“Suppose I should seize you, rob you of your liberty, drive you into the field, and make you work without pay as long as you lived.  Would that be justice?  Would it be kindness?  Or would it be monstrous injustice and cruelty?  Now, is the man who robs you every day too tender-hearted ever to cuff or kick you?  He can empty your pockets without remorse, but if your stomach is empty, it cuts him to the quick.  He can make you work a life-time without pay, but loves you too well to let you go hungry.  He fleeces you of your rights with a relish, but is shocked if you work bare-headed in summer, or without warm stockings in winter.  He can make you go without your liberty, but never without a shirt.  He can crush in you all hope of bettering your condition by vowing that you shall die his slave, but though he can thus cruelly torture your feelings, he will never lacerate your back—­he can break your heart, but is very tender of your skin.  He can strip you of all protection of law, and all comfort in religion, and thus expose you to all outrages, but if you are exposed to the weather, half-clad and half-sheltered, how yearn his tender bowels!  What! talk of a man treating you well while robbing you of all you get, and as fast as you get it?  And robbing you of yourself, too, your hands and feet, your muscles, limbs and senses, your body and mind, your liberty and earnings, your free speech and rights of conscience, your right to acquire knowledge, property and reputation, and yet you are content to believe without question that men who do all this by their slaves have soft hearts oozing out so lovingly toward their human chattles that they always keep them well housed and well clad, never push them too hard in the field, never make their dear backs smart, nor let their dear stomachs get empty!”

In like manner we may ask, are not the cruelties and oppressions described in the following pages what we should legitimately expect from men who, all their lives, have used whip and thumb-screw, shot-gun and bloodhound, to keep human beings subservient to their will?  Are we to expect nothing but chivalric tenderness and compassion from men who made war on a tolerant government to make more secure their barbaric system of oppression?

These things are written because they are true.  Duty to the brave dead, to the heroic living, who have endured the pangs of a hundred deaths for their country’s sake; duty to the government which depends on the wisdom and constancy of its good citizens for its support and perpetuity, calls for this “round, unvarnished tale” of suffering endured for freedom’s sake.

The publisher of this work urged his friend and associate in journalism to write and send forth these sketches because the times demanded just such an expose of the inner hell of the Southern prisons.  The tender mercies of oppressors are cruel.  We must accept the truth and act in view of it.  Acting wisely on the warnings of the past, we shall be able to prevent treason, with all its fearful concomitants, from being again the scourge and terror of our beloved land.