Mrs. Greenhow's letter.
--In another column will be found the remarkable letter of Mrs. Greenhow, a Virginia lady, who has been imprisoned by the Lincoln despotism in Washington, to W. H. Seward.The name of the writer is endorsement enough to Virginia readers of all that is said in that letter. Nothing is so hideous in the tyranny inaugurated at Washington as its treatment of helpless women. In all civilized countries, the name of woman is a protection stronger than a shield of iron. None but savages and brutes make war upon the defenceless sex. It has been reserved to Yankees to make this a war upon women, and even children, and deliberately to proclaim in advance their purpose of visiting worse horrors than those of ordinary war upon the wives and daughters of their enemies. When they have not ventured to proceed to all the extremities their base instincts dictated, they have, nevertheless, treated such unfortunate victims as they could imprison upon some miserable pretext, with such wrongs and indignities as sufficiently indicate the combined depravity and cowardice of their character. Mrs. Greenhow's letter is ingenuous, womanly, and courageous. She is a true woman, a true Virginia woman, and the blood of every man must boil when he reads the narrative of indignities offered to her sex in Washington. The account she gives needs no confirmation; but we have heard, through private and reliable sources, of the grossest and most systematic insults offered to the captive ladies in Washington by their brutal persecutors.--We anticipate no favorable response from Seward to this noble and affecting letter. He has not the courage to make war upon any but the weak and helpless, and such natures never relax their hold upon a victim, when they can display their ferocity without danger of retaliation. There is not a gentleman in Lincoln's cabinet, not one who has the feelings of a man, or such treatment to woman could never occur in the very capital of the nation. We have never known the tendency of the oldNational Intelligencer to obsequiousness to man in power more disgustingly displayed than in it sycophancy to an administration which perpetrates such it very
