Martyria Part 2

The dense pine forests on either side still attest the luxuriant growth, which was regarded at the time of its selection as the finest timbered land of all Georgia. These immense pines are even yet so near as to cast their lengthened shadows, at morning and evening, over the accursed area where so many n.o.ble men perished for want of shelter from the heat of the noonday sun, the chilling dews of evening, and the frequent rain. The shade temperature of this place sometimes rose to the height of 105, even 110 Fahrenheit. The sun temperature within the stockade must have risen to 120 and upwards, for the height of the walls prevented the free circulation of the air. The heat of this region during the days of summer is unusually great.

[Ill.u.s.tration: VIEW OF OFFICERS' STOCKADE, with rebel camps and hospitals in the distance.--Page 21.]

Its elevation above the tide level is only about three hundred feet; and the hot blasts from the burning surface of the Gulf of Mexico, which is only about one hundred and fifty miles distant, sweep up over it northward, without being deviated or modified by ranges of mountains. The intervening country is unbroken, from distance to distance, by the undulation of the soil, and resembles more the level of a wide, green sea than the usual configurations of the solid earth. It bears the reputation of being unhealthy, and it is not strange; for there are certain isolated local climates which are absolutely pestilential, as we observe in the detached mountain groups and table lands of India and Southern Europe. Its isothermal line pa.s.ses through Tunis and Algiers, and the hyetal charts show it to be one of the most humid regions in America.

Fifty-five inches of rain fall here annually, whilst Maine, with her constant fogs, receives but forty-two and England but thirty-two.

Was it possible for human life to endure these extremes of heat, rendered still more positive by exposure to the damp and chilly dews of the nights of southern lat.i.tude? It is a well-known fact, that neither men nor animals can labor or expose themselves with impunity to the rays of the noonday sun of tropical climes. Man, of all terrestrial animals, is the least supplied with natural protectives.

XVI.

Around this ill-fated spot were stretched a cordon of connected earthworks, which completely enveloped the palisades, and commanded, with seventeen guns, every nook and corner of the enclosure. The forts were well constructed, and provided against the chances of sudden and desperate a.s.saults. The cannon were well mounted, and placed in barbette and embrasure. Lunettes and redoubts covered all the approaches to the two great gates.

Several regiments of the rebel reserves constantly occupied the forts and trenches, and guarded closely every avenue. Escape was impossible.

XVII.

To preside over this a.s.semblage, with its arranged, premeditated, and atrocious system, were selected men well known for their energy of purpose and their ferocity of soul, and who hoped, like the Parthian, that cruelty might seem to the eye of man a warlike spirit. Winder has already been summoned to his G.o.d, without affording to the tribunals of men the opportunity to judge of his justification or his shame. The wretched Wirz, arraigned and convicted by the most overwhelming evidence, has since paid the severest penalty which the majesty of violated law can exact on earth.

The instincts of nature always demand a certain respect for the memory of the dead, no matter how the death may take place. But shall this shield for the executioner obstruct justice, or reverence and admiration for the remembrance of the virtues of the n.o.bler victims? Let us bring to light, and praise the heroism of n.o.ble men, even if we violate and break to pieces the sacred mausoleums where a thousand criminals lie buried.

XVIII.

The dispositions of man depend greatly upon the a.s.sociations of his early life. The youthful and pliant organization is easily impressed by the natural scenes of birthplace and childhood, and the effect of the views of the savage mountain gorges, the dark and gloomy forests, or the distant landscape, smiling in the rays of the sun, and decorated with the most beautiful works of human industry, are felt hereafter in the labors and conceptions of manhood. Men sometimes are but the living reflections of the savage scenes among which they have been reared, and seldom do we see them arise from that immense and world-wide ma.s.s of fallen humanity to cherish anew, to maintain the n.o.ble principles of this earthly life, and lead the willing world to the true worship of the Creator.

Wirz was born among the glorious mountains of Switzerland, where the lofty and dazzling peaks of eternal snow, pointing upwards into the clear vault of heaven, impress the human mind with sublimity, or where the deeper glens sadden the heart and blast the aspiring imagination.

