A Brief History of the Cruelties and Atrocities of the Rebellion

o wounded, and after he told them who he was, they brutally shot him in the leg. When he was carried off the field the jolting of the am-, balances so hurt him, that he involuntarily groaned, whereupon a rebel officer rode,up to him and threatened to blow his brains out if he repeated “his noise.” “ Immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities." General Ricketts testifies that when he lay on the field wounded, the passing rebels called out, “ knock out his brains, the d------d Yankee.” He heard of many of the prisoners, who were bayoneted, and two or three shot after they arrived in Richmond. “ Immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities.'1’ Senator Sprague, who went to recover the bodies of Col. Slocum and Major Ballou, testified that he was told, when searching the battle-ground, that the Colonel’s body had been dug up, his head cut off, and his body burned. After thorough and repeated investigations, the Senator became fully satisfied that both of these gallant men did indeed suffer this unhallowed and barbarous rite of sepulchre at the hands of their own countrymen, who boast themselves gentlemen, par excellence, their chivalry, and that their’s is the only genuine type-of manhood on the face of God’s green earth. The Senator corroborates the statement that many of our men were buried face downward, and similar outrages unheard of and unthought of, save among the unsanctified rites of pagan and savage nations. Heaven save us and the rest of mankind from such Christianity, and such civilization, if their’s is the only genuine. An official report of Judge Advocate General Holt, dated March 27, 1863, gives a heart-rending picture of the barbarities of the rebels upon twenty- two Federal prisoners, captured near Chattanooga, Tenn. One of them was stripped, tied down to a stone, and whipped until life was nearly extinct. After whipping him, they brought a rope to hang* rhim, but his life was finally spared. Eight of these men were hung, after having been tried by a court-martial and acquitted. But the authorities at Richmond over-ruled the court, and ordered, them hung. From the breaking of the rope, after being sometime suspended, two of these unhappy victims were restored to consciousness ; they begged for one hour for prayer and preparation for death, which was peremptorily refused, and the execution proceeded. What better is this, than cowardly butchery ? . The remaining prisoners, reduced to fourteen, closely confined in jail at Atlanta, accidentally learned that it was determined by the Richmond government to hang them, and-they laid a plan of escape. Eight succeeded, six entered our lines, two were never heard from. The following brief dispatch tells the story of the remaining six: “At the •end of eleven months terminated their pitiless persecutions in the prisons of the South— persecutions begun and'continued amid indignities and sufferings on their part, and atrocities on the part of the barbarous foe, which illustrates, far more faithfully than any human language could express, the demoniac spirit of a revolt, every throb of whose life is a crime against the very race to which we belong.” ’ “Immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities." LIBBY PRISON. At a meeting of Surgeons of the United States Army and Navy, a

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