It might be supposed that the Richmond authorities would have attempted some substantial retaliation, in view of these murderous and incendiary disclosures, and would have treated those of Dahlgren's raiders who had been captured as the felons they really were. But President Davis was weak and melodramatic on the subject of retaliation; a distinct victim had never yet been exacted for innumerable murders and massacres committed by the enemy; a single act of substantial retaliation had never been done by the Confederate Administration; and now the utterly absurd and puerile notice in Richmond of the Dahlgren raid was to bury the body of its leader in a concealed grave, and to put several tons of powder under the Libby Prison to intimidate its inmates. Such stupid melodrama is almost incredible in the head of a great government, and merely gave occasion to the enemy to exclaim about “rebel barbarities,” and to surround with romance a deed of villainy from which the public, without such appeals to their interest and sympathy, would have turned with aversion. Indeed so far did the misrepresentation and hypocrisy of the North go on this subject, that the authenticity of the papers found on Dahlgren was denied, and with that singular disposition of Northern newspapers to interpret as heroism, and entitle as fame, the worst villainies of the war, and its most ruthless and comprehensive works of destruction, the name of Ulric Dahlgren was written as “the young hero of the North,” who had been “assassinated” on the path to glory.
The authenticity of “the Dahlgren Papers” --the most important only of which we have copied above — is probably no longer a question with the intelligent. But to put it beyond all dispute, we annex here
