With us, you have
forfeited all pretensions to reputation, and it is only by holding you
like a wild beast, afraid of your keepers, that you can be made
manageable. But to return to the point in question.
Though I can think no man innocent who has lent his hand to
destroy the country which he did not plant, and to ruin those that
he could not enslave, yet, abstracted from all ideas of right and
wrong on the original question, Captain Asgill, in the present case,
is not the guilty man. The villain and the victim are here separated
characters. You hold the one and we the other. You disown, or affect
to disown and reprobate the conduct of Lippincut, yet you give him a
sanctuary; and by so doing you as effectually become the executioner
of Asgill, as if you had put the rope on his neck, and dismissed him
from the world. Whatever your feelings on this interesting occasion
may be are best known to yourself. Within the grave of your own mind
lies buried the fate of Asgill. He becomes the corpse of your will, or
the survivor of your justice. Deliver up the one, and you save the
other; withhold the one, and the other dies by your choice.
On our part the case is exceeding plain; an officer has been taken
from his confinement and murdered, and the murderer is within your
lines. Your army has been guilty of a thousand instances of equal
cruelty, but they have been rendered equivocal, and sheltered from
personal detection. Here the crime is fixed; and is one of those
extraordinary cases which can neither be denied nor palliated, and
to which the custom of war does not apply; for it never could be
supposed that such a brutal outrage would ever be committed.
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