The majority of the illustrations in this work are from the skilled pencil of Captain O. J. Hopkins, of Toledo, who served through the war in the ranks of the Forty-second Ohio.  His army experience has been of peculiar value to the work, as it has enabled him to furnish a series of illustrations whose life-like fidelity of action, pose and detail are admirable.

Some thirty of the pictures, including the frontispiece, and the allegorical illustrations of War and Peace, are from the atelier of Mr. O. Reich, Cincinnati, O.

A word as to the spelling:  Having always been an ardent believer in the reformation of our present preposterous system—­or rather, no system—­of orthography, I am anxious to do whatever lies in my power to promote it.  In the following pages the spelling is simplified to the last degree allowed by Webster.  I hope that the time is near when even that advanced spelling reformer will be left far in the rear by the progress of a people thoroughly weary of longer slavery to the orthographical absurdities handed down to us from a remote and grossly unlearned ancestry.

Toledo, O., Dec. 10, 1879.

John McELROY.

We wait beneath the furnace blast
The pangs of transformation;
Not painlessly doth God recast
And mold anew the nation. 
Hot burns the fire
Where wrongs expire;
Nor spares the hand
That from the land
Uproots the ancient evil.

The hand-breadth cloud the sages feared
Its bloody rain is dropping;
The poison plant the fathers spared
All else is overtopping. 
East, West, South, North,
It curses the earth;
All justice dies,
And fraud and lies
Live only in its shadow.

Then let the selfish lip be dumb
And hushed the breath of sighing;
Before the joy of peace must come
The pains of purifying. 
God give us grace
Each in his place
To bear his lot,
And, murmuring not,
Endure and wait and labor!

WHITTIER

ANDERSONVILLE

A STORY OF REBEL MILITARY PRISONS

CHAPTER I.

A Strange land—­the heart of the Appalachians—­the gateway of an empire —­A sequestered Vale, and A primitive, Arcadian, non-progressive people.

A low, square, plainly-hewn stone, set near the summit of the eastern approach to the formidable natural fortress of Cumberland Gap, indicates the boundaries of—­the three great States of Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.  It is such a place as, remembering the old Greek and Roman myths and superstitions, one would recognize as fitting to mark the confines of the territories of great masses of strong, aggressive, and frequently conflicting peoples.  There the god Terminus should have had one of his chief temples, where his shrine would be shadowed by barriers rising above the clouds, and his sacred solitude guarded from the rude invasion of armed hosts by range on range of battlemented rocks, crowning almost inaccessible mountains, interposed across every approach from the usual haunts of men.