Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/472

438 that, after the downfall of the Polish insurrection, the Russian sword raged among the helpless victims without mercy; that every whisper against the victorious government was punished with death; that immeasurable chain-gangs of men and women were driven across thousands of miles of sterile country, to drag out their miserable lives in the snows of Siberia. He might have learned that even in civilized France, after the wholesale butchery of the 2d of December, 1851, hundreds of men were transported, to find a speedy death in the miasmas of Cayenne. That is military despotism in Europe. Where has the Senator his ears and his eyes that he knows nothing of this? If the military governments in the South had been like the military despotisms in Hungary, Poland and France, men like the rebel Generals Preston and Forrest would long ago have expired on the gallows instead of presuming to give a Vice-President to the United States. Wade Hampton would have been moldering under the ground instead of dictating Democratic platforms and trying to starve loyal negroes into voting the Democratic ticket. Henry A. Wise's redoubtable tongue would now be food for worms instead of proclaiming the approaching victory of the lost cause, and thousands of Southern ladies and gentlemen would now be shivering among the icebergs of Alaska, instead of killing negroes and spitting in the faces of Southern Unionists. Military despotism, indeed! Show me a single gallows, in this great Republic, where a single man expired for participation in the rebellion—for the miserable Wirz was not hung because he was a rebel, but because he had murdered thirteen thousand of our brave boys by starvation. Show me a single prison where a single man has been held captive for treason! Yes, there was one, Fortress Monroe, where Jefferson Davis was fed on fried oysters and spring chickens, and where the hall before his prison-cell was covered with a