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[534] soldier, “that I desire very much to pay, and nothing troubles me so much now as the fact that my wounds prevent me from entering upon active service at once.”

The case of Louis Francis, who was terribly wounded and maltreated, and lost a leg, is referred to by Gen. Ricketts; but the testimony of Francis himself is startling. He was a private in the New-York Fourteenth regiment. He says:

I was attacked by two rebel soldiers, and wounded in the right knee with the bayonet. As I lay on the sod they kept bayoneting me until I received fourteen wounds. One then left me, the other remaining over me, when a Union soldier coming up, shot him in the breast, and he fell dead. I lay on the ground till ten o'clock next day. I was then removed in a wagon to a building; my wounds examined and partially dressed.

On the Saturday following we were carried to Manassas, and from there to the general hospital at Richmond. My leg having partially mortified, I consented that it should be amputated, which operation was performed by a young man. I insisted that they should allow Dr. Swalm to be present, for I wanted one Union man there if I died under the operation. The stitches and the band slipped from neglect, and the bone protruded; and about two weeks after, another operation was performed, at which time another piece of the thigh-bone was sawed off. Six weeks after the amputation, and before it healed, I was removed to the tobacco-factory.

Two operations were subsequently performed on Francis--one at Fortress Monroe and one at Brooklyn, N. Y.--after his release from captivity.

Revolting as these disclosures are, it was when the committee came to examine witnesses in reference to the treatment of our heroic dead that the fiendish spirit of the rebel leaders was most prominently exhibited. Daniel Bixby, Jr., of Washington, testifies that he went out in company with G. A. Smart, of Cambridge, Mass., who went to search for the body of his brother, who fell at Blackburn's Ford in the action of the eighteenth of July. They found the grave. The clothes were identified as those of his brother on account of some peculiarity in the make, for they had been made by his mother; and, in order to identify them, other clothes made by her were taken, that they might compare them.

“We found no head in the grave, and no bones of any kind — nothing but the clothes and portions of the flesh. We found the remains of three other bodies all together. The clothes were there; some flesh was left, but no bones.” The witness also states that Mrs. Pierce Butler, who lives near the place, said that she had seen the rebels boiling portions of the bodies of our dead in order to obtain their bones as relics. They cold not wait for them to decay. She said that she had seen drumsticks made of “Yankee shinbones,” as they called them. Mrs. Butler also stated that she had seen a skull that one of the New-Orleans artillery had, which, he said, he was going to send home and have mounted, and that he intended to drink a brandy-punch out of it the day he was married.

Frederick Scholes, of the city of Brooklyn, N. Y., testified that he proceeded to the battle-field of Bull Run, on the fourth of this month, (April,) to find the place where he supposed his brother's body was buried. Mr. Scholes, who is a man of unquestioned character, by his testimony fully confirms the statements of other witnesses. He met a free negro, named Simon or Simons, who stated that it was a common thing for the rebel soldiers to exhibit the bones of the Yankees. “I found,” he says, “in the bushes in the neighborhood, a part of a Zouave uniform, with the sleeve sticking out of the grave, and a portion of the pantaloons. Attempting to pull it up, I saw the two ends of the grave were still unopened, but the middle had been prised up, pulling up the extremities of the uniform at some places, the sleeves of the shirt in another, and a portion of the pantaloons.” Dr. Swalm (one of the surgeons, whose testimony has already been referred to) pointed out the trenches where the secessionists had buried their own dead, and, on examination, it appeared that their remains had not been disturbed at all. Mr. Scholes met a free negro, named Hampton, who resided near the place, and when he told him the manner in which these bodies had been dug up, he said he knew it had been done, and added that the rebels had commenced digging bodies two or three days after they were buried, for the purpose, at first, of obtaining the buttons off their uniforms, and that afterwards they disinterred them to get their bones. He said they had taken rails and pushed the ends down in the centre under the middle of the bodies, and prised them up.

“The information of the negroes of Benjamin Franklin Lewis corroborated fully the statement of this man Hampton. They said that a good many of the bodies had been stripped naked on the field before they were buried, and that some were buried naked. I went to Mr. Lewis's house and spoke to him of the manner in which these bodies had been disinterred. He admitted that it was infamous, and condemned principally the Louisiana Tigers, of Gen. Wheat's division. He admitted that our wounded had been very badly treated.” In confirmation of the testimony of Dr. Swalm and Dr. Homiston, this witness avers that Mr. Lewis mentioned a number of instances of men who had been murdered by bad surgical treatment.

Mr. Lewis was afraid that a pestilence would break out in consequence of the dead being left unburied, and stated that he had gone and warned the neighborhood and had the dead buried, sending his own men to assist in doing so.

On Sunday morning, (yesterday,) I went out in search of my brother's grave. We found the trench, and dug for the bodies below. They were eighteen inches to two feet below the surface, and had been hustled in in any way. In one end of the trench we found, not more than two or three inches below the surface, the thigh-bone of a man


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