Out of sixty-eight confederate prisoners, taken by Captain Oliver at the Blue Springs settlement, in Jackson county, Missouri, only fourteen could write their names. – The written vouchers for this fact are in the city, and can be exhibited. The larger proportion of the Prisoners from Fort Donelson, who cannot read, is notorious. This is one of the saddest fruits of slavery, and of the character of material composing the staple of rebellion, which this war has yet revealed. A free and popular government cannot prosper with an uneducated people, and the tendency of slavery is to enshroud them in ignorance. – Chicago Trib.
– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Wednesday Morning, March 5, 1862, p. 2
