of a CONCILIATION MEASURES-CONDUCT OF THE WAR colonial assemblies. It also contained a the people, they were ordered to be printed provision for a congress of the colonies in the newspapers, together with the reto vote, at the time of making this port of the committee, which concluded acknowledgment, a free grant to the King with a resolution, unanimously adopted, certain perpetual revenue, to be denouncing as open and avowed enemies placed at the disposal of Parliament. All all who should attempt a separate treaty, the assemblies rejected the proposition. and declaring that no conference should A committee of the Continental Congress, be held by any commissioners until the to which the proposition had been re- British armies should be first withdrawn, ferred, made a report (July 31, 1775), in or the independence of the United States which the generally unsatisfactory char- acknowledged. acter and the unsafe vagueness of the ministerial offer were fully exposed. The Congress accepted the report and published it to the world. The commissioners appointed under the act, after fair and unfair efforts to accomplish their ends, were completely discomfited, and before leaving for England issued an angry and threatening manifesto (Oct. 3), addressed not to Congress only, but to the State legislatures and the people, charging upon Congress the responsibility of continuing the war; offering to the assemblies separately the terms already proposed to Congress; reminding the soldiers that Great Britain had already conceded all points originally in dispute; suggesting to the clergy that the French were papists; appealing to all lovers of peace not to suffer a few ambitious men to subject the country to the miseries of unnecessary warfare; allowing forty days for submission, and threatening, if this offer should be rejected, the desolation of the country as a future leading object of the war. This manifesto Congress had printed, with a counter-manifesto by that body, and other comments calculated to neutralize the proclamation of the commissioners. Conciliation with the Colonies. See BURKE, EDMUND. When Parliament reassembled after the Christmas holidays (January, 1778), the opposition exposed the losses, expenses, and hopelessness of the war with the colonists; and, to the surprise and disgust of some of his most ardent supporters, Lord North presented a second plan for reconciliation (Feb. 17), and declared he had always been in favor of peace, and opposed to taxing the Americans. He introduced two bills: one renouncing, on the part of the British Parliament, any intention to levy taxes in America-conceding, in substance, the whole original ground of dispute; the other authorizing the appointment of five commissioners, the commanders of the naval and military forces to be two, with ample powers to treat for the re-establishment of royal authority. Meanwhile David Hartley, an opponent of the war, was sent to Paris to open negotiations with the American commissioners there. The war had already (1775-78) cost Great Britain more than 20,000 men, $100,000,000 of public expenditure, and 550 British vessels, chiefly in the merchant service, captured by American cruisers, worth about $12,000,- lution providing for the appointing of a 000, besides a loss of trade with America, suspension of American debts, and the confiscation of the property of American loyalists. Added to all was the danger of a war with France. Copies of these conciliatory bills arrived in America in the middle of April (1778), and the Congress took immediate action upon them, for the partisans of the crown were very active in circulating them among the people. A committee of that body criticised these bills very keenly, showing their deceptiveness. Fearing the effect of the bills upon Concord. See LEXINGTON AND CONCORD. Conduct of the War, COMMITTEE ON THE. On Dec. 9, 1861, the Senate, by a vote of 33 yeas to 3 nays, adopted a reso joint committee of three from the Senate and four from the House to inquire into the conduct of the war, the committee to have power to send for persons and papers, and to sit through that session of Congress. The House concurred in the resolution on the following day, and on the 17th and 19th the committee was appointed, consisting of Senators Benjamin F. Wade, of Ohio; Zachariah Chandler, of Michigan, and Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee; and Representatives Daniel W. Gooch, of Massachusetts; John Covode, of man. Pennsylvania; George W. Julian, of Indiana, and Moses F. Odell, of New York. On Dec. 20 the committee held its first session and chose Senator Wade as chairThis committee became an important factor in the early movements of the National army and navy. During its existence