Semi-Weekly Dispatch

The joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, have made a report in regard to the barbarous treatment by the Rebels, at Manassas, of the remains of officers of the United States Army, killed in the battle there.

They examined a number of witnesses whose testimony is submitted. The facts disclosed are of a repulsive, shocking and painful character. The Committee say, in conclusion:

"The members of your Committee might content themselves by leaving this testimony to the Senate and the people without a word of comment; but when the enemies of a just and generous Government are attempting to excite the sympathy of disloyal men in our own country and to solicit the aid of Foreign Governments by the grossest misrepresentations of the objects of the war and of the Republic, this, the most startling evidence of their insincerity and inhumanity, deserves some notice at our hands.

"History will be examined in vain for a parallel to this rebellion against a good Government--long prepared for by ambitious men, who were made doubly confident of success by the aid and counsel of former Administrations, and the belief that their plans were unobserved by a magnanimous people.

"They precipitated the war at a moment when the General Administration had jut been changed, under circumstances of astounding perfidy, without a single reasonable ground of complaint, and in the face of repeated manifestations of moderation and peace on the part of the President and his family, they took up arms and declared that they would never surrender until their rebellion had been recognized, or the institution established by our fathers had been destroyed. The people of the loyal States, at last convinced that they could preserve their liberties only by an appeal to the God of battles, rushed to the standard of the Republic in response to the call of the Chief Magistrate.

"Every step of this monstrous treason has been marked by violence and crime. No transgression has been too great and no wrong too startling for its leaders. They disregarded the sanctity of the oaths they had taken to support the Constitution; they repudiated all their obligations to the people of the free States; they deceived and betrayed their own fellow citizens and crowded their armies with forced levies and they