The manner of their death, the horrors that
cluster'd thickly around every moment of their existence, the loyal,
unfaltering steadfastness with which they endured all that fate had
brought them, has never been adequately told. It was not with them as
with their comrades in the field, whose every act was perform'd in the
presence of those whose duty it was to observe such matters and report
them to the world. Hidden from the view of their friends in the north
by the impenetrable veil which the military operations of the rebels
drew around the so-called confederacy, the people knew next to nothing
of their career or their sufferings. Thousands died there less heeded
even than the hundreds who perish'd on the battlefield. Grant did not
lose as many men kill'd outright, in the terrible campaign from the
Wilderness to the James river--43 days of desperate fighting--as died
in July and August at Andersonville. Nearly twice as many died in that
prison as fell from the day that Grant cross'd the Rapidan, till he
settled down in the trenches before Petersburg. More than four times
as many Union dead lie under the solemn soughing pines about that
forlorn little village in southern Georgia, than mark the course of
Sherman from Chattanooga to Atlanta. The nation stands aghast at the
expenditure of life which attended the two bloody campaigns of 1864,
which virtually crush'd the confederacy, but no one remembers that
more Union soldiers died in the rear of the rebel lines than were
kill'd in the front of them.
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