37
or give us opportunities of preferring our complaints, he might, had he so pleased, have mitigated, in very many respects, the rigors of our imprisonment. I may add, that no "communications from released prisoners," that I ever saw, were in any particular, untrue or exaggerated, and the promptitude with which Col. Burke threw out his sinister suggestion to the Marshal, shows how anxious he was for the suppression of all such information.
Our correspondence was subjected to the strictest scrutiny, and letters written by the prisoners were. frequently returned to them, and generally because they contained facts which the Government did not desire should become known, or reflections on the Government itself. On one occasion Lieut. Wood returned to me a letter which I had written to my wife. No reason was assigned for this; but I was forced to the conclusion that it was sent back because Lieut. Wood chose to consider it too long. It was a small sheet of note paper. There was nothing in the contents to which he could object, and as two letters of the same length as mine, were returned to the writers that morning, with a message from Lieut. Wood that they were too long, I inferred that mine was sent back for a similar cause. To such annoyances we were continually subjected. At times our condition became so unendurable, that finding our complaints unheeded, we expressed our sense of the indignities put upon us, in perfectly plain language. On one occasion, when outraged by some fresh act of harshness or impertinence, I wrote a letter to a friend, in which, after describing our situation, I used this language:
"To have imprisoned men solely on account of their political opinions, is enough to bring eternal infamy on every individual connected with the Administration; hut the manner in which we have been treated since our confinement, is, if possible, even more disgraceful to them. I should have supposed that, if the Government chose to confine citizens because their sentiments were distasteful to it, it would have contented itself with keeping them in custody, but would have put them in tolerably comfortable quarters * * * * * * * * If I had been told twelve months ago, that the American
