PROSECUTED BY CRUELTY AND TERROR. 23 mechanic and day-laborer, to those in all the professions: clergymen, lawyers, physicians, members of Congress, United States Senators, and judges of the highest courts of the State and of the Nation. In the spring and summer of 1861, Senator Johnson and Messrs. Etheridge, Bridges, Maynard, Nelson, all then or previously members of Congress, were compelled to flee from the single State of Tennessee, or, being out of the State, found it unsafe to return. Judges Catron and Trigg, of the same State, with others of the bench, the former of the United States Supreme Court, were treated in like manner. Judge Catron did. not dare, nor was he permitted, to visit his home in Nashville until Middle Tennessee was repossessed by the United States forces. Judge Wayne, also of the Supreme Court of the United States, whose residence was in Georgia, being in attendance upon his official duties at Washington when the rebellion began, and determined to remain loyal to his oath and his country, has never since ventured to visit his State, and will not be able to do so except under the protection of the arms of the Union. The only crime for which these men were exiled from the land of their birth, and for which others have suffered imprisonment at home, was their determination to adhere to the Government which had always given them protection, their regard for their solemn oaths of office, and their unwillingness to yield to the demands of a godless rebellion. If persons of such distinction can be so treated, and were so treated at the beginning of the revolt, no large amount of credulity is demanded to believe that thousands of less note have been subjected to the most cruel doom. We have undoubted proof of this, relating to every period since the beginning of the war, and we fairly infer that there are multitudes of like cases of which the public never hear. Among numerous testimonies at hand, we give an illustration of this point from the address of Governor Hamilton, of Texas, to the people of that State, issued in January last. We too well know that Texas does not stand solitary and alone in the work here graphically described. The same tale is true of every rebel State. Governor Hamilton begins by barely referring to his own treatment: * * * Martial law has CITIZENS OF TEXAS: Through the instrumentality of ambitious and designing men, you have been for more than two and a half years engaged in rebellion against the Government of the United States. Hunted as a felon, and expelled from the State because I would not join the conspiracy to overthrow free government, I now, after an exile of eighteen months, return to it, charged with the duty of organizing such Provisional State Government as may be best calculated to aid in restoring you to the blessings of civil liberty. When you were forced, by a minority, into rebellion, you were in the enjoyment of every blessing ever conferred by civil government upon men. Not a single wrong had you ever suffered from the Government. been visited upon you, and in every town, and village, and neighborhood, some petty despot appointed, to whose edicts you were required to bow in meek submission. You have been denied the right to travel through the community near your homes, on the most necessary business, without the written permission of one of these tools of tyranny. You dare not convey to market the product of your farms and your labor without permission. Your wagons and teams have been seized by Government agents at home and on the road to market, in order to compel you to sell them your crops for a nominal price in worthless paper. No interest has been secure, and no right sacred. Law and order no longer exist among you. * * The vicious and depraved, the murderers and ruffians of the country, are banded together in secret societies, known as "Sons of the South," and are from day to day sitting in judgment on the lives of the best citizens of the State. Three thousand of your citizens have perished because they loved good government, and peace, and order in society-perished as felons. They have been hung, shot, and literally butchered; they have been tortured, in many instances, beyond any thing known in savage warfare. Uncertainty, and gloom, and despair, are resting upon you to-day like the frown of God. Are you in love with this, and do you desire it to continue? * PROSECUTED BY CRUELTY AND TERROR. 25 He then draws a picture of the condition of things just before the rebellion began, from which we take a single paragraph: In our own State, during the summer and fall of 1860, according to the published account of the murderers themselves, two hundred and fifty of our free citizens were hung as felons, and thousands driven from their homes and compelled to leave the State, because they were SUSPECTED of infidelity to slavery. And, finally, gathering temerity from its successful war upon the rights and lives of the citizens, it lifted its unholy hand to destroy the Government to whose protection it owed its power. We close these illustrations of rebel cruelty by one more quotation. It is from the distinguished Southern statesman referred to under the foregoing head, and commended so highly by the National Intelligencer, a journal that will not be suspected of favoring what is called "radicalism." He is speaking chiefly of the violence practised towards loyal citizens of Virginia, and says: What argument can Virginia, for example, make in favor of a revolt against the authority of the Union, that may not be used with tenfold force by her own western counties to justify a revolt against her? Virginia herself had really no definable grievance against the Union. * * She has never yet indicated a single item of grievance resulting from the acts of the Federal Government. In fact, that Government has always been, in great part, in her own hands, or under the control of her influence. If she has not been happy and prosperous it is simply her own fault. I mean to say, she has no cause