It seems that the natural impressions made upon this man in this beautiful country were of an earthly and sordid character, for he has always exhibited, in his wanderings in pursuit of fortune, the reckless and degraded soul of a mercenary.

Seeking gain in the New World, he turned up in the Slave States when the revolt was determined upon, and without reluctance, offered his services to the frantic and savage horde. Although a Swiss and republican by birth and inheritance, he does not hesitate between liberty and despotism. The principles of political dogmas do not agitate him; it is the desire for money, and an insatiate thirst for blood, blasting the natural heart with cruel and remorseless pa.s.sions, that led him blindly and swiftly to ruin.

The fatal plunge taken, and there was no return. The compunctions of humanity pa.s.sed over his seared and unfeeling conscience, with no more effect than when the waves surge over the huge rocks which form the bed of the deepest ocean.

He was selected for the fatal position by the brutal Winder, who first observed him among the unfortunate prisoners of the first disastrous battle of the republic. What should recommend him, then, to the notice of this inhuman officer, can be easily conjectured by the survivors of the prisons of that period. Cruelty then was pastime, it afterwards became a law. It was then that some of the chivalry, after the manner of the tribes of Abyssinia and Eastern Africa, made glorious trophies of the skulls and the bones of their antagonists who had fallen in battle.

This man appeared at times kind and humane, and his voice had the accents of benevolence; but when excited, natural sentiments recoiled with horror at the depth and extent of his imprecations. This a.s.sumed gentleness of disposition is of but little weight among the examples of history.

"I have often said," writes Montaigne, "that cowardice is the mother of cruelty, and by experience have observed that the spite and asperity of malicious and inhuman courage are accompanied with the mantle of feminine softness." The ensanguined Sylla wept over the recital of the miseries he himself had caused.

That daily murderer, the tyrant of Pheres, forbade the play of tragedy, lest the citizens should weep over the misfortunes of Hecuba and Andromache.

The beautiful eyes of the Roman maidens glistened with tears at the imaginary sufferings of the inanimate marbles of Niobe and Laoc.o.o.n, yet how remorselessly they gave the signal of death to the defeated gladiator on the arena of the Colosseum!

The warm, generous, natural impulses of the heart soon become affected, impaired, and even reversed by brutal a.s.sociations.

Circ.u.mstances develop greatly the characters of men, and they sometimes rise to true greatness, or sink into baseness, according to the law of effect, of contact, and example.

BOOK SECOND.

I.

"Plus in carcere spiritus acquirit, quam caro amitt.i.t."--_Tertullian._

"Eternal spirit of the chainless mind!

Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art, For there thy habitation is the heart-- The heart which love of thee alone can bind: And when thy sons to fetters are consigned-- To fetters, and the damp vault's dayless gloom, Their country conquers with their martyrdom, And Freedom's fame finds wings on every wind."

_Prisoner of Chillon._

Within the deadly shadows of this enormous palisade were a.s.sembled and confined together at one time during the hot months of 1864, more than thirty-five thousand soldiers, of the various armies of the United States--more men than Alexander led across the h.e.l.lespont to the conquest of Asia; more men than followed Napoleon in those glorious campaigns over the bright fields of Northern Italy, where every helmet caught some beam of glory.

Here were men of all conditions, birth, and fortune--some of the best blood and sap of the republic.

The strong-limbed lumbermen from the forests of Maine, the tall, gigantic men from the mountains of Pennsylvania, the hunters of the great prairies of the West,--those men of wonderful courage and endurance,--the artisan from the workshop, the student from his books, the lawyer from the forum, the minister from the pulpit, the child of wealth, and the poor widow's only son, were collected here in this field of torture.

[Ill.u.s.tration: VIEW OF INTERIOR OF THE PRISON, with the quagmire and crowds of huts and men beyond. From rebel photographs.--Page 29.]

