pass, with the stride of a giant, even as the sun, through the vast expanse of the universe, and what is still greater and more difficult, to enter one’s self, and study there man, and to understand his nature, his duties, and his end.”

IX.

Civilization claims to introduce the elements of peace, happiness, and prosperity into the structure of society, and to transform the sword and the spear into the harmless implements of husbandry; yet with a swifter pace the engines of war increase, man thirsts as fiercely for the blood of his fellow-man, and the dormant spirit of destruction is as ready to illume the torch, as in the reckless times of past history. Even in this enlightened age we are constantly reminded of the truth and force of the remark of Hannibal: “No great state can long remain at rest. If it has no enemies abroad, it finds them at home; as overgrown bodies seem safe from external injuries, but suffer grievous inconveniences from their own strength.”

The motives of self-aggrandizement by force of arms appear to be innate in human nature. We see men maintaining monstrous ideas. We see great armies singularly swayed by single minds, in defiance of truth and reason. The soldiers of Catiline fought to the last gasp, and perished to a man, embracing the eagle of Marius—“Marius, who sprang from the dust the expiring Gracchi flung towards heaven,” and who first dared attack the aristocratic nobility, and defend the down-trodden rights of the oppressed plebeian. There are mysterious laws, which seem to regulate the expansion and the decay of the human families. There are unseen forces which now and then impel vicious men to their own destruction.

X.

Andersonville—a name which has been stamped so deeply by cruelty into the pages of American history—is one of those miserable little hamlets, of a score of scattered and dilapidated farm-houses, which relieve the monotony of the wide and dreary level of sand plains, which, covered with immense forests, interspersed with fens, marshes, corn and cotton fields, stretch away, in unbroken surface, from Macon down to the Florida shores. The plantations, which were tilled by slave labor, are almost concealed in the recesses of the forests, so thickly wooded is the country. Here and there only, where the savannas are of unusual fertility, do the cleared lands give a wide and extended view of the landscape, but the primeval pines everywhere hide the distant horizon.

J. H. Bufford’s lith. Boston, Mass.

The song of the laborer rarely disturbs the silence, which is oppressive. Song is the impulsive outburst of a heart filled with joy and hope. The slave has neither. His voice is the cry of anguish, of a soul burdened and crushed, and is more like the moan of the winds than the accents of civilized man.

The physical aspect of the white inhabitant indicates the local impressions and inspirations—listless and apathetic in look, lank and haggard in form. There are countries, there are even limited localities, where the moral and mental faculties expand in accordance with external impressions. The laws of beauty and deformity are regulated by the condition and circumstances of the outward world to a remarkable degree.

The landscape, the sunshine, and the luxuriance at Corinth and Athens gave rise to the most beautiful flowers of art and love, and to that wonderful type of human beauty, which the world has since lost; but the rugged and stern defiles of the mountains of Calabria, of Albania, and the dreary marsh fens of the Campagna, or of the Netherlands, still produce characters that rival in ferocity the hyenas of the desert.

Nature appears to have selected for man the sites where are performed the noble acts which charm and enlighten the mind, or the dark deeds which cause men to ponder and regret the frailty of their organization. “It seems that the instincts of war conduct from age to age the armies of successive empires to the same rendezvous of contest, and that geography has laid off in advance certain fields of battle, as a sort of arena for these great immolations of humanity.” “Hungary,” said Sobieski, “is a clump of earth, which, if squeezed, would give out but human blood.” The name and look of Andersonville will always be synonymous with and suggestive of cruelty.

XI.

At the distance of eight hundred paces from the railway which connects the town with Central Georgia on the north and the Gulf of Mexico on the south, appears the Prison Stockade, which was located by the Winders of the Rebel army, at the suggestion of Howell Cobb, in 1863, and occupied for its specific purpose in February, 1864.

It is situated about fifty miles south of Macon, and its position on the geographical map is defined by longitude 7° 30′ west from Washington, latitude 32° 10′ north of the equator, corresponding in the western hemisphere to the central region of Algiers.

A dense forest of primeval trees covered the spot which was selected by the engineers when they marked out the line of the prison. The massive pines were levelled by the strong arms of several hundred negro slaves, and when their branches were cut away, they were placed side by side, standing upright in the deep ditches, which were excavated with regularity, and in parallel lines, north and south, east and west. Thus were formed the boundaries of the palisade, wherein nearly forty thousand human beings were to be herded at one time. The surface of the earth was cleared completely away, so as to give full play to the elements of destruction.

View of the Stockade as the rebels left it.—Page 19.

Neither shade nor shelter was there to protect from the storm, or from the merciless rays of an almost tropical sun. Not a tree nor a shrub was left there to cast a shadow over the arid and calcined earth. There was simply a rampart of logs, rising from fifteen to eighteen feet in height above the surface of the ground. This rampart measured at first ten hundred and ten feet in length by seven hundred and seventy-nine feet in width, and was surrounded, at a distance of sixty paces, by another palisade of rough logs more than twelve feet in height. It was afterwards lengthened, in the autumn of 1864, to sixteen hundred and twenty feet.

This enormous structure still stands there, with its giant walls of trees, undisturbed.

* * * “May none those marks efface,
For they appeal from tyranny to God.”

XII.

A small stream of water, which arose in two branches scarcely a thousand paces distant, in bogs and fens whose bitterness and impurities continued with the current, passed through the central portion of the enclosed space with sufficient volume to supply the wants of many thousand men, if it had been properly received, protected, and economized.

During the summer many springs burst forth from the soil on either bank of the stream within the prison; but the water, neglected by the military guards, soon became defiled by the feet and grime of the prisoners, and then this portion of the enclosure, embracing several acres, was transformed into a deep and horrible mire, quivering with those disgusting forms of organic life