RICHMOND ENQUIRER, July 30, 1861:
Yesterday morning our reporter paid
a visit to the City Alms House, where a number of the wounded, captured at
Manassas, are now quartered. The Alms House is a large four story building,
recently erected and completed with the exception of the plastering. It is
situated on a commanding elevation in the northeastern portion of the city
and affords from its windows and spacious porches a magnificent view of the
surrounding country. It is most admirably adapted for a hospital, the use
to which it is now put, as well on account of its interior arrangements as
its salubrious situation. The wounded prisoners occupy the south end of the
second story. Those seriously wounded are lying on mattresses, and, others
who are slightly injured, sit on benches or walk up and down he porches as
suits their pleasure. An air of neatness pervades the whole establishment,
and the order is only broken by the occasional curses of a "Pet Lamb." With
the exception of the New York Zouaves, the prisoners express regret at taking
up arms against our people. Some say their newspapers and politicians had
led them to believe that Southerners were semi-barbarous, and were preparing
to overrun the North; others had been persuaded that the masses of the people
here were held in subjection by a few unprincipled men, and desired the aid
of the North to regain their independence; and many enlisted with the understanding
that they would only be employed in the defence of Washington city. They are
very grateful for the kind treatment they are receiving at our hands. But
the Fire Zouaves are incorrigible. They seem perfectly oblivious to every
sentiment of honor, gratitude or decency. They have nothing but the human
form and faculty of speech to distinguish them from Gorillas.
No wonder the Astors and Coopers,
of New York, contributed so liberally to their equipment, and urged them
so earnestly to invade the South. They knew their brown stone fronts, marble
palaces and plethoric warehouses rested on a foundation as insecure as the
passions of this “glorious fighting material,” as Ellsworth termed them, which
waited but the spark of some favorable event to fan into flames, fiercer than
those that lit up the streets of Paris, and cast a lurid light over the thousand
horrors of a French revolution. The New York “Herald” stated, a few weeks
ago, that there were three hundred thousand just such men in the North as
those composing the fire Zouave regiments, and insisted they should be organized
into a “grand army,” to invade the South; and should, in the language of
the Botany Bay Poet,
“Leave their country for their country’s good.”
The sentiment of humanity, which finds
no more capacious dwelling than a Southern heart, demands these Zouaves –
debased, degraded and ungrateful as they are – should be taken care of in
their present condition; but we would respectfully suggest that no such sentiment
requires that our men should be compelled to occupy the same apartment with
them, or what is tantamount to it, adjoining rooms, through the open doors
of which they can hear abuse heaped upon our cause by the representatives
from Blackwell’s Island, the Five Points, and other renowned school from whence
Northern policy draws its deepest inspirations.