They were men in the prime of life--young, vigorous, and active--when they surrendered themselves as prisoners of war. And as prisoners, they were ent.i.tled to the care and treatment acknowledged by the general laws and usages of civilized nations, and expected even more from those who boasted of having revived the generosity and chivalric tone of the feudal ages.

Besides justice to all men, we owe special grace and benignity to those who come into our power from the hazard of battle. However degraded the suppliant may be, there is always some commerce between them and us, some bond of mutual relation.

Why these men did not receive that respect which true courage always accords to the vanquished brave, why they did not receive even that atom of compa.s.sion which belongs to the nature of man, and which is seen even among the lower animals, history, which loves to avenge the weak and oppressed, and which affords to all men, to all nations, the opportunity for their justification, their vengeance, their glory, will surely exhibit in burning characters of horror and shame. There are men even now who would sanctify the acts of cruelty of the rebellion over the very ashes of this the nation's sepulchre. There are men even now who would outrage virtue, and deify the crime. There are men living, like those of the past, but not forgotten iron age, possessed of that remorseless fury, that implacable hatred, which nothing could arrest, nothing could disarm, and which could no more receive a sentiment of compa.s.sion than that sophistry which allowed outrage and death to the tender and guiltless child of Seja.n.u.s.

"Ut h.o.m.o hominem, non iratus, non timens, tantum spectaturus occidat."

II.

The intention which directed the formation of this vast camp was Cruelty.

The system which governed, or rather the want of system which neglected, each department, whether hospital or commissariat, meant Death. The evidence against the leaders of the Confederacy is not wanting, neither is it obscure. It is true that most of the witnesses have perished, or are fast pa.s.sing prematurely away; but the chain of circ.u.mstantial evidence is so connected, so apparent, that, unless the faith of humanity changes, that voice, which Tacitus calls "the conscience of the human race," will, until the end of time, overwhelm with withering scorn the memory of these men as the a.s.sa.s.sins of sedition, rather than the heroes and saints of a just revolution.

We may search history in vain for a parallel in modern times.

Civilization, in its known vicissitudes, cannot point out a spectacle so horrible.

The ma.s.sacre, in hot blood, of the Tartars of the Crimea by Potemkin, will not compare with this slow, merciless, implacable process of murder by starvation, and violation of those hygienic laws upon which the principle of life depends. The fusilades of that saturnalia of blood, the French Revolution, which swept away whole generations, had the pomp of military executions, which threw a gleam of brilliancy over the scene, and gave momentary enthusiasm to the victims. Those great immolations of the Saracens and Persians by the Tartars were as rapid as the cimeters could flash. "The fury of ideas," says Lamartine, "is more implacable than the fury of men; for men have heart, and opinion none. Systems are brutal forces, which bewail not even that which they crush."

"See," said Timour to the learned men of Aleppo, "I am but half a man, and yet I have conquered Irak, Persia, and the Indies." "Render glory, therefore, to G.o.d," replied the Mufti of Aleppo, "and slay no one." "G.o.d is my witness," said, with apparent sincerity, the destroyer of so many millions of men, "that I put no one to death by a premeditated will; no, I swear to you I kill no one from cruelty, but it is you who a.s.sa.s.sinate your own souls."

III.

The world has never seen such a display of courage and devotion as was exhibited by the intelligent ma.s.ses of the freemen of the North, when the liberties of the great republic were menaced by the fierce gestures of the slave faction and their misguided supporters.

Men of all cla.s.ses, forsaking home, kindred, and property, rushed to present a living barrier to the impetuous march of the enraged and misguided horde that pressed on with almost resistless fury, and threatened to overwhelm and destroy the n.o.blest fabric of the enlightened mind. At last the carnage of battle has ceased. Nature smiles again, and rapidly obliterates the marks of the ravages left upon her green fields, where the huge and desperate armies have swayed and struggled in deadly conflict. The emblems of civil liberty are again restored, the fasces replaced; and it now becomes the country to arouse itself from the depths of apathy, and revive those sentiments of tenderness and grat.i.tude which nature everywhere bestows upon the memory of those who upheld the cause of liberty, and fell in its defence.