Murder of Union Soldiers in South Carolina.
The Washington correspondent of the Detroit Tribune under date of Feb. 23, 1867, writes:— The report of the committee on the murder of Union soldiers in South Carolina, which was made last night, will startle the country as it has Congress. No really new facts are presented, but heretofore they have rested upon newspaper statements alone, and the Copperheads were at liberty to denounce them as false. Now, we have a series of facts sworn to before the committee, and presented over the names of some of the best members of the House. To state the result with brevity, three Union soldiers were murdered in South Carolina with the most atrocious cruelty, their murderers were apprehended, but through the connivance of prominent rebels in South Carolina, leading rebel sympathizers here, including the President, and Judge Hall, of Delaware, they were set free, and are now at liberty in South Carolina. Perhaps the most striking fact stated by the report is this: That those villainous murderers were received by their neighbors with “an ovation!” The President and his friends may well grow nervous over this report, for it gives an unanswerable reply to all their delusive argument respecting the “tyranny of the Reconstruction bill.” The President told a New York gentleman who called on him the other evening, that the Reconstruction bill just passed by Congress was the most tyrannical act ever passed by that body. Doolittle, in the Senate, has the effrontery to get up in his place and pronounce the accounts in the newspapers of outrages at the South upon Union men and freedmen as “falsehoods,” and this for the simple reason that he, a rebel sympathizer, a traitor to his party and principles, could travel on the main lines of railway without trouble! The report replies to all such loose statements and denials with a decisiveness that leaves no further room for argument.