And yet, right at this point this volume will meet its severest criticism, and at this point its testimony is most vital and necessary.
Many will be slow to believe all that is here told most truthfully of the tyranny and cruelty of the captors of our brave boys in blue.

There are no parallels to the cruelties and malignities here described in Northern society.

The system of slavery, maintained for over two hundred years at the South, had performed a most perverting, morally desolating, and we might say, demonizing work on the dominant race, which people bred under our free civilization can not at once understand, nor scarcely believe when it is declared unto them.

This reluctance to believe unwelcome truths has been the snare of our national life.

We have not been willing to believe how hardened, despotic, and cruel the wielders of irresponsible power may become.
When the anti-slavery reformers of thirty years ago set forth the cruelties of the slave system, they were met with a storm of indignant denial, villification and rebuke.