Descripción
Two reports bound together, as issued. 128; 34pp., plus four plates. Original publisher's embossed green cloth, gilt. Boards rubbed, soiled, and slightly bumped. Some light, scattered foxing to text, with some faint dampstaining to bottom outer edge of various pages. Some tanning and dampstaining to bottom outer edge of plates. Very good. Two congressional reports from the Joint Select Committee on the Conduct of the War, issued in May of 1864, one addressing the Fort Pillow massacre and another the condition of returned Union prisoners of war and their treatment at the hands of their Confederate captors. Described by historian David J. Eicher as "one of the bleakest, saddest events of American military history," the Fort Pillow Massacre took place on April 12, 1864, the third anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter. On that day, Confederate forces under the command of General Nathan Bedford Forrest attacked the Union garrison at Fort Pillow, located in Tennessee along the Mississippi River, about forty miles north of Memphis. The fort was manned by about six hundred Union troops split evenly between the 6th U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery and Bradford's battalion of Tennessee Cavalry. When a Confederate victory was all but assured and Union troops began to turn themselves over, Forrest's men gave no quarter. Over three hundred Union soldiers who should have been taken prisoner were killed, most of them from the 6th Heavy Artillery. The exact events of the massacre have been the subject of heated debate since the day they occurred. Modern scholarship is conclusive that the atrocity took place very much as reported, although arguments continue about whether or not it was premeditated and the degree of Forrest's involvement. Almost immediately afterward, Congress moved to investigate the incident, and the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War was tasked with conducting an inquiry "into the truth of the rumored slaughter of the Union troops, after their surrender, at the recent attack of the rebel forces upon Fort Pillow, Tennessee." A sub-committee, comprised of Senator Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio and Congressman Daniel W. Gooch of Massachusetts, was appointed, and, after collecting testimony in Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee, the sub-committee issued its report, the first of the two reports contained herein. Condemning the "malignity and barbarity of Forrest and his followers," the report describes "a scene of cruelty and murder without a parallel in civilized warfare" during which some three hundred Union troops "were murdered in cold blood" after having "thrown down their arms and ceased to offer resistance." The report cites the Confederates' refusal "to recognize the officers and men of our colored regiments as entitled to the treatment accorded by all civilized nations to prisoners of war" and includes over one hundred pages of testimony obtained from witnesses and survivors. As it was completing its report on the Fort Pillow massacre, the committee "received a communication.from the Secretary of War.calling the attention of the committee to the condition of returned Union prisoners" recently arrived at the Naval Academy hospital in Annapolis, Maryland. Upon completing their investigation into the Fort Pillow massacre, members of the committee travelled to Baltimore and Annapolis "to examine with their own eyes the condition" of the returned prisoners. There they found men who gave "the appearance of living skeletons, many of them being nothing but skin and bone." The report contains testimony from the soldiers themselves as well as from the surgeons and other medical personnel caring for them. Finding it "impossible to describe in words the deplorable condition of these returned prisoners," the committee included in the report four lithographic plates - taken from photographs - depicting eight of the returned prisoners. The report concluded that the condition of these returned prisoners was "the result of a determinatio. N° de ref. del artículo WRCAM62673
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