Unknown to Unknown

Rev. Col. J. J. GEAR, of the One Hundred and Eighty-third Ohio Volunteers, addressed an appreciative audience, on Wednesday evening, at the Arrorney-street M. E. Church, and narrated many of the hideous experiences of our soldiers while held as prisoners of war by the "Christian gentleman and scholar," Generalissimo ROBERT E. LEE. Many veteran soldiers were present. The speaker, having been introduced by Capt. STEERS, of the Thirteenth Ward Police, said that he had been four years and fourteen days a soldier of the United States, and passed through three rebel penitentiaries, and after having been chained and bayoneted, had attempted escape through a swamp of two hundred and fifty miles, fed by negroes and hunted by bloodhounds, and at length captured and returned to Georgia, there tried and sentenced to death. In the court before which he was arraigned the speaker and his companion, Col. COLLINS, made a clean breast, confessing themselves to be United States soldiers, and bade the rebels do their worst. The prisoners' truthful words won them friends in the court, and pending a decision of their fate, a sanguinary encounter occurred, many rebels urging their immediate execution and many others speaking in their defence, until, when the crowd had tired of fighting, the Sheriff—a humane, and, as has since proved, a loyal man—assumed the responsibility of removing their chains. Col. GEAR and Col. COLLINS subsequently came North with this excellent county official. In the Macon prison, to the floor of which their feet were chained for eighteen days, our dear prodigal brethren of the Southern chivalry fed them by tossing their food in through the iron grating of the door, as though the prisoners had been dogs. At Atlanta, on the very night when Col. GEAR broke from the jail of that town, seven Union prisoners were hanged. When he passed through Richmond, on his way to Libby Prison, just before the Presidential election, the multitudes who were shouting for JEFF. DAVIS said to him: "You'll go home soon, you prison-breaking Methodist preacher, for the North is about to vote with us, and the Northwest will join us outright." The newspapers of the South, wielded by JEFF. DAVIS, had made the people—even many Union prisoners—credit this falsehood; and to our heroes who were languishing in prison the prospect was appalling. The speaker was at Andersonville when 10,000 prisoners were held there, and of the number he counted 287 men who had no feet; and on the Cape Fear River, into a prison in which he was thrust, 555 men out of 5,000 died in one season. He had been asked how it occurred that our soldiers lost their feet. They were left without shelter, and to keep their blood warm were compelled to walk in the sand continually until the blood ceased to circulate in the feet, and they dropped off at the ankle. Forty-five of these men are now on David's Island. The speaker read several affidavits, one of which we quote as follows:

County of Westchester, State of New-York, ss.—JOHN W. JANUARY, a corporal in Company B, of the Fourteenth Illinois Cavalry, being duly sworn, says that he was a prisoner of war at Andersonville, Ga., and Florence, S.C., from about the 1st of August, 1864, to the 1st of March, 1865 . . . that in consequence of exposure and other inhumanities in that prison he lost both of his feet. This deponent further says that shortly after he was put into the stockade at Florence, S.C., he saw one of his fellow-prisoners catch, cook and eat a snake, for want of better food.

The speaker asked who must answer for those atrocities—the poor dirt-eaters and conscripts of the South?—oh, no! But somebody must answer, and the retribution will be terrible, beyond the power of language to describe.