Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/67

Rh with chivalrous indignation the bosom friends of Louis Bonaparte, St. Arnaud, and Pelissier—those who had hung the banner of Perjury and Massacre beside the banner of the Black Prince, was bad in form, but in substance it was merely a threat to women who insulted soldiers and officers in the street, who spat in an officer’s face, that they should be treated as street-walkers were treated under the local law. It proved effectual, and saved all the decent women and all the decent citizens of New Orleans from the consequences of a collision between the garrison and the inhabitants. No captured city of the Confederates suffered the fate of Magdeburg or Lyons, or even of Badajoz and St. Sebastian. I visited myself a large prison camp and a prisoner’s hospital. The inmates of the prison camp were evidently well fed, and, so far as I could see, were undergoing no hardship not inseparable from a captive’s lot. The inmates of the prison hospital were treated, if my eyes did not deceive me, with the utmost liberality and kindness. The agents of the Sanitary Commission, when they came upon a field of battle, made no distinction between the wounded friend and the wounded enemy. Public sentiment did not demand, and would not have suffered any effective retaliation for the atrocities of Andersonville. At the very time when the North was ringing with the report of those atrocities, I was able to write that though I had heard fierce expressions of indignation against the rebels and of determination to put them down, I had heard scarcely a single expression of bloodthirstiness, scarce a single expression of desire for vengeance. At the time, I believe what I said seemed