Rebellion Record: a Diary of American Events: Poetry and Incidents., Volume 8.
Frank Moore, Ed.

Specimens of “Southern Literature.” --There are some signs that “the South” --meaning by that the slave-drivers and woman-whippers, who so long claimed this name for themselves — will presently have something of “a literature of its own.” The Parisians have just been edified with a work on “The condition of the confederate States,” by one Charles Girard, “formerly Secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, Washington.” To give his book an apparent importance and character, Dr. Girard has addressed it, as a memoir or report, to the Emperor Napoleon, though it nowhere appears that he was commissioned or requested to make any report of any kind to the Emperor.

The value of this writer's report may be gathered from the following remarkable “incident” which he relates:

I one evening, at General Cooper's, heard the Governor of North-Carolina tell how, in their numerous incursions into his State, the enemy carried off, by force, [28] whole families of negroes; that on several occasions, being surrounded at the moment of embarkation by the local militia, the negroes took the opportunity of escaping to return to their masters, and that then the Yankees turned their fury on the negro children, whom they tore from their mothers' arms and flung into the water. On other occasions they drowned the negroes by wholesale when they resisted the attempt to carry them off.

The Yankees exercised similar cruelty on the whites. In one detachment of prisoners, of whom a great part were ill of small-pox, caught in the miserable huts in which they had been lodged, they amused themselves with fastening them two and two, a sick man to a healthy one, to spread the disease; and then, when the disease reached its height, they would throw them overboard with loud cheers.