It was in the year 1864, and the first three months of 1865 that these twenty-five thousand youths mere cruelly and needlessly done to death.  In these fatal fifteen months more young men than to-day form the pride, the hope, and the vigor of any one of our leading Cities, more than at the beginning of the war were found in either of several States in the Nation, were sent to their graves, “unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown,” victims of the most barbarous and unnecessary cruelty recorded since the Dark Ages.  Barbarous, because the wit of man has not yet devised a more savage method of destroying fellow-beings than by exposure and starvation; unnecessary, because the destruction of these had not, and could not have the slightest effect upon the result of the struggle.  The Rebel leaders have acknowledged that they knew the fate of the Confederacy was sealed when the campaign of 1864 opened with the North displaying an unflinching determination to prosecute the war to a successful conclusion.  All that they could hope for after that was some fortuitous accident, or unexpected foreign recognition that would give them peace with victory.  The prisoners were non-important factors in the military problem.  Had they all been turned loose as soon as captured, their efforts would not have hastened the Confederacy’s fate a single day.

As to the responsibility for this monstrous cataclysm of human misery and death:  That the great mass of the Southern people approved of these outrages, or even knew of them, I do not, for an instant, believe.  They are as little capable of countenancing such a thing as any people in the world.  But the crowning blemish of Southern society has ever been the dumb acquiescence of the many respectable, well-disposed, right-thinking people in the acts of the turbulent and unscrupulous few.  From this direful spring has flowed an Iliad of unnumbered woes, not only to that section but to our common country.  It was this that kept the South vibrating between patriotism and treason during the revolution, so that it cost more lives and treasure to maintain the struggle there than in all the rest of the country.  It was this that threatened the dismemberment of the Union in 1832.  It was this that aggravated and envenomed every wrong growing out of Slavery; that outraged liberty, debauched citizenship, plundered the mails, gagged the press, stiffled speech, made opinion a crime, polluted the free soil of God with the unwilling step of the bondman, and at last crowned three-quarters of a century of this unparalleled iniquity by dragging eleven millions of people into a war from which their souls revolted, and against which they had declared by overwhelming majorities in every State except South Carolina, where the people had no voice.  It may puzzle some to understand how a relatively small band of political desperados in each State could accomplish such a momentous wrong; that they did do it, no one conversant with our history will deny, and that they—­insignificant as they were in numbers, in abilities, in character, in everything save capacity and indomitable energy in mischief—­could achieve such gigantic wrongs in direct opposition to the better sense of their communities is a fearful demonstration of the defects of the constitution of Southern society.