Andersonville, vol 1 | Page 5

and its defenders cherished by those who made
war upon it. This is a point we can not afford to be mistaken about.
And yet, right at this point this volume will meet its severest criticism,
and at this point its testimony is most vital and necessary.
Many will be slow to believe all that is here told most truthfully of the
tyranny and cruelty of the captors of our brave boys in blue. There are
no parallels to the cruelties and malignities here described in Northern
society. The system of slavery, maintained for over two hundred years

at the South, had performed a most perverting, morally desolating, and
we might say, demonizing work on the dominant race, which people
bred under our free civilization can not at once understand, nor scarcely
believe when it is declared unto them. This reluctance to believe
unwelcome truths has been the snare of our national life. We have not
been willing to believe how hardened, despotic, and cruel the wielders
of irresponsible power may become.
When the anti-slavery reformers of thirty years ago set forth the
cruelties of the slave system, they were met with a storm of indignant
denial, villification and rebuke. When Theodore D. Weld issued his
"Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses," to the cruelty of slavery, he
introduced it with a few words, pregnant with sound philosophy, which
can be applied to the work now introduced, and may help the reader
better to accept and appreciate its statements. Mr. Weld said:
"Suppose I should seize you, rob you of your liberty, drive you into the
field, and make you work without pay as long as you lived. Would that
be justice? Would it be kindness? Or would it be monstrous injustice
and cruelty? Now, is the man who robs you every day too
tender-hearted ever to cuff or kick you? He can empty your pockets
without remorse, but if your stomach is empty, it cuts him to the quick.
He can make you work a life-time without pay, but loves you too well
to let you go hungry. He fleeces you of your rights with a relish, but is
shocked if you work bare-headed in summer, or without warm
stockings in winter. He can make you go without your liberty, but
never without a shirt. He can crush in you all hope of bettering your
condition by vowing that you shall die his slave, but though he can thus
cruelly torture your feelings, he will never lacerate your back--he can
break your heart, but is very tender of your skin. He can strip you of all
protection of law, and all comfort in religion, and thus expose you to all
outrages, but if you are exposed to the weather, half-clad and
half-sheltered, how yearn his tender bowels! What! talk of a man
treating you well while robbing you of all you get, and as fast as you
get it? And robbing you of yourself, too, your hands and feet, your
muscles, limbs and senses, your body and mind, your liberty and
earnings, your free speech and rights of conscience, your right to
acquire knowledge, property and reputation, and yet you are content to
believe without question that men who do all this by their slaves have

soft hearts oozing out so lovingly toward their human chattles that they
always keep them well housed and well clad, never push them too hard
in the field, never make their dear backs smart, nor let their dear
stomachs get empty!"
In like manner we may ask, are not the cruelties and oppressions
described in the following pages what we should legitimately expect
from men who, all their lives, have used whip and thumb-screw,
shot-gun and bloodhound, to keep human beings subservient to their
will? Are we to expect nothing but chivalric tenderness and compassion
from men who made war on a tolerant government to make more
secure their barbaric system of oppression?
These things are written because they are true. Duty to the brave dead,
to the heroic living, who have endured the pangs of a hundred deaths
for their country's sake; duty to the government which depends on the
wisdom and constancy of its good citizens for its support and
perpetuity, calls for this "round, unvarnished tale" of suffering endured
for freedom's sake.
The publisher of this work urged his friend and associate in journalism
to write and send forth these sketches because the times demanded just
such an expose of the inner hell of the Southern prisons. The tender
mercies of oppressors are cruel. We must accept the truth and act in
view of it. Acting wisely on the warnings of the past, we shall be able
to prevent treason, with all its fearful concomitants, from being again
the scourge and terror of