ad, at such time and place as the
President of the United States should direct.

November 3 President Johnson approved of the sentence, and ordered Major
General C. C. Augur to carry the same into effect on Friday, November 10,
which was done. The prisoner made frantic appeals against the sentence;
he wrote imploring letters to President Johnson, and lying ones to the
New York News, a Rebel paper. It is said that his wife attempted to
convey poison to him, that he might commit suicide and avoid the ignomy
of being hanged. When all hope was gone he nerved himself up to meet his
fate, and died, as thousands of other scoundrels have, with calmness.
His body was buried in the grounds of the Old Capitol Prison, alongside
of that of Azterodt, one of the accomplices in the assassination of
President Lincoln.

CHAPTER LXXXII.

THE RESPONSIBILITY--WHO WAS TO BLAME FOR ALL THE MISERY--AN EXAMINATION
OF THE FLIMSY EXCUSES MADE FOR THE REBELS--ONE DOCUMENT THAT CONVICTS
THEM--WHAT IS DESIRED.

I have endeavored to tell the foregoing story as calmly, as
dispassionately, as free from vituperation and prejudice as possible.
How well I have succeeded the reader must judge. How difficult this
moderation has been at times only those know who, like myself, have seen,
from day to day, the treason-sharpened fangs of Starvation and Disease
gnaw nearer and nearer to the hearts of well-beloved friends and
comrades. Of the sixty-three of my company comrades who entered prison
with me, but eleven, or at most thirteen, emerged alive, and several of
these have since died from the effects of what they suffered. The
mortality in the other companies of our battalion was equally great,
as it was also with the prisoners generally. Not less than twenty-five
thousand gallant, noble-hearted boys died around me between the dates of
my capture and release. Nobler men than they never died for any cause.
For the most part they were simple-minded, honest-hearted boys; the
sterling products of our Northern home-life, and Northern Common Schools,
and that grand stalwart Northern blood, the yeoman blood of sturdy middle
class freemen--the blood of the race which has conquered on every field
since the Roman Empire went down under its sinewy blows. They prated
little of honor, and knew nothing of "chivalry" except in its repulsive
travesty in the South. As citizens at home, no honest labor had been
regarded by them as too humble to be followed