Is the World Growing Better?
By Voice of the West
By favor of the Hon. Charles Upson, we have received the reports of the committees appointed by congress to investigate the Fort Pillow Massacre, and the condition of returned prisoners. In examining them we have at times been scarcely able to realize that we were living in the boasted nineteenth century. On the battle-field amid the shock of charging squadrons, the rattle of musketry, the thunder of cannon, with the dead and dying lying around, it is no wonder that men are temporarily turned into demons. But we submit that we know of no outrages committed by uncivilized barbarians which exceed in wickedness the treatment which not only the negro prisoners, but the white have received from their Southern captors. These outrages have been committed not in a moment of excitement, but deliberately and in cold blood. But to particularize: our Northern men have been deliberately starved to death: i. e. they have been exposed to the greatest privations, so that many have even frozen to death, while at the same time they received a quantity of food utterly insufficient to sustain life under the most favorable circumstances. A piece of bread three inches square, made of corn meal,—the cobs ground in,—and three mouthfuls of meat, were allowed for a meal. And by this treatment these men have been reduced to living skeletons, and shattered in mind and body, they have been put on board the flag of truce steamer for Annapolis many of them dying of inanition before reaching that place. A large proportion die in the hospitals, and those who live are but wrecks of men in body, and often in mind. Copies of the photographs of some of these returned prisoners, are given in this report. It is heart rending to look at them, and think how much they must have suffered. Call to mind the recent accounts of the doings of the French soldiers in Mexico, of the Russians in Poland and Circassia, of the English in India, China and Japan, and then look at the barbarities perpetrated in our own land—and wherein should we boast over “The Dark Ages?” Should we not rather feel humbled that with all the advances made in learning, art, and science, that with all the boasted progress of the age, such deeds should now, not only be done, but be gloried in? Are men growing better as they become wiser in knowledge of this world? No! It is only by the wisdom of God that men become in any sort better, and that kind of wisdom is to the world, now more than ever before folly. We do not expect, or look for better days till Jesus comes.—Voice of the West.