Beneath the red clods of this field, thickly as the leaves of autumn, are stretched side by side a number of men more numerous than all of the American soldiers who perished by disease and casualty of battle during the Mexican war--more than all of the British soldiers who were killed, or perished from their wounds, on the bloody fields of the Crimea, the desperate struggles at Waterloo, the four great battles in Spain,--Talavera, Salamanca, Albuera, Vittoria,--and also the sanguinary contest at New Orleans. All these losses of the sons of the British empire do not build up a hecatomb of the human dead so high, so vast, so red, as this one single link of the great chain of wrong that stretched from Virginia to Texas. There is no battle-field on the face of the globe, known to the antiquary, where so many soldiers are interred in one group as are gathered together in the broad trenches of this neglected field among the pine forests of Georgia. What a gathering is this! What a monument of the incarnation of political lust, of the reckless desperation, the implacability of the depraved human heart, when resolved upon cruelty! The world does not offer, among all of her extant memorials, a more terrible, a more impressive comment upon the ambition, the power, the glory of mankind. VIII. Respect to the dead is an instinct of nature; and to leave the remains of a fallen comrade upon the field, unhonored, is repugnant even to the red men of the forest. How much more, then, does a civilized nation, of high degree, owe to the memory of its brave defenders! Will it now forget the noble sacrifice of its sons amid the debasing influences of commerce and manufacture? Shall these sticks, which mark the nation's sacrifice, moulder into dust, and with their brief inscriptions be swept away by the winds of the world, and all traces of this heroism, this martyrdom, lost? Here is something required more than brief, hollow, human gratitude, and a sonorous, perishable epitaph. Whatever rises above the level of this plain to commemorate for future ages the devotion of the men who sleep beneath, should be of lasting material, and as colossal as the gigantic proportions of the republic itself: or the field should be levelled and swept, and every distinguishing sign blended and effaced, and the true altar of memorial erected in the hearts of all men who believe and revere those eternal principles of love, justice, truth. Liberty has but one inscription to offer, and that is the noble lines which were traced on the dungeon wall in the blood of the noblest and purest of the Girondins: "_Potius mori quam foedari_"--Death rather than dishonor. IX. Impartial history will give to the memory of these men a place among the records of useless murder. The law of parole was all-sufficient to prevent their return to service, and their absence from the fields of campaign would have been of no material weight with the prolific North.