there were frequently complaints from officers in the field that their freedom of action was seriously impeded by this committee; and in other quarters it was asserted that many of the early campaigns were planned by "civilians in Washington," without the advice of experienced military men. from them when they went in. For a long time they were not allowed a seat of any kind to sit upon. The board floors, on which they slept, were washed every afternoon, and were damp at night, causing many to become consumptive and die. The glasses in the numerous windows were mostly broken, and they suffered intensely from cold in winter, for they were allowed only one blanket each, and these in time became ragged, filthy, and filled with vermin. Turner, a lieutenant of General Winder, the commissary of prisoners, seemed to make cruelty his study. He ordered that no one should go within 3 feet of a window. A violation of the rule gave license to the guard Confederate Prisons. Libby, Belle Isle, to shoot the offender. The prisoners were Castle Thunder, and Danville prisons, in also deliberately starved. The process of Virginia; Salisbury prison, in North Caro- slow starvation began in the fall of 1863, lina; Andersonville and Millen prisons, and was so general and uniform in all the in Georgia; and Charleston, in South prisons that, according to a report of a Confederacy, SOUTHERN. See CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA. Carolina, were the principal places of confinement of Union prisoners during the Civil War. In these prisons the captives sometimes endured terrible suffering from cold, hunger, filth, and cruel personal treatment. Libby prison had six rooms, each 100 feet in length and 40 in breadth. At one time these held 1,200 Union officers of every grade, from a lieutenant to a brigadier-general. They were allowed no other place in which to cook, eat, wash and dry their clothes and their persons, sleep, and take exercise. Ten feet by two feet was all the space each man might claim. Their money, watches, and sometimes part of their clothing were taken committee of the United States Sanitary Commission, there can be no doubt of its having been done by direct orders. This starvation was done when, as has been proved, there was abundance of food at the command of their jailers. Boxes of food and clothing, sent to the prisoners from their friends at the North, were denied them after the beginning of January, 1864. "Three hundred boxes," said the report, "arrived every week, and were received by Ould, the commissioner of exchange, but instead of being distributed, were retained, and piled up in a warehouse near by. . . . The officers were permitted to send out and buy articles at extravagant prices, and would find the heaven, in comparison with the spot on clothes, stationery, hams, and butter, which they were suffering. which they had purchased, bearing the The barren spot, about 5 acres, was marks of the Sanitary Commission." Over surrounded by earthworks, and guarded 3,000 boxes were sent to the captives in by Confederate soldiers. There, without Libby Prison, and on Belle Isle, in the shelter, though lumber was plentiful, nearJames River near by, which were with ly 11,000 captives were, at one time, held from the sufferers. The treatment of crowded into that bleak space of 5 the prisoners in the Libby was no worse acres. The winter of 1863-64 was one of than in other prisons, nor nearly so bad the severest ever experienced in the South, as on Belle Isle and at Andersonville. but no shelter was provided for the capThat island is in the James River, in front tives. The mercury sank to zero, and of Richmond, containing a few acres. A snow lay deep on the ground around Richpart of it was a grassy bluff, with a few mond. Ice formed in the river, and water trees, and a part was a low, sandy barren, left in buckets on the island froze 2 or a few feet above the surface of the river, 3 inches in thickness in a single night. which there flows swiftly. In the scorch To keep from perishing, the captives lay ing summer sun the prisoners were kept in the ditches on top of each other, takon the open sand-barren, and never al- ing turns as to who should have the outlowed to touch the cool grass or feel the side. The report of the committee ingrateful shade of the trees-a spot a few forms us that " in the morning the row yards off-which appeared to them like of the previous night could be marked by the motionless forms of those who were sleeping on in their last sleep-frozen to death!" "The cold froze them," said the report, "because they were hungry; the hunger consumed them, because they were cold." At Andersonville, Ga., the sufferings of the captives were still more acute and dreadful, and