FEDERAL " OUTRAGES."

{FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT.]

New York, December 26, 1863. CONGRESS has adjourned for the holidays ; there are no important military movements on foot, except the weaving of meshes to ensnafb the retreating steps of Longstreet ; and in the Free States, excelif for the absence of gold and silver and the great fairs for the benefit of the Sanitary Commission, there would be no sign that the country is engaged in a great civil war—that itis passing bloodily through a fundamental revolution. I could not have a better opportunity of complying with a request made by a friend on your side of' the water, who knows I am your correspondent, that I would give some attention to the reports of "atrocious outrages by Federal commanders," which do the cause of the Republic so much harm in Europe, and tell my readers who are and who are not culpable in this matter.

I find upon examination that the stories of gross and wanton outrage committed by officers of our army, or with their sanction, or their connivance, are either entirely without foundation, or mali- cious exaggerations and perversions of the truth. But let me also say what I do not mean to include in this denial. I do not mean to include such retaliatory acts as are described in a proclamation of a certain famous general in whom my British readers of English blood and I have a common interest, which proclamation sets forth that divers of the army under this general's command have been "not only spoiled and robbed, but also barbarously and inhumanly butchered and slain by a sort of outlaws and robbers, not under the dis- cipline of any army," and also " that it is in the power of the

country to detect and discover them (many of them being inhabi- tants of those places where commonly the outrage is committed)" and that "their motion is ordinarily by the invitation and ac- cording to the intelligence given them hy their countrymen."

The general, therefore, proclaims " wheresoever any under my command shall be hereafter robbed and spoiled by such parties, I will require life for life, and plenary satisfaction for their goods of those parishes and places where the fact shall be committed,

unless they shall discover and produce the offender." This threat was fulfilled, for the proclamation dated Edinburgh, Nov. 5th, 1650,

is signed by " Oliver Cromwell "---a God-fearing man of those days, who kept his word and stood no nonsense, although he punished plundering by his own soldiers with death, and wrote as to one of them, " Hang him, he shot the widow's son." I do not mean to deny the commission of sundry acts of protective retalia- tion of this kind by the order, or with the consent of Union

Officers ; and I am not at all surprised that Mr. Jefferson Davis and Mr. Beresford Hope, the London Times and the Saturday Review, and those of their inclining, should make the most of them as " acts of wanton barbarity." Neither do I mean entirely to deny the commission of acts somewhat like those recorded in the following‘paragraphs, of men in whom my readers have a direct and I only a collateral interest. The writer is speaking of a fire

which took place at Varna in 1854

" The soldiers plundered a good deal, and outrages of a grave cha- racter were attributed to the Zouaves during the fire. . . . And some of the camp canteen keepers were completely ruined by their losses." "The conduct of many of the men, Fieneh and English, seemed cha- racterized by a recklessness bordering on insanity."

Elsewhere the same writer is describing the flank march upon Sevastopol, and says :—

"Just as the araba in which I lay was passing by a beautiful little chateau, said to belong to a Russian general, I saw a stream of soldiers issue from it laden with the most incongruous, but at the same time the richest spoils which a man of taste and wealth could abandon to an enemy ; others were engaged in smashing the house to atoms," &a. " Shocked by the wanton outrage, I inquired the cause, and learned from an officer who was standing by, that the soldiers had not done the smallest mischief till they saw an English staff officer of rank take a bronze statuette out of the house and ride away with it, hereupon the cry arose, 'Let us plunder, too, if our officer sets the example.' "

These passages are not from Sevastopol or St. Petersburg papers, but from Russell's " British Expedition to the Crimea," where they may be found on pages 85 and 164. Now, it is not to justify any acts of this kind that have been committed by our armies, still less to recriminate on our accusers, that I quote these passages.

Two wrongs never yet made one right ; " 'you're another," is the fitting retort, in the quarters in which it is heard, of those who have no other reply to make ; and beside, next to the honour and the glory of this Republic, I cherish the honour and the glory of the British nation. I have quoted these passages, thinking that some of my readers might see, as I see, that if acts like those which they describe could be done by the members of the long- established compact, and severely disciplined armies of one of the two leading Powers of Europe, the fact that they also occurred in the hastily gathered, enormous and heterogeneous levies of this Republic, as they swept through the land in a storm of civil war, is not evidence either of degeneracy of race, of the impotence of a Republican Government, or of a hatred and bloodthirstiness which sets at naught the usages of modern warfare.

