moonshine. Even success, the most brilliant, is over
dead and mangled bodies, the anguish and lamentation of distant families
appealing to me for missing sons, husbands, and fathers. It is only
those who have not heard a shot, nor heard the shrieks and groans of the
wounded and lacerated (friend or foe), that cry aloud for more blood,
more vengeance, more desolation."

One glance we here may give at the traits which against this dark
background shone with the light which redeems humanity. The worst scenes
of all were not on the battlefield but in the military prisons. At
Andersonville, and other points, thousands of Northern prisoners were
crowded together, with insufficient supply of unnutritious food, with
scanty and foul water; surrounded by harsh guards, quick to shoot if the
"dead line" was crossed by a foot; harassed by petty tyranny; starved,
homesick, diseased, dying like infected sheep. It is a black, black
page,--but let its blackness be mainly charged to war itself, and what
war always breeds. In Northern prisons, the rate of mortality was nearly
as high as in Southern; the work of hunger in the one was matched by
cold in the other. "All things considered," says J. F. Rhodes in his
impartial _History of the United States_, "the statistics show no reason
why the North should reproach the South. If we add to one side of the
account the refusal to exchange the prisoners"--a refusal based by Grant
at one time on the military disadvantage of restoring the Southern
prisoners to active service--"and the greater resources, and to the
other the distress of the Confederacy; the balance struck will not be
far from even." Enough for our present purpose that the Andersonville
prison-pen was a hell. Well, after a time the Union armies were
recruited by negroes, and the Confederates in resentment refused to
consider these when captured as prisoners of war, and would not include
them in the exchanges. Thereupon the Federal Government declared that
its negro soldiers must receive equal rights with the whites, and until
this was conceded there should be no exchange at all. Then some of the
Andersonville prisoners drew up a petition, and signed and sent it to
Washington, praying the government to hasten their release, and if
necessary to hold the question of negro prisoners for negotiation, while
pressing forward the liberation of its faithful and suffering white
soldiers. But promptly by others in the prison-pen a counter petit