Had they all been turned loose as soon as captured, their efforts would not have hastened the Confederacy's fate a single day.
As to the responsibility for this monstrous cataclysm of human misery and death: That the great mass of the Southern people approved of these outrages, or even knew of them, I do not, for an instant, believe.

They are as little capable of countenancing such a thing as any people in the world.

But the crowning blemish of Southern society has ever been the dumb acquiescence of the many respectable, well-disposed, right-thinking people in the acts of the turbulent and unscrupulous few.

From this direful spring has flowed an Iliad of unnumbered woes, not only to that section but to our common country.

It was this that kept the South vibrating between patriotism and treason during the revolution, so that it cost more lives and treasure to maintain the struggle there than in all the rest of the country.