Jacob R. Freese

“ First, as to the truth of what we have already said, if the statements and propositions related to any other than a political subject, there would be no more doubt of their truthfulness than of any statement or proposition made by Gibbon, Macaulay, Bancroft, or any other historian. But upon the two subjects of politics and religion, men are generally so set in their opinion that blindness in the one and bigotry in the other seems to be as natural to the human mind "as for grass to be green, or skies to be blue, on bright clear days in June." ”

“ How comes it that the South has not denounced the Democratic party for its perfidy in making promises which it never fulfilled?
We have no sympathy now, and never had, with rebellion, as such; and, while it continued, helped to fight it as best we could; but we had then, and have now, a very deep sympathy with those who were blindly led to their own destruction by wicked, designing men. To no people in all of history are the words of our blessed Saviour more applicable than to the people of the South, when he said, "Woe unto the world because of offences! ”

“ Philip, King of Macedon, determined to subvert the liberties of all the Grecian republics. To him, as to European sovereigns of to-day, a representative form of government was hateful, as would have been the liberty of the press, had there been a press in those days. It was one of his favorite maxims that "no fortification was impregnable into which a mule could make its way with a bag of money!" as it was a maxim with the first Napoleon that "every man has his price?" In pursuance of this policy, Philip had his bribed emissaries in Thebes, as he had at Athens and Sparta. ”

“ Be careful, my good man; be careful! Why, Colonel, I never saw such bloody roads in all my life. Do they ever work them?"
"Yes, sometimes," the Colonel replied, as sober as a judge, though almost dying from suppressed laughter. Indeed such a scene would have made a dog laugh, and surely the blind old mule would have laughed outright could he have laughed at all. The Colonel, lying upon the straw on the bottom of the cart, felt no fear at all when it sidled over; but Lord Brewerton, on the chair, was indeed in danger of being spilled out every time the cart made a sudden lurch. ”

“ The next shortest answer will be that our republic will, in all human probability, follow the fate of the Grecian and Roman republics, and that it is only a question of time when that shall be. We know that such a confession is humiliating to one's pride, and that we would all much rather believe, as it is usual for Fourth of July orators to say, that "this republic is to last forever!" but alas! alas! for human vanity, it is only too true that "history but repeats itself!" ”

“ I only wish we had just such a court, and just such a judge at the head of it, in every city we've conquered from the rebels. They would do more towards extracting the venom of these secession serpents than all our armies combined. As to the Judge being a doctor, instead of a lawyer, by profession, that only makes me think the more of him. A lawyer is anybody's man who'll pay him a fee, and the one who'll pay the best is apt to get from him the best service, no matter on which side he pretends to be employed, but a doctor has only to cure the case in hand, and can have no conflicting interests ”

“ Thousands at the South, as well as at the North, believed then, and believe still, that General Winder, instead of his subordinate officer, should have stood beneath the hangman's noose. Undoubtedly he could have corrected these terrible wrongs had he tried. That he did not try is proof positive that he did not care. The world at large always gives to commanders the chief credit of all done by their subordinates, and, on the same principle, holds them responsible for all that their subordinates fail to do or do wrongfully. ”

“ It is no mere figure of speech to say that "the price of liberty is eternal vigilance" Like panthers crouching and waiting for their prey, the enemies of this government are all the while on the watch. They have their paid emissaries not only at Washington, but at every State capital, just as Philip of Macedon had among the republics of Greece. A lack of vigilance upon the part of patriots may, at any one of our national elections, put the general government into their hands. ”

“ Had General Winder desired his prisoners to have had better treatment, neither Captain Wirz, nor any other of his subordinates, would have treated them as they did. How much they suffered none will ever know. The horrible things related in the foregoing pages, and the thousands of other terrible things related by others who have written the history of the Rebellion, are but as drops to the ocean, as sands to the sea-shore, to all that occurred during the war. ”

“ Is it to sit with folded hands and see our glorious republic drift on and on until it falls into the hands of the Democratic party, and then into the hands of European sovereigns, and then is blotted out in one eternal night? ”

