t region.
"Congressional reconstruction, the military, &c.," are successfully
defied. The power of the United States Government is not felt or feared.
They only know it as powerless to prevent the atrocities enacted before
their eyes during and since the war.

The flag that I had united with others to honor with procession, songs,
and cheers, was powerless to protect me, and floats dishonored above the
graves of the 12,848 martyr heroes who suffered and died in the
stockades at Andersonville, as prisoners of war never suffered and died
before.

I need hardly say that with my knowledge of the condition of things
around me, as presented _only in part_ in this communication, I left
Andersonville as desired by the _Ku-Klux Klan_. I knew that human
life--that my life was not worth as much as the life of a chicken in any
law-abiding, law-governed community, for should any evil disposed person
there maliciously kill his neighbor's chicken he would be compelled to
pay some slight fine or endure some brief imprisonment; but no one of
all the perpetrators of the crimes I have named has suffered or has
dreamed or suffering any fine, imprisonment, or punishment whatever. I
knew that in their own language my life was "_worthless_." I went South
to reside in 1843, and there are few who know it as thoroughly. As agent
of the American Bible Society, and in other capacities, I have traveled
tens of thousands of miles over different States on horseback before the
war. Bishop Kavenaugh, of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, in
introducing me to the Louisville Conference in 1858, told them that
though a Presbyterian I had "out itinerated the itineracy itself." And
yet I have never seen or heard as much of outrage and personal violence
upon the colored people in any five years of slavery as I heard and saw
at Andersonville, Georgia, from December 22, 1868, to February 12, 1869.
I have never known crime to be committed in any community with such
perfect impunity. I have yet to learn of a _single_ instance where the
civil courts in that part of the State have rendered any punishment or
redress for outrages like those I have detailed. The fact that such
crimes have for years been committed with perfect impunity--that the men
who perpetrate them have not the slightest fear or thought of ever being
punished--that the Freedmen who have suffered outrages such as these,
and others entirely too gross for me to repeat, have not the faintest
shad