the cruelties practised upon them were more fearful. The prison was one open pen, in an unhealthy locality, near Anderson Station, about 60 miles from Macon, and surrounded by the most CASTLE THUNDER. fertile region of the State. The site was selected, it is said, at the suggestion of Howell Cobb, the commander of the district. It comprised 27 acres of land, with a swamp in the centre. A sluggish and choked stream crawled through it, while within rifle-shot distance flowed a brook of pure, delicious water, 15 feet wide and 3 feet deep. Had that stream been included in the pen, the prisoners might have drunk and bathed. The spot selected for the pen was covered with pine-trees. These were cut down. When some one suggested that the shade would alleviate the sufferings of the prisoners, Capt. M. S. Winder, son of the commissary of prisoners at Richmond, declared that they were to be intentionally deprived of that comfort. The pen was a quadrangle, with two rows of stockades from 12 to 18 feet in height; and 17 feet from the inner stockade was the "dead line," over which no captive could pass and live. It is unnecessary to detail the cruelties suffered here by Union prisoners. Suffice it to say that unimpeachable testimony proves that they were far CONFEDERATE PRISONS-CONFEDERATE PRIVATEERS more malignant and intense than at Libby or Belle Isle. They were worse after the elder Winder arrived. At one time more than 30,000 human beings were crowded into that awful prison-pen, sometimes smitten by the hot sun, at other times flooded with filthy water; exposed to frost and heat; to the bullets of guards in wanton sport; beaten, bruised, and cursed; driven to madness and idiocy; starved into skeletons; and worse than all, tortured by the false declaration of their jailers that their government had forsaken them, leaving them no other relief from misery but in death. To almost 13,000 of these sufferers that everlasting relief came. The graves of 12,462 of the victims tell the dreadful tale. Of these, enly about 450 are unknown. (See Report of a Committee of the United States Sanitary Commission.) The prison records show that the Total number of prisoners received Total number of deaths in hospital.. Percentage of deaths to whole number received. Percentage of deaths to whole num ber admitted to hospital. ... Average number of deaths for each of the thirteen months... Largest number of deaths in one day, Aug. 23, 1864... Cases returned from hospital to stockade Total number of escapes. 49,485 12,462 charges and hanged in November. It was proved that in a small hut between the stockade and the graveyard he kept nine bloodhounds to hunt down prisoners who should attempt to escape. Castle Thunder, in Richmond, was a Confederate prison in which civilians who were suspected or known to be in opposition to the Confederates were confined. It was to the offenders against Confederate authority what Forts Lafayette and Warren were to like offenders against the national government. Castle Thunder was a tobacco warehouse on the corner of Carey and Nineteenth streets. It was burned early in September, 1879. Confederate Privateers. The Confederate Congress resolved (February, 1862) to prosecute the war with vigor. Before the close of July following they had more than twenty vessels afloat as privateers to depredate upon American commerce, and had destroyed millions of dollars' worth of property. At the first, the most formidable of these were the Nashville 33,006 and Sumter. The former was a sidewheel steamer, carried a crew of eighty 8,735 men, and was armed with two long 12pounder rifled cannon. She was destroy3,727 ed (Feb. 28, 1862) by the Montauk, Captain Worden, in the Ogeechee River. The career of the Sumter was also short, but 69 12-17 much more active and destructive. She had a crew of sixty-five men and twenty958 five marines, and was heavily armed. She 97 had run the blockade at the mouth of the Mississippi River (Jan. 30, 1861), ran 3,469 328 among the West India islands, making many prizes of vessels bearing the American flag, and became the terror of the The method of burial in the graveyard, short distance from the stockade and prison-pen, was by digging trenches varying in length from 50 to 100 yards, in which the bodies were laid in rows of 100 to 300, without coffins or the ordinary clothing, with an allowance of space for each body of not more than 12 inches in width, and then covered with earth. Henry Wirz, a Swiss by birth, was appointed by General Winder as superintendent of the prison and prisoners. In the summer of 1865 he was tried on numerous charges of the most horrid cruelties towards the prisoners at Andersonville. He was found guilty of all the 26 a PRIVATEER SHIP SUMTER. |