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first learning my letters?") and gray-haired old men and women forming, with slowness and difficulty, by the aid of spectacles, the first characters in the writing - book. The teachers were furnished by the American Missionary Association, the freedmen paying for their own books, (an item with the booksellers,) and for the necessary fuel and lights.

Mr. Eddy, the superintendent, and an old experienced teacher, said to me: "The children of these schools have made in a given time more progress in the ordinary branches of education than any white schools I ever taught. In mathematics and the higher sciences they are not so forward. The eagerness of the older ones to learn is a continual wonder to me. The men and women say, 'We work all day, but we'll come to you in the evening for learning, and we want you to make us learn; we're dull, but we want you to beat it into us!'"

I was much interested in a class of young clergymen who recited in the evening to the young matron of the "teachers' home." One of them told me with tears of gratitude how kind and faithful all the teachers had been to them.

"Are you not mistaken?" I said. "I have been told a hundred times that the Southern people are your best friends." He replied: "Georgia passed a law making it a penitentiary offence, punishable with five years' imprisonment, to teach a slave to read. Now we are no longer slaves, and we are learning to read. They may deceive you, but we know who are our best friends."

I was repeatedly assured by earnest secessionists that there were no Union men in Georgia; that, soon or late, all went into the rebellion. But one day I met an old man who denied the charge with indignation.

"I am sixty-five years old. I fought for the spot where Macon now stands, when it was Indian territory. I don't know what they mean by no Union men. If to fight against secession from first to last, and to oppose the war in every way, makes a Union man, I was that. Of course I paid taxes, because I could n't help it. And when Stoneman

"NO PARTY" CRY.

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raided on us, and every man that could bear arms was pressed, I went with the rest, and was all day behind the breastworks. But I've always spoke my mind, and being an old citizen, I never got hung yet. A majority of the people of Macon were with me, if they had only dared to say so. They hate the secessionists now worse than they hate the Yankees : no comparison! The secessionists now cry, No party!' but never a party stuck together closer than they do.

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"The Confederates," he went on, "injured us ten times more than the Yankees did. When Wilson came in last April, he put a guard at my house, who stayed with me seven weeks, and did his duty faithfully."

CHAPTER LXV.

ANDERSONVILLE.

JUST across the railroad track below Macon, in a pleasant pine grove, is the Fair Ground, where was located that thing of misery known to us as the Macon Prison. It was the "Yankee Prison," down here.

I visited the spot one bright morning after a shower, when the breezes and the sunshine were in the pine-tops overhead. The ground was covered with a thin growth of brown grass, wet with the rain: stepping along which I came suddenly to a quadrangular space, as arid as the hill of Golgotha. No marks were necessary to show where the stockade had stood, with its elevated scaffolding on which walked the Rebel guard. The stockade had been removed; but the blasted and barren earth remained to testify of the homesick feet that had trodden it into dreary sterility.

A little stream runs through a hollow below the Fair Ground, carrying off much of the filth of the town. From that stream our prisoners drank. The tub set in the side of the bank at the foot of the hill, and the ditch that conducted into it the water for their use, were still there. Guarded, they came down from the stockade, to this tub, of the contents of which they were not always permitted to have enough. "I used to hear 'em yell for water," said a negro living near. "I was bad off as a slave, but I never begun to be so bad off as they was. Some of 'em had no shoes for winter, and almost no clothes."

In the pine woods on the hill above the area of the stockade is "Death's Acre," the prison burying-ground, enclosed by a plain board fence, and containing little rows of humble graves marked with stakes, and numbered. I noticed num

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bers as high as two hundred and thirty. How many national soldiers lie buried in this lot I do not know.

I shall not dwell upon the sufferings endured by the inmates of this prison. They shrink into insignificance compared with the horrors of the great military prison of Georgia and the South. Neither of these do I purpose to say much. Enough, and more than enough has been spoken and written about them. The infamy of Andersonville is world-wide.

Passing through Washington in August, 1865, I one morning looked into the hot and steaming court-room where Captain Henry Wirz was on trial. In a somewhat worn broadcloth coat, with his counsel at his side occasionally whispering him, his elbow on a table, and his thin uneasy hand fingering his dark beard or supporting his chin; attenuated, bent, and harassed with the most terrible anxieties, - for, however indifferent he may have been to the lives of other and better men, there was one life to which he was not indifferent, and which was now at stake; down-looking for the most part, but frequently glancing his quick sharp eye at the court or the witnesses; there sat the miserable man, listening to minutely detailed accounts of the atrocities of which he had been the instrument. The cause he had served with such savage fidelity, had perished; and the original authors of the enormities he had been employed to commit, stalked at large, or lay in temporary confinement, confidently expecting the executive clemency; while this wretched hireling, whose sin consisted in having done their work too well, was to suffer, not the just for the unjust, but the guilty dog for the still more guilty masters.

Fifty-eight miles below Macon, by the Southwestern Railroad, is the scene of the crimes against humanity for which Henry Wirz was punished with death. The place is set down as Anderson on maps and in guide-books; and that is the • name by which it was known to the inhabitants of the country, until the immense hideous business the war brought to it dignified it with the title of ville.

It is a disagreeable town, with absolutely no point of inter

est about it except the prison. Before the war it had but five buildings: a church without a steeple; a small railroad depot; a little framed box in which was the country post-office; and two dwellings, a log-cabin, and a house with a saw- and grist-mill attached. There were other dwellings within a mile.

Such was Anderson. Andersonville contains some forty additional cheap-looking, unpainted buildings, of various sizes, all of which were constructed with reference to the prison; such as officers' houses, large or small according to the rank of the occupants, government storehouses, hospital buildings, (for the troops on duty,) and so forth. The hospital is now used as a hotel. The entire aspect and atmosphere of the place are ugly and repulsive.

The village lies on the railroad and west of it. Between a third and one half of a mile east of it, is the prison.

The space enclosed by the rough stockade contains twentyfive acres, divided by a sluggish stream flowing through it. It looks like a great horse-yard. Much of the land is swampy, but the rest is elevated, rising on the south side gradually, and on the north side quite steeply from the brook. It was from this shallow stream, defiled with refuse from the camp of the Georgia Reserves, which it received before entering the stockade, that the thirty thousand prisoners, who were sometimes crowded into this broken oblong space, drew their chief supply of water. There were a few little springs in the banks, very precious to them.

The walls of the stockade are of upright logs about a foot in diameter, twenty feet high above the ground, in which they are set close together, deep enough to be kept firmly in their position. There are an outer and an inner wall of this description, with a space some fifty yards in breadth between them. There were sentry-boxes for the soldiers on guard, hung like birds'-nests near the top of the inner wall. These were reached by ladders. For further security, the stockade was partly surrounded by a deep ditch; and on portions of two sides there is an unfinished third line of upright logs.

The outer wall of the stockade has but one entrance.

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