Page:A memoir of the last year of the War of Independence, in the Confederate States of America.djvu/12

viii the deep and bitter execrations of an entire people now attend them, and an immortality of infamy awaits them. As for all the enemies who have overrun or aided in overrunning: mv country, there is a wide and impassable gulf between us, in which I see the blood of slaughtered friends, comrades, and countrymen, which all the waters in the firmament above and the seas beneath cannot wash away. Those enemies have undertaken to render our cause odious and infamous; and among other atrocities committed by them in the effort to do so, an humble subordinate, poor Wirz, has been selected as a victim to a fiendish spirit, and basely murdered under an executive edict, founded on the sentence of a vindictive and illegal tribunal. Let them continue this system ! they are but erecting monuments to their own eternal dishonour, and furnishing finger posts to guide the historian in his researches. They may employ the infamous Holt, with his "Bureau of Military Justice," to sacrifice other victims on the altars of their hatred, and provost marshals, and agents of the "Freed-man-s Bureau" may riot in all the license of petty tyranny, but our enemies can no more control the verdict of impartial history, than they can escape that doom which awaits them at the final judgment.

During the war, slavery was used as a catch word ta arouse the passions of a fanatical mob, and to some extent the prejudices of the civilized world were excited against us ; but the war was not made on our part for slavery. High dignitaries in both church and state in Old England, and puritans in New England, had participated in the profits of a trade, by which the ignorant and barbarous natives of Africa were brought from that country ,and sold into slavery in the American Colonies. The generation in the Southern States which defended their country in the late war, found amongst them.