We do not ask that anyone shall be punished.

We only desire that the Nation shall recognize and remember the grand fidelity of our dead comrades, and take abundant care that they shall not have died in vain.
For the great mass of Southern people we have only the kindliest feeling.
We but hate a vicious social system, the lingering shadow of a darker age, to which they yield, and which, by elevating bad men to power, has proved their own and their country's bane.
The following story does not claim to be in any sense a history of Southern prisons.

It is simply a record of the experience of one individual--one boy--who staid all the time with his comrades inside the prison, and had no better opportunities for gaining information than any other of his 60,000 companions.
The majority of the illustrations in this work are from the skilled pencil of Captain O.J.Hopkins, of Toledo, who served through the war in the ranks of the Forty-second Ohio.

His army experience has been of peculiar value to the work, as it has enabled him to furnish a series of illustrations whose life-like fidelity of action, pose and detail are admirable.
Some thirty of the pictures, including the frontispiece, and the allegorical illustrations of War and Peace, are from the atelier of Mr.
O.Reich, Cincinnati, O.
A word as to the spelling: Having always been an ardent believer in the reformation of our present preposterous system--or rather, no system--of orthography, I am anxious to do whatever lies in my power to promote it.
In the following pages the spelling is simplified to the last degree allowed by Webster.

I hope that the time is near when even that advanced spelling reformer will be left far in the rear by the progress of a people thoroughly weary of longer slavery to the orthographical absurdities handed down to us from a remote and grossly unlearned ancestry.
Toledo, O., Dec.