The slaying of every man there was a foul crime.
The most of this was done by very young boys; some of it by old men.
The Twenty-Sixth Alabama and Fifty-Fifth Georgia, had guarded us since the opening of the prison, but now they were ordered to the field, and their places filled by the Georgia "Reserves," an organization of boys under, and men over the military age.

As General Grant aptly-phrased it, "They had robbed the cradle and the grave," in forming these regiments.
The boys, who had grown up from children since the war began, could not comprehend that a Yankee was a human being, or that it was any more wrongful to shoot one than to kill a mad dog.

Their young imaginations had been inflamed with stories of the total depravity of the Unionists until they believed it was a meritorious thing to seize every opportunity to exterminate them.
Early one morning I overheard a conversation between two of these youthful guards: "Say, Bill, I heerd that you shot a Yank last night ?" "Now, you just bet I did.

God! you jest ought to've heerd him holler." Evidently the juvenile murderer had no more conception that he had committed crime than if he had killed a rattlesnake.
Among those who came in about the last of the month were two thousand men from Butler's command, lost in the disastrous action of May 15, by which Butler was "bottled up" at Bermuda Hundreds.

At that time the Rebel hatred for Butler verged on insanity, and they vented this upon these men who were so luckless--in every sense--as to be in his command.