Yankee Brutalities.
We cordially concur with a contemporary in calling upon all Confederate citizens and soldiers who have letters captured from the
Yankees in their possession, to keep them carefully, so as to enable the
Government to have them collected and printed for preservation in a national library.--There were mail bags captured at
Manassas, the contents of which it will be scarcely possible for the world to credit, unless the original manuscripts are retained, and preserved in the public archives, so as to be referred to, if necessary, by those who read the printed book.
Upon almost every battlefield since, letters of a similar character have been picked up, though-their style has in general been less indecent, owing to the exposures that were made of their first correspondence.
The world and posterity ought to see the real character of the men who are engaged in this war, and Congress would do well to adopt measures to that end by collecting and preserving the captured Yankee letters.
A gentleman who has since returned to
Europe the intelligent correspondent of the
London Herald, was favored by one of our
Generals with a peep at the
Yankee letters taken at
Manassas, and has already given as graphic a picture as decency would permit of their astounding contents.
But newspaper notices are soon forgotten, and we wish to embalm the Sons of the Pilgrims in their own odoriferous spices, so that their fragrance may descend to the most remote generations.
We wish the world to behold the fruits of Puritanism in these private disclosures of a people who profess to be the purest, most pious, and philanthropical of man kind.
It is impossible even to hint, except in general terms, at the horrible lewdness of these letters.
The human imagination never before conceived such atrocities as the flames of battle have distanced in the interior of these whited sepulchres.
There is another development of the enemy's brutality and barbarism, which ought to be placed upon record side by side with Yankee correspondence, and that is the unparalleled and horrible incarceration and even defilement of churches dedicated to the worship of God.
The church at
Centreville was a memorable example, and the evidences of Yankee civilization and decency in their treatment of this church, as well as others, ought to be placed in such a form that even Yankee mendacity could not overlook it. The blasphemous and filthy words, and the vile pictures with which those hallowed walls were covered all over, ought never to be forgotten, as Illustrative of the kind of enemy with whom we contend.
Can Heaven be expected to favor such a cause?
Can the
All Good Being prosper such a people?
Instead of looking abroad for intervention, we have every reason to look upward, and believe that a God of Justice and of Vengeance will Interpose in our behalf.
