DEVILISH TORTURE.

ON or about the 3d of September, 1863, a party of rebel fiends visited the house of a well-known Union man (whose name we refrain from mentioning from obvious reasons), in Jamestown, Russell county, Kentucky. Rushing into the house, they arrested him and his wife, and, after some private consultation, took them out of the house and carried them to a place where they knew they were beyond pursuit.

The fiends then threw the woman down upon the ground, and compelled a negro who was with them to hold her down. The negro protested, and declared he would not do it, when a pistol was presented to his head and held there until he consented to do it; and then the brutes actually violated her, compelling her husband to stand up and look at them while they committed their devilish work. She plead and begged them to kill her before they thus treated her, but they only cursed her, and told her that she deserved more, and ought to consider herself lucky in getting off so easy for being a d-d Unionist.

They then released her and her husband, to go home and mourn over the wrongs that were inflicted upon them, for no other reason than that they loved their country and would not desert it.*

MURDER OF CARTER FOSTER.

IN the latter part of the summer of 1863, a party of rebels made a raid into the neighborhood of Conyersville,

* Captain J. D. Hale, of Kentucky.

Kentucky, and after robbing the Unionists of the country, and committing numerous other depredations, they went to the house of a man named Carter Foster, whom they 'arrested, and after calling him a d-d Unionist, and heaping every species of abuse upon him, they told him that it was their intention to kill him. He begged and plead with them not to take his life, and said that he had always been quiet and attended to his own business, and had said nothing to injure them or their cause. "You are a d-d Lincolnite," said they, "and that is enough; besides, it is our business to rid Kentucky of such men." They then drew their pistols and brutally shot him; after the body fell, the fiends actually kicked the corpse. This is but one of the many atrocious murders committed by this same band upon the unprotected Unionists of Kentucky. At one time it was worth a man's life to be even suspected of being a Unionist.*

THE DOCTRINE OF STATE RIGHTS PRACTICALLY REPUDIATED BY THE REBEL AUTHORITIES.

ONE of the principal grounds on which it has been attempted to justify the rebellion, is the mischievous doctrine of State rights; yet, this doctrine, which they profess to hold so sacred, for which they claim they have taken up arms, and submitted to the greatest sufferings, has been uniformly disregarded in practice by the rebels in the pursuit of their fiendish purposes. Maryland, and Kentucky, and Missouri, they have sought to force into the rebellion. Several of the seceded

*J. P. Dunlap, R. Pollard, and others.

States, to say the least, were actually forced into the rebellion against the will of a majority of the people, by the inauguration of a reign of terror. The practical disregard of this doctrine by the rebel authorities in North Carolina, is thus set forth in a speech of Hon. C. J. Barlow, of Georgia, delivered in the Cooper Institute, New York, October 15, 1864:—

In all my reading, I have not found in history so barefaced an attempt to deceive an intelligent people as this of Davis, to set up a claim that he is fighting the battles of the American people, and that he is the champion of State rights. Now let us come to the doctrine of State rights, and Mr. Davis's rule. The people of North Carolina proposed to meet in convention to nominate a candidate for Governor. They proposed, as a part of their scheme, that inasmuch as Mr. Davis evidently did not desire to make peace with the United States Government, it was competent for the "sovereign State" of North Carolina to withdraw from her "agent," Mr. Davis, that portion of his power delegated to him, and which gave him the control of the subject of peace, believing that the State could negotiate a peace better than Mr. Davis. The convention met in a building used for camp meeting purposes, and I suppose was as large as this. It was a body composed of the first men of the State, men of intelligence, wealth, and many of whose names were historic, and among them were many of advanced age. What did Mr. Jefferson Davis, the exponent of State rights, who is so exceedingly sensitive on that point, do? He sent an armed force to disperse the meeting and arrest its leaders; and, fellow-citizens, to-day, in the North Carolina prisons, are many aged and respected and intelligent citizens languishing and dying, because they had the audacity to nominate a candidate for Gover

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nor upon certain principles which they thought would redound to the benefit of the people. But that did not do. The agitation went on. The Georgia peace party kept pressing Mr. Davis. We held our Congressional elections and turned out of Congress what were called the "Forty Thieves." These were forty members of the socalled Congress at Richmond who always voted compactly as Davis wanted them to, and always in secret session, for there never had been an open session of that body upon any question that interested the people. We knew them, and in our election, what the Richmond Examiner called the "Forty Conscripts," and others called the "Forty Thieves," was turned out. But when Mr. Davis found that he had lost them, he induced them before their final retirement to pass a law, some of the features of which I will detail to you, because they are quite novel and original, and particularly as coming from a State Rights Democrat. In the first place, that law sets forth that any man who uses language calculated to lead anybody to suppose that he can possibly be in favor of the idea that a State has a right to secede from the Southern Confederacy, it is treason. [Laughter.] Then a clause gives to Mr. Davis the power to construe the language and motive of a man, and any lawyer knows the extent to which tyranny can be carried under such a clause. Then he is empowered by this to appoint military courts and the officers who compose it, the law having abolished the civil tribunals. What is the result? When a citizen is brought before the military court, he is tried with closed doors, is refused legal counsel, is refused the benefit of testimony, is refused correspondence or communication with his family, and all for what? To try and to shoot him, if, after getting all the evidence that can be got together, it can be shown to the mind of

Mr. Jefferson Davis, by direction or indirection, that this man could possibly entertain the idea that under any circumstances a State had a right to secede from the Southern Confederacy!

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* In the southwestern part of North Carolina, in the mountain region, there is a valley corresponding to the Valley of East Tennessee, which is grand and beautiful in its appearance. The inhabitants of this valley are almost entirely small farmers-many of them farmers who have quietly pursued their industries without slaves, in the midst of a picturesque country and fertile soil. They were simple and rural in their characteristics, patriotic, and they voted en masse against all the schemes and propositions for disunion. [Applause.] When at last the trial came, when Mr. Davis's conscript law was passed, those unfortunate people sent a commission to Richmond, asking that they might be absolved from the operation of that draft. The petition was, of course without avail. They then resorted to other means to avoid taking up arms against the Government under which they were reared and which they loved. They petitioned for expatriation. That, too, was refused by Mr. Jefferson Davis, this modern representative of civil liberty and defender of the rights and liberties of localities. [Laughter.] On the contrary, this champion of State rights sent North Carolina troops to that region for the purpose of having the conscript law executed against that unfortunate people, and to force them to take up arms against the conviction of their consciences. But the North Carolina troops fraternized with their fellowcitizens, and Mr. Davis was forced to send other troops, who also failed to effect the purpose. What next did he do? He enlisted a brigade of Cherokee Indians, numbering, I think, from 3500 to 4000, of as desperate