“ In the beginning of our journey we peeped into some dark places—places into which the light of history never before had shone, but which, from this time forth, will be as well known as any other facts of the great rebellion. ”

“ That the cannibal, who kills and eats his fellow-man, is just as conscientious in what he does as the man who kills and eats a lamb, is now a generally admitted fact. With this philosophic truth as a stand-point from which to look at the subject, who can doubt that General Polk, who for so many years had been the universally respected and highly beloved Bishop of the diocese of Louisiana, was just as conscientious in his advocacy of slavery, and in his defence of the Southern Confederacy, as Bishop Simpson was in his opposition to slavery and his advocacy of the Union. ”

“ Why, then, need we add a word about the founding of the Roman Republic, five hundred and ten years before Christ; why tell of the law, then for the first time enacted by the Senate, that any citizen who had been condemned to death by a magistrate, or even to banishment, or corporal punishment, should have the right of an appeal to the people before the sentence went into effect; why tell of the wars in which the republic was thenceforth engaged, and how gloriously the people sustained the honor of the republic ”

“ They knew, too, that every day made their situation more and more desperate; that every day increased the effectiveness of the blockade; that food, clothing, and all the necessaries of life were every day becoming scarcer; and while they still had almost any quantity of cotton, they knew the people could not eat that, and unless some new source of nutrition for the Confederacy could be opened, it must soon succumb from mere exhaustion. To add still further to the difficulty, their communication with the North seemed about to be cut off entirely. ”

“ The third section of the third article of the Constitution of the United States defines treason to be the 'levying of war against the United States, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.' Now, if the transfer of goods, or the transfer of money from the sale of goods, gives to an enemy 'aid and comfort,' then, surely, it is the business of a military court to stop it, and the evidence in this case shows this to have been done. ”

“ On the pretence of protecting the people, though really to protect their own selfish interests, both doctors and lawyers have procured the passage of laws in many States, whereby no one is authorized to practise in either profession until he shall have complied with such rules and regulations as these laws prescribe. It is virtually a relinquishment by the people of one of the very first principles of freedom—namely, the right to choose their own agents or servants, but it is submitted to on the plea that it keeps out quacks and pettifoggers. ”

“ What more right had any captain to it than any one of the twenty lieutenants? or what more right had any lieutenant to it than any one of the one thousand privates? If it were a question of strength only, the strongest man in the regiment would finally gain the prize, even though he had to walk over the dead body of every other man in the regiment to gain it. The court thinks that even the doctor, though he had his hands full of scalpels, or the colonel, though a sword were suspended from every hair of his head, would shrink from a contest of this character! ”

“ The labor of its farms, of its shops, of its merchants even, was all done by slaves; while the administration of government, the learning how to fight, and fighting, seems to have been the principal, if not the only, employment of its free citizens. Though existing at the same time with the Athenian Republic, and within one hundred and eighty-four years as old, the two governments were in no sense a type of each other. The Athenian found in his taste for pleasure constant employment; the Spartan's taste was only for war. The arts of Athens met with the highest encouragement ”

“ Not Abraham Lincoln alone would have fallen at the hands of the assassin or hangman, but thousands of others throughout the North would have suffered a like fate, until the rule of the "thirty tyrants" in Athens would have been considered but child's play in comparison with the rule of the more than three hundred tyrants of this republic. Then would have been witnessed here, as there, thousands of the most eminent of American families leaving their country in despair—wandering they knew not whither—without a home, and without a country! ”

“ Like as an expectant bride, though she has the plighted faith of her lover, will continue to smile, to dress, to allure in every way she can, up to the very hour of the marriage ceremony, so the South continued to smile, to dress, to allure, in every way she could, her Northern allies, who had solemnly plighted their faith to her, and her English sympathizers, whose pecuniary interests lay all in that direction, and these things she continued to do up to the very moment when the Confederacy collapsed, and when it was found that nothing was left of the egg but the shell. ”

