The author, when very young, engaged in journalistic work, until the drum of the recruiting officer called him to join the ranks of his country’s defenders.  As the reader is told, he was made a prisoner.  He took with him into the terrible prison enclosure not only a brave, vigorous, youthful spirit, but invaluable habits of mind and thought for storing up the incidents and experiences of his prison life.  As a journalist he had acquired the habit of noticing and memorizing every striking or thrilling incident, and the experiences of his prison life were adapted to enstamp themselves indelibly on both feeling and memory.  He speaks from personal experience and from the stand-paint of tender and complete sympathy with those of his comrades who suffered more than he did himself.  Of his qualifications, the writer of these introductory words need not speak.  The sketches themselves testify to his ability with such force that no commendation is required.

This work is needed.  A generation is arising who do not know what the preservation of our free government cost in blood and suffering.  Even the men of the passing generation begin to be forgetful, if we may judge from the recklessness or carelessness of their political action.  The soldier is not always remembered nor honored as he should be.  But, what to the future of the great Republic is more important, there is great danger of our people under-estimating the bitter animus and terrible malignity to the Union and its defenders cherished by those who made war upon it.  This is a point we can not afford to be mistaken about.  And yet, right at this point this volume will meet its severest criticism, and at this point its testimony is most vital and necessary.

Many will be slow to believe all that is here told most truthfully of the tyranny and cruelty of the captors of our brave boys in blue.  There are no parallels to the cruelties and malignities here described in Northern society.  The system of slavery, maintained for over two hundred years at the South, had performed a most perverting, morally desolating, and we might say, demonizing work on the dominant race, which people bred under our free civilization can not at once understand, nor scarcely believe when it is declared unto them.  This reluctance to believe unwelcome truths has been the snare of our national life.  We have not been willing to believe how hardened, despotic, and cruel the wielders of irresponsible power may become.

When the anti-slavery reformers of thirty years ago set forth the cruelties of the slave system, they were met with a storm of indignant denial, villification and rebuke.  When Theodore D. Weld issued his “Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses,” to the cruelty of slavery, he introduced it with a few words, pregnant with sound philosophy, which can be applied to the work now introduced, and may help the reader better to accept and appreciate its statements.  Mr. Weld said: