these
things were?
[ have known Northern men and wo-
men to praise Gen. Robert b. Lee, for
courteous and kind-hearted gentleman"
Did he ever, by word of mouth or stroke
of his pen, oppose or alleviate the suffer
ings that for all these years have been go
ing on under his eye? Where were the
wives of these men, that they did not
with tears and supplications give their
husbands no rest until they prevailed up
on them to relieve the awful miseries that
were going on by day and by night among
their prisoners of war;" sss
Is it not womans place and duty to be
pitiful and sympathetic, when man Is full
of vengeance and cruelty? Take the
vilest crowd of criminals that were ever
herded together beneath one prison roof
and tell to a woman throughout the
whole North the half Of such story OF
horror as we have been told of husbands,
and sons, and brothers, and IT that wO
man would not risk her own life to carry
food, clothing, and medicines to those
men, she would be unworthy her name
or her sex.
Dear reader, for the ignorant, mis-
guided, deluded South, l think we ought
to have little but sympathy and pity
Let us win them, by Kindness and for
bearanee, back to a new and better ale
glance and love to the Union. The
thing that stood betwixt us, that awful
power of darkness, even slavery, has
passed away forever, and oRr future, our
prosperity, our honor, is theirs also.
But does not a voice come up to us
from the crowds of Southern graves,
where lie our heroic dead, crying, not for
that vengeance which is mine, saith the
Lord, but demanding at least for truth
and Justices sake that the names of the
men who commanded and allowed, and
those who executed these demoniac atroci-
ties, shall be given to universal execra-
ton and infamy? And if they be men of
culture and position, the greater be the
horror which their works shall bring
down on Their own heads and whether in
high places or low, wherever and Whatso-
ever they are, they deserve the wrath and
execration of every honest soul through
ont the earth. V. +. T.