My introduction has been long ; but, in fact, it is a good part of my task ; for other than such matters as those already noticed there are of the "Federal outrages" only the so-called attempt to destroy Charleston harbour, the shooting of six men in Missouri by General M'Neil, the story of the boarding-school rape at Rome, Georgia, by General Turchin's soldiers, General Butler's woman order at New Orleans, and General Gilmore's bombardment of Charleston. As to Charleston, the first and the last in this list, a few words. The alleged attempt to destroy that decaying seaport was only a fu- tile effort to close the least important two of the five approaches to the harbour, leaving the others unharmed, and to be guarded by the blockading fleet. And as to General Gilmore's act, if any one chooses to denounce as inhuman the bombardment, after forty- eight hours' notice, of a city towards which an attacking force, sent to take or destroy it, had been working its way for months, I shall not waste time by counter-plea or protest. Such an objection touches the question whether war is ever justifiable. As to M'Neil, the defence is much like that made in a suit for the return of a brass kettle :—That the kettle had been returned, that the defendant never borrowed it, and that the plaintiff never had a kettle to lend. For the men whom he shot were, in the first place, to use Cromwell's phrase " a sort of outlaws and robbers not under the discipline of any army," and he put them to death in the same protective retaliation proclaimed by the great Puritan. In the next place, their lives were forfeit under any circumstances ; because they were prisoners who had deliberately violated their parole. And lastly, M'Niel was not an officer of the United States army, but only a frontier militia general, not responsible for his military conduct to the Government at Washington as a colonel of British volunteers would be to the Commander-in-Chief. He was simply one of those who, in the words of Macaulay, "administered a rude justice with the rifle in the wilds beyond the Mississippi." The Turchin story I can hardly notice with patience, so sheer a fabrication is that monstrous slander. In a word, no evidence was discoverable to be produced before a court-martial that a single female inmate of that boarding-school suffered outrage of any kind from the men of General Turchin's command, or that a single woman in the captured town with one exception had any complaint of that kind to make—and that exception was a notorious mulatto harlot. That Mr. Jefferson Davis should still attempt to use this exploded scandal for the purpose of " firing the Southern heart," is not sur- prising; but that Mr. Buxton should refer to it as a fact in a letter otherwise creditable to his father's son, only shows how true is the vulgar adage that if you throw plenty of dirt some of it will be sure to stick. As I have been writing, the thought of General Butler's woman order, the last " outrage " that I have to notice, has reminded me of an incident in the Court history of Spain, the names and dates of which I cannot remember, and which I have not now timeto hunt up. One of the Kings of Spain had the good taste to be very much annoyed at the extravagant length of the trains worn by the ladies of his Court. He tried all means to curtail the nuisance ; but his efforts were as vain as King James's " Counterblast against Tobacco." At last he ordered his chamber- lain or corresponding officer to decree that while trains of any length might be worn by any woman, all trains beyond a certain length should be regarded as the badge of courtesans. The order executed itself. At once allLthe ladies of the Court, some of whom were said to be well qualified for an extra ell, cut short their trail- ing robes, and the halls and the presence-chamber became practi- cable for the male animal. What the royal and gallant Spaniard did to effect a needed reform in costume, General Butler did to secure the peace and safety of the city of which he held precarious military possession. It was necessary, absolutely necessary, for him to compel respect, outward respect at least, for the national autho- rity. A man who hauled down the flag and trampled it under foot he could hang, and he did hang ; his own soldiers who plundered he could hang, and he did hang, three in a row. But what was he to do with women, who, sheltering themselves under the immunities of their sex, did more to create and per -

petuate disturbance than all the men, by offering open, gross, personal insult to his command ? What weapon could he bring to bear against "ladies" who spat in the faces of his officers who were not even addressing them ? By one of the most ingenious and, in my opinion, justifiable orders ever written, he simply declared that every woman thus behaving like a common woman of the town should be—not imprisoned, for mere imprisonment would have gratified their longings to be martyis- but that they should " be regarded and be held liable to be treated " as the women were liable to be treated like whom they behaved.

That treatment was merely imprisonment in the calaboose. This order at once vindicated itself by requiring no force thereafter to restrain either the insulters or the insulted. In spite of the obloquy heaped upon him for this order, General Butler has not deigned to offer any public defence of it. When in New York he addressed a mixed audience of both sexes numbering 3,000, and among them some of the most honoured ladies and gentlemen in the country, although he spoke for two hours about his course and his views of the rebellion, upon this point he only said, " Has any woman ever complained that she was not protected while I was in command at New Orleans ? " He paused a moment, and then passed on, without one other word upon the subject. And I know from a resident of New Orleans, a British subject, that not only did no woman in New Orleans need other protection than General Butler's presence in the city, but that the women of the very sort named in his order never before found it necessary to carry themselves so discreetly, never before were themselves so secure from rudeness in the streets of that debauched and riotous capital. But you will ask, was there no danger of General But- ler's order being misunderstood as an invitation to licence? Not a whit. General Butler knew his men. They were New England troops ; and in New England,—such are the baleful influences of instructed democracy,—the crimes of wife-beating and sexual out- rage are unknown.

Upon the mind of any person who willingly believed the slanders which I have just noticed I have no hope of producing any effect ; but one word from the other side as to the manner and the spirit in which we have conducted this war is worth more than all that I can say to strangers. That word I happen to be able to give my readers. I have some secessionist acquaintances, more than I like to have ; and many friends whose near kinsmen are rank, open rebels. One of the latter, himself anti-slavery and loyal to the core, showed me the other day a letter from his sister, a Virginia woman, whose husband's plantation is on the banks of the Rapidan. It was written when Meade had passed that river. I was permitted to make the following extract from it. The General Kilpatrick mentioned in it is, perhaps, the best cavalry officer, certainly the most dashing, in the United States service. The writer's husband is a colonel in the insurgent army :-

" I received your letters this morning through tho kindness of General Kilpatrick, who has gone to New York this morning to attend the funeral of his wife. Poor man ! I am so very sorry for him. He will be there about ten days, and will bring me anything you would send to his charge. We are all well, and doing well. I have a guard constantly, and a good time generally when they don't shoot too near. Tho officers are very kind, and come to see us often. General Kilpatrick and General Davies are particularly kind. I have plenty of servants with me, and two old ones, men who do everything I want— attend to getting wood and such matters. I have plenty to eat and drink, but no husband ; but will, no doubt, see Massa Thomas' in three or four weeks, if I am to judge of the future by the past."

I venture to say that that letter from the wife of a rebel officer does not indicate a very outrageous and atrocious style of warfare on the part of the United States officers, in that quarter at least. I could back that up by another case, within my own knowledge, still stronger, in which only private soldiers were concerned, and by many of which I know by credible report. But to what good end should I any longer abuse your patience? For in this matter men believe with the heart rather than with the head.

A YANKEE.