At the distance of about five hundred paces northwestward from the
stockade, in a little field which is almost overshadowed by the
surrounding pines, appear a multitude of stakes standing upright in the
earth, in long and regular lines.
Upon every one of these fragments of boards figures have been carelessly
scratched by an iron instrument; and they run up to the appalling number
of almost thirteen thousand! Each stick represents a dead man,--a
hero,--and this multitude of branchless and leafless trunks reminds us
rather of a blasted vineyard than of a cemetery arranged for the human
dead.
[Illustration: VIEW OF THE GRAVEYARD, with its thirteen thousand victims,
as the rebels left it. Taken from rebel photographs in possession of the
author.--Page 37.]
I have seen many of the rarest sculptures in civilized lands, where art
has lavished and exhausted its powers to awaken sympathy for the dead, but
have met with none that moved my heart more impressively than the brief,
vague inscriptions, the rude memorials of this silent and neglected field,
where sleep an entire army of freemen, who preferred lingering death
rather than allegiance to a rebel and wicked faction.
Beneath the red clods of this field, thickly as the leaves of autumn, are
stretched side by side a number of men more numerous than all of the
American soldiers who perished by disease and casualty of battle during
the Mexican war--more than all of the British soldiers who were killed, or
perished from their wounds, on the bloody fields of the Crimea, the
desperate struggles at Waterloo, the four great battles in
Spain,--Talavera, Salamanca, Albuera, Vittoria,--and also the sanguinary
contest at New Orleans. All these losses of the sons of the British empire
do not build up a hecatomb of the human dead so high, so vast, so red, as
this one single link of the great chain of wrong that stretched from
Virginia to Texas.
There is no battle-field on the face of the globe, known to the antiquary,
where so many soldiers are interred in one group as are gathered together
in the broad trenches of this neglected field among the pine forests of
Georgia. What a gathering is this! What a monument of the incarnation of
political lust, of the reckless desperation, the implacability of the
depraved human heart, when resolved upon cruelty! The world does not
offer, among all of her extant memorials, a more terrible, a more
impressive comment upon the ambition, the power, the glory of mankind.