shot by the guard upon the most frivolous pretences. I have seen our men marched through the city of Richmond barefooted, bareheaded, without coats, and with only the remnants of other articles of clothing. I have seen them brought from this island in the evening, to ship them in the morning for City Point, so weak from hunger and disease that they were unable to stand upon their feet. One of the many nights spent in Libby is engraven upon my mind. A free negro of Philadelphia, nearly white, captured while serving in our navy, received three hundred and twenty lashes. His loud cries and pleadings penetrated every part of the building, as blow followed blow. He was then wrapped in a blanket, saturated with salt and water, and cast into one of the dungeons for a month or so. Such scenes and cries were frequent.

Major Houstain and Lieutenant Von Weltrien, who escaped from Richmond in November, 1863, stated, in a conversation at Fort Monroe, that the cries of the pri soners for food were piteous, and the ravings of the men, rendered insane in many instances by the pangs of hunger, sounded through the Libby building night and day. One man in the room with Major Houstain was so prostrated by want of food, that when a piece of bread was thrown to him by his brutal jailor, he had not the strength to eat it, and died with the scrap in his hand, clutching in death the very staff of life. Rev. James Harvey, Chaplain of the Hundred-and-Tenth Ohio Volunteers, who was taken prisoner at Winchester, Va., says: After spending three days in connection with our hospitals in gathering up our wounded, I found in the dead-room of one of our hospitals files of men who were lying in a state of decomposition. The nurses told me that they could: not be taken out, as the stench was such that the room could not be entered.

WRETCHED CONDITION OF UNION PRISONERS, RELEASED FROM RICHMOND.

THE following is a simple statement of facts from a gentleman of undoubted veracity:

The flag-of-truce boat New York arrived at the Naval School wharf, Annapolis, Maryland, this morning, October 30th, 1863, from City Point, with one hundred and eighty-one paroled men. Eight of the men died on the boat, on its way hither. They had literally been starved to death. Never, in the whole course of my life, have I witnessed such a scene as these men presented. They were living skeletons; every man of them had to be sent to the hospitals, and the surgeon's opinion of them is, that more than one-third of them must die. They are beyond the reach of medicine.

I questioned several of them, and all stated that their condition has been brought on by the treatment which they have received at the hands of the rebels. They have been kept without food, and exposed, a large portion of the time, without shelter of any kind.

To look at the attenuated and squalid condition of these poor men, and listen to their tales of woe and agony, as to how they have been treated, one would not suppose they had fallen into the hands of Southern Chivalry! but rather into the hands of savage barbarians, destitute of all humanity or feeling.

The following is a letter addressed to the editor of the Daily Chronicle, of Washington, by Rev. E. W. Hutter, Pastor of St. Matthew's Lutheran Church, New Street, Philadelphia, in regard to the prisoners referred to in the

ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND,
December 1st, 1863.

Dear Sir: Although the statements respecting the extreme wretchedness of the Union prisoners returned from Richmond, seemed to me to be so well authenticated as to preclude all possibility of doubt or mistake, I yet resolved to satisfy myself of their truthfulness, or otherwise, by actual personal observation. To this step I was prompted by no desire to gratify a mere idle curiosity, but to render to those poor men, if possible, all the good that might be in my power. "He that knoweth to do good," says St. James, "and doeth it not, to him it is sin." Nor are we, in our ministrations of mercy, to wait until occasions for their exercise present themselves at our doors, but, in imitation of our blessed Redeemer, we are to seek them out.

Actuated by motives such as these, I paid a visit to the Government Hospitals at Annapolis, and proceed to furnish you with a statement of the condition of the prisoners recently returned from Richmond. In my visit there, I was most kindly assisted by Rev. H. C. Henries, the laborious and self-denying chaplain in charge of that place. Be assured, it is not possible to exaggerate the scenes there presented; they defy the descriptive powers of language. The pictorial representation in Harper's Weekly, so far from being an exaggeration, affords but a very inadequate view of these scenes of wretchedness. In my pastoral experience, I have stood at the bed-side of many dying sufferersoften have I seen the human frame painfully reduced by the ravages of consumption-but never before have my sensibilities been so shocked as at Annapolis. To look upon men who, a short time since, were robust and stalwart men, not brutes-immortal men, created by a com

mon Father, and redeemed by a common Lord—to see such reduced to wasted and bony skeletons, by withholding from them the "daily bread," for the production of which the Lord of heaven and earth sends his genial sunshine and his refreshing rains-Oh! this was a scene which, in this land of plenty, enriched by the superabundant goodness of God, I never expected to witness. Such scenes I did witness only to-day, in the hospitals at this place-men, from emaciated bodies, breathing out their spirits into the hands of God, whose death has been literally wrought by the murderous process of starvation. An unspeakable satisfaction to me was it, to be permitted, in company with the beloved Chaplain, to point a number of such dying starvelings to "the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world." In every instance, when it was in the power of these poor men to speak, the last lingering accents on their lips consisted of petitions to Christ for the remission of their sins, and in the supplication of blessings from the Almighty Ruler of the world on their beloved. country. Very few of these men, after their arrival here, have been able to articulate; they could only signify their wishes by looks and signs. From the few who were able to speak, it is a noteworthy fact, that I did not hear a solitary murmur of complaint that they had enlisted in the service of their country, or that, by the mysteriousness of Providence, they had been doomed, for such a cause, to die even so ghastly and horrible a death. Like the Apostles of our Lord, these heroic men seem content, in the prosecution of their noble work, to endure even worse things than a baptism of blood and a martyrdom of fire-even a horror not confronted by the Apostles themselves, viz., Starvation.

In my intercourse with these famishing victims of

Southern barbarity, I was exceedingly anxious to learn their own impressions as to the causes that underlie the action of the Rebel Government toward themselves,whether the treatment they had received at Richmond was voluntary or compulsory. If the former, it would, of course, be the fault of their enemies; if the latter, their misfortune. With one accord, the answer was, that their dreadful condition was mostly voluntary, the result of a system of wanton and deliberate cruelty. The Richmond conspirators, our prisoners admit, are in straits, and have it not in their power to bestow upon them even a tolerable degree of care and attention; but their condition is not so desperate, that they might not, if they wished, afford them at least as much daily food as would serve to sustain life. Their own destitution the rebels seize upon, not as a real and truthful justification of their inhumanity, but as a pretext; and this they do, not in sorrow, but in the intense maliciousness of diabolism itself. They gloat over it, that, for the display of their fiendish cruelty, they have an argument plausible enough to quit themselves in their own wicked foregone conclusions, however transparent its flimsiness to all the world beside. I stood at the bedside of a dying youth, from Tennessee; I kneeled at his bedside in prayer; he claimed to have made his peace with God, through faith in Jesus Christ. In the very article and hour of death, when all purposes are honest, and all secrets are revealed, I asked him: Do you think, my young brother, that the men in Richmond have starved you to death from choice, or were they driven to it from necessity? His answer was, "God forgive them, they might have done better in they wished." The utterance of another was, "I know they could have given us more food than they did, from the amount they gave to the guards; but they wished us