John Latouche testified as follows: "I was first lieutenant in Company B, Twenty-fifth Virginia Battalion, C. S. A. I was detailed to post duty in Richmond to regulate the details of the guards of the military prisons there, and in March, 1864, I was on duty at Libby Prison. Major Turner, the keeper of the prison, told me that he was going to see General Winder about the guard. On his return he told me that General Winder himself had been to see the Secretary of War, and that they were going to put powder under the prison. In the morning of the same day the powder was brought. There were two kegs of about twenty-five pounds each, and a box which contained about as much as the kegs. A hole was dug in the centre of the middle basement, and the powder was put down there. The box when put in just came level with the ground, and the place was covered over with gravel. I did not see any fuse to it then. I placed a sentry over this powder so that no accident might occur, and the next day Major Turner, who had charge of the fuse, showed it to us in his office; he showed it to everybody there. It was a long fuse made of gutta-percha, such a one as I had never seen before. In May, I think it was, Major Turner went South, and all of the prisoners were sent out of the Libby building proper to the south; and General Winder sent a note down to the office with directions to take up the powder as privately or as secretly as possible. I forget his exact words. The note was delivered into my hands for the inspector of the prison, to whom I either gave or sent it. I afterward heard Major Turner say that in the event of the raiders coming into Richmond he would have blown up the prison. I understood him to say those were his orders." We are not left, however, to infer that this gunpowder plot, by which the lives of twelve hundred Union officers held as prisoners of war were to have been sacrificed in case Colonel Dahlgren should have gotten into the city for the purpose of their liberation, was authorized by the head of the rebel government. The box turned over by General Johnson to General Schofield, containing the archives of the Confederate government, contained the proof that Jefferson Davis ordered these preparations to be made, and that his subordinates had orders to carry the plot into execution in the event of the contingency above referred to. These archives also showed that in this he was sustained by the committee of the rebel congress on the conduct of the war. Pollard, also, in his history of the "Lost Cause," attempts to justify this plot. In all this we see the debasing influence of human bondage on the moral sense of a people. Who, except under the influence of such a demoralization, could have planned for the wholesale sacrifice of their prisoners of war?