“Majah” Dick Turner, Lieutenant Colonel Iverson and Lieutenant Barret have passed into obscurity, while Wirz was hanged for his crimes. That Wirz richly deserved his fate, no man who knows the full extent of his barbarities, has any doubt, and yet it seems hard that the vengeance of our Government should have been visited upon him alone. The quality of his guilt was not much different from that of many of prison commandants but the fact that he had a greater number of men under his charge brought him more into notice. Why should Wirz, the tool, be punished more severely than Jeff Davis and Howell Cobb? They were responsible, and yet Wirz hung while they went scot free.
I have frequently noticed that if a man wanted to escape punishment for murder he must needs be a wholesale murderer, your retail fellows fare hard when they get into the clutches of the law. If a man steals a sack of flour to keep his family from starvation, he goes to jail; but if he robs a bank of thousands of dollars in money and spends it in riotous living, or in an aggressive war against what is known as the “Tiger,” whether that Tiger reclines upon the green cloth, or roams at will among the members of Boards of Trade or Stock Exchange, or is denominated a “Bull” or a “Bear” in the wheat ring, why he simply goes to Canada.
Surely Justice is appropriately represented as being blindfolded, and I would suggest that she be represented as carrying an ear trumpet, for if she is not both blind and deaf she must be extremely partial.
Reader, if I have succeeded in amusing or instructing you, I have partly accomplished my purpose in writing this story. Partly I say, for I have still another object in view.
The description I have given of the prisons in which I was confined is but a poor picture of the actual condition of things. It is impossible for the most talented writer to give an adequate description. But I have told the truth as best I could. I defy any man to disprove one material statement, and I fall back upon the testimony of the rebels themselves, to prove that I have not exaggerated. These men suffered in those prisons through no fault of their own. The fortunes of war threw them into the hands of their enemies, and they were treated as no civilized nation ever treated prisoners before. They were left by their Government to suffer because that Government believed they would best subserve its interests by remaining there, rather than to agree to such terms as the enemy insisted upon.