Showing posts with label Torture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Torture. Show all posts

Sunday, January 25, 2015

Diary of William Howard Russell: March 22, 1861

A snow-storm worthy of Moscow or Riga flew through New York all day, depositing more food for the mud. I paid a visit to Mr. Horace Greeley, and had a long conversation with him. He expressed great pleasure at the intelligence that I was going to visit the Southern States. “Be sure you examine the slave-pens. They will be afraid to refuse you, and you can tell the truth.” As the capital and the South form the chief attractions at present, I am preparing to escape from “the divine calm” and snows of New York. I was recommended to visit many places before I left New York, principally hospitals and prisons. Sing-Sing, the state penitentiary, is “claimed,” as the Americans say, to be the first “institution” of its kind in the world. Time presses, however, and Sing-Sing is a long way off. I am told a system of torture prevails there for hardened or obdurate offenders — torture by dropping cold water on them, torture by thumb-screws, and the like — rather opposed to the views of prison philanthropists in modern days.

SOURCE: William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, p. 26