WASHINGTON, April 30.
The joint committee on the conduct of the war made a lengthy
report regarding the treatment by the rebels at Manassas of the remains of the
officers and soldiers killed there. They
say the facts disclosed are of a painful, repulsive and shocking character;
that the rebels have crowned this rebellion by perpetration of deeds scarcely
known even to savage warfare.
Investigations have established this beyond controversy. The witnesses called before us are men of undoubted
veracity and character. Some of them
occupy high positions in the army and some of them high positions in civil
life: differing in political sentiments, their evidence proves a remarkable
concurrence of opinion and judgment. Our
own people and foreign nations must, with one accord, (however they have
hesitated heretofore,) consign to lasting odium the authors of crimes which, in
all their details, exceed the worst excesses of the Sepoys in India. The outrages on the dead will revive the
recollections of the cruelties to which savage tribes subject their
prisoners. They were buried, in many
cases, naked, with their faces downward; they were left to decay in the open
air, their bones being carried off as trophies – sometimes, as the testimony
proves, to be used as personal adornments; and one witness deliberately avows
that the head of one of our most gallant officers was cut off by a secessionist
to be used as a drinking cup on the occasion of his marriage.
Wm. Allen Bryant, of Va., nephew of Gov. James Barber, has
been appointed chief of the bureau of inspection of the post office department.
The vote in the Senate refusing, by four majority, to refer
the subject of the confiscation of rebel property to a select committee, was
regarded as a test vote between the friends and opponents of the measure, and a
triumph of the former.
– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette,
Davenport, Iowa, Friday Morning, May 2, 1862, p. 1
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