Ass't. Adjt.-General."

However, this order did not prevent the carrying out of the intentions
of the confederate President and Congress.

The saddest and blackest chapter of the history of the war of the
Rebellion, is that which relates to the treatment of Union prisoners in
the rebel prison pens, at Macon, Ga., Belle Island, Castle Thunder,
Pemberton, Libbey, at and near Richmond and Danville, Va., Cahawba,
Ala., Salisbury, N. C., Tyler, Texas, Florida, Columbia, S. C., Millen
and Andersonville, Ga. It is not the purpose to attempt a general
description of these modern charnel houses, or to enter into a detailed
statement of the treatment of the Union soldiers who were unfortunate
enough to escape death upon the battle-field and then fall captive to
the confederates. When we consider the fact that the white men who were
engaged in the war upon both sides, belonged to one nation, and were
Americans, many of whom had been educated at the same schools, and
many--very many--of them members of the same religious denominations,
and church; not a few springing from the same stock and loins, the
atrocities committed by the confederates against the Union soldiers,
while in their custody as prisoners of war, makes their deeds more
shocking and inhuman than if the contestants had been of a different
nationality.

[Illustration: TERRIBLE FIGHT WITH BLOODHOUNDS.

The 1st South Carolina Regiment was attacked by the Confederates with
bloodhounds, at Pocaralago Bridge, Oct. 23rd, 1862. The hounds rushed
fiercely upon the troops, who quickly shot or bayoneted them and
exultingly held aloft the beasts that had been so long a terror to the
negro race.]

The English soldiers who lashed the Sepoys to the mouths of their
cannon, and then fired the pieces, thus cruelly murdering the captured
rebels, offered the plea, in mitigation of their crime, and as an excuse
for violating the rules of war, that their subjects were not of a
civilized nation, and did not themselves adhere to the laws governing
civilized nations at war with each other. But no such plea can be
entered in the case of the confederates, who starved, shot and murdered
80,000 of their brethren in prison pens, white prisoners of war. If such
treatment was meted to those of their own color and race, as is related
by an investigating committee of Senators, what must have been the
treatment of those of another race,--whom they had held in slavery, and
whom they regarded the s