“ And just here let us say, lest we may be misunderstood, that when we speak of the Catholic Church it is not by way of disparagement, so far as their religion is concerned, but only and purely as one of the instruments by which European sovereigns hope to work the downfall of this nation, or rather of the representative form of its government and the liberty of its press. Against the religious faith and the religious zeal of the Catholics we have not a word to say, though ourself a Protestant. ”

“ But though the "mills of the gods grind slowly, they grind exceeding fine," and erelong the republicans of Thebes, headed by the brave Pelopidas, and seconded by the no less brave Epaminondas, shook off the Spartan yoke—shook off the oligarchy—and reëstablished a republican form of government, and from thenceforth the Theban Republic went forward in a career of glory equal to anything that Athens or Sparta could ever boast. ”

“ From thenceforth there was almost a constant warfare between the political parties or factions of the republic, while jealous eyes outside were consequently watching an opportunity for its destruction. Ambitious demagogues were constantly using the people as their tools, but scarcely would one obtain the chief magistracy until another would pull him down—if not by a vote of the people, then by faction or by assassination. Meanwhile Hippias, who had been dethroned, sought aid from the king of Persia to reinstate him, and thus brought a long and bloody war upon his own country. ”

“ They had grown to look upon the Democratic power as invincible, and their European coadjutors had been made to believe that the time had finally come when the hated representative form of the United States government could be changed into a slaveocracy, then into an aristocracy, and then into a kingly form of government; while a censorship could be placed upon the press so effectual, that from thenceforth it could never do European sovereignties or the Roman Catholic Church any harm. ”

“ A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of Montmartre from fragments of their bones. Nor does that process of induction and deduction by which a lady, finding a stain of a particular kind upon her dress, concludes that somebody has upset the inkstand thereon, differ in any way from that by which Adams and Leverrier discovered a new planet. The man of science, in fact, simply uses with scrupulous exactness the methods which we all habitually and at every moment use carelessly. ”

“ Long before b. c. 382, at which time the citadel of Thebes was seized by the Spartans, the government of the Thebans was called republican, but it was rather so in name than in fact. The oligarchic party at Thebes, corresponding with the Democratic party of this country, were all the while aiming at the establishment of an oligarchy, while the patriotic supporters of liberty and independence were just as determined not only to maintain the republic, but to make it so in fact as well as in name. ”

“ Viewing the subject from this stand-point, now that the prejudices and excitements of the war are over, it is not difficult to understand how President Davis, General Lee, General Beauregard, General Polk, and their adherents, regarded themselves quite as loyal as President Lincoln, General Grant, General Sherman, General Sheridan, and their followers. Each regarded theirs as the "lawful government," and that only by adhering to it, by being faithful to it, could one justly claim to be loyal. ”

“ Though a representative form of government, and therefore a republic, yet it was so different from any other government that ever existed before or since, it may well be called unique, singular, sui generis. Its citizens, for instance, ate at public tables; the children were regarded as belonging to the state rather than to parents; its money was made of iron and of such weight that no one man could carry a hundred dollars. ”

“ Another fact, which greatly contributed to blockade running and other clandestine trade, was that all through the North there were warm sympathizers with the South—some of whom had been born in the South, others had relatives and friends there, others had had extensive business relations with Southern men, and still others sympathized with the South from a political standpoint—each and all of whom were ready to help the South in any way they could; and yet to save themselves from censure, if not from arrest, felt obliged to call themselves "Union" men. ”

“ The officer in command, a Major Gee, was himself a brute, and no more fit to have the care of human beings than a hyena would be to be placed in charge of a sheepfold. Here, as at Libby and Castle Thunder, the usual ration was a loaf made from one pint of corn-meal, each day, and occasionally a small bit of meat. For shelter most of them had to burrow for themselves, like rabbits, in holes under ground; and so poorly were they off for clothing and shoes, that our informant saw scores of men standing about the doors of hospitals, waiting for the clothing and shoes of those who might die within. ”