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with her mantle of green or has hidden with great growths of shrub or forest the spots which we thought that we could easily recognize. And as we gaze about us, we stand amazed at the outlook; for the scars of conflict are all concealed, if not wholly blotted out.

Is it not, my friends, one of God's loving ways of teaching us that he is constantly seeking to overlay our heart-sorrows with greater and more lasting heart-joys?

The battle here, with all the woe and pain and death it brought to many an individual soldier, resulted in a glorious fruitage. For the laurel of Victory was the precursor of the olive branch of Peace. An entire Nation, united and prosperous, now rejoices in the blessings that were made possible, in God's good time, by the bloody field of Gettysburg.

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CHAPTER XXII.

CONFEDERATE PRISONS.

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LADLY would we forego the recital of the revolting details of this chapter. To do so would be an untruthful abridgement of history. Thirty-nine soldiers of the Twenty-fourth Michigan died of starvation, and disease resulting therefrom, in Confederate prisons, and nine more of the Regiment died while coming home, after their release from those prison pens, not to mention the untimely graves and shattered healths of 85 others of this one regiment who were confined in them. Confederate prisons form. the darkest chapter in the blood-stained annals of this nation, and conclusively prove that a people of a section guilty of such barbarities to those within their power were totally unworthy of, and unfit for, separate nationality.

Savages of the forest and cannibals of the sea isles never exhibited greater cruelties to captives than the Confederates did to their prisoners. of war. From public records on both sides, from personal narratives of our regimental comrades still living in this city, and from a visit of the author to Andersonville in 1869, has he been able to collate the awful facts of this chapter. We offer no apology for this narration. The pen must convey thoughts which the tongue will hesitate to utter. By-gones may be by-gones with sentimentalists whose feelings go out to the authors, but never to the victims of crime. But we can never forget and will never forgive those in the South guilty of the barbarisms practiced upon our unfortunate comrades whom the chances of war placed under their control. As martyr fires emblazon the deeds of fanaticism and bigotry, and burnings at the stake lighten up the forest darkness among savages, so the records of Southern prison pens disclose the enormities of slavery's influence, which read like pages from the history of hell!

The captive insurgents were well fed, comfortably housed, and as generously treated as if they had been hospital patients of the Union army. Not one of them ever died of starvation; not one ever suffered

UNION PRISON FOR CONFEDERATE SOLDIERS, AT ELMIRA, N. Y.-FROM A_WAR-TIME PHOTOGRAPH.

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for want of food, clothing or medical attention. Whatever mortality prevailed among them was from natural causes, greatly from small-pox, the result of their own failure to vaccinate. Not so in the South with the Union captives, where they had, for the most part, no shelter from storms, cold or sun heat other than dug-outs in the ground, with but inadequate and the foulest food and water; and this, too, in sight of standing forests, the purest water, and an abundance of food, which were denied them.

The scope of our work forbids a full treatment of this subject and descriptions of those infernal prisons. Libby prison was a large warehouse in Richmond, owned by Mr. Libby, a Unionist, whose property was seized for prison uses. It was three stories high, besides a basement. It contained six rooms, 40 by 100 feet each, in which were confined 1,500 Union officers and men, with no conveniences to cook, eat, wash their clothes, and bath, or even sleep except upon the bare floor. There was no fire, and the windows being broken, the cold wind blew through the building. Under penalty of being shot by the guard, no one was allowed to go within three feet of the windows. The brutal guards were given a furlough for each Union prisoner thus killed.

Yet the prisoners in Libby fared better than those on Belle Isle, as they were under a roof. Those on the island were without shelter for the most part. This island consisted of about eight acres in the James River, in front of Richmond. A portion of it was a beautiful, grassy bluff, shaded with trees. About five acres were low, treeless, and sand-barren, where the prisoners were confined and never allowed to seek the shelter of the grove a few rods off. Here 11,000 Union prisoners were held, with shelter for a few only.

When the Union captives were taken they were searched and stripped of all valuables, blankets, overcoats and often even their shoes. In winter the prisoners had to bundle together like hogs to keep warm. In sleeping on the ground they took turns who should be the outside men, and in the severe wintry mornings this row was marked by stiffened forms, frozen to death, within sight of the Confederate capitol and the residence of Jefferson Davis!

The Union prisoners were slowly starved by a diminution of food, and thus cold and hunger were like two vultures gnawing at their vitals. While women of the North were permitted to visit the Confederate captives and alleviate their sick and wounded in prison and in hospital, we have yet to learn that a single Southern woman ever visited a Confederate prison where Union soldiers were confined,

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CONFEDERATE PRISON FOR UNION SOLDIERS, AT MILLEN, GEORGIA.-FROM A WAR-TIME PHOTOGRAPH.

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