whatever to excuse her rebellion against the Union. Yet she revolted; we may say, gave to the revolution a countenance and support, without which it would have speedily sunk into a futile enterprise. Having come to it, she assumed the right to compel her unwilling citizens to cast their lives and fortunes into the same issue. A large portion of her people, comprising the inhabitants of many counties in the mountain region of the Alleghanies, have always been distinguished,—as, indeed, seems to be the characteristic of all our mountain country,-for their strong attachment to the Union. These people have an aversion to slaves, and have been steadily intent upon establishing and expanding a system of free labor. They have, therefore, very little in common, either of sentiment or interest, with the governing power of the State. When, therefore, the question of secession was submitted to them, they voted against it. From that moment they were marked, and when the State, under the control of its lowland interest, raised the banner of revolt, its first movement was to invite the Southern army to occupy the mountain districts, to overawe and drive the people there, not only into submission to the dominant power of the State, but into active hostility against the Union. To this end these loyal people were pursued with a bitter persecution, harried by a ruffian soldiery, hunted from their homes into the mountain fastnesses; their dwellings burned; their crops destroyed; their fields laid waste, and every other cruelty inflicted upon them to which the savage spirit of revolution usually resorts to compel the assent of those who resist its command. The inhabitants of these beautiful mountain valleys are a simple, brave, and sturdy people; and all these terrors were found insufficient to force them into an act of treason. They refused, and in their turn revolted against this execrable tyranny and drew their swords in favor of the Union. What more natural or righteous than such a resistance? And yet, Virginia affects to consider this the deepest of crimes, and is continually threatening vengeance against what she calls these rebels-Virginia, the rebel, denouncing rebellion! Her own plea is that she has only seceded, but Western Virginia rebels— there is a great difference. When it is considered that unnumbered multitudes all through the South have been subjected to similar cruelties for the crime of loyalty to the Government, and for refusing to be driven into treason and rebellion against it, and when this is contrasted with the "leniency" of our Government, which, as Governor Hamilton says, is without a parallel in the history of nations dealing with treason and traitors, it places the unblushing cruelty of the Southern leaders and their minions out of the pale of all comparison with that of any tyrannical power, claiming to be civilized and Christianized, which the world has ever known.* *In his address to the people of Texas, Governor Hamilton truly says: "In the history of the world, there cannot be found one example of a government dealing with a rebellion against its rightful authority with the mercy and leniency which have characterized the United States in this war. Out of the multiplied thousands who have been taken in arms against the Government, not me has been made to suffer for his ITS DESOLATION OF THE COUNTRY. 27 ITS DESOLATION OF THE COUNTRY. 7. We pass over some of the other characteristics of the rebellion, with a bare mention of them: the wide-spread desolation which it has brought upon the whole disloyul region, to every interest, material, moral, social, and religious; bringing to premature and dishonored graves the flower of a whole generation of their young men, with multitudes of aged fathers and stripling boys, pressed into their armies by the merciless conscription; leaving their land filled with widows and orphans, to mourn and weep out the remainder of an embittered life; the threatening of wide-spread starvation within their borders; the laying waste of nearly the whole producing regions of agriculture, from the desolation which more or less always follows the track of armies in civil war; the disbanding of their institutions of learning of the higher grades, to furnish material for their armies; the injury which, from treason. * How has it been in Texas and throughout the South? Hecatombs of victims have been offered upon the altar of rebellion! The men who are responsible to society and to God for the blood of a thousand good citizens, are those who are prating about the tyranny of the President and the Government of the United States." * We may perhaps take this as a specimen of what has befallen institutions of learning at the South. If this is true of North Carolina, where there has always been great disaffection with the rebel leaders, we may readily infer the condition of colleges in other States: "The effect of the rebellion on Southern Colleges is well illustrated by the case of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1860, it had four hundred and thirty students; in 1863, but sixty-three, nearly all of whom were too young or physically incapacitated for service. In 1860, eighty-four young men graduated, of whom one-seventh are known to have fallen in battle. Of the eight who ranked highest in the class, four are in their graves, a fifth is a wounded prisoner, and the others are in the army. Of the Freshman Class of that year, eighty in number, only one remained to graduate, and even he had been in the army, and was discharged for bad health. Though none of the fourteen members of the Faculty were liable to conscription, five enlisted, one of whom was killed; another has been taken prisoner; the third was severely wounded, and the fourth has a ruined constitution. Every son capable of service of the remaining nine, eight in number, entered the service, and two of them have been mortally wounded. Fifteen young men of the village, being more than half of the whole, have perished in battle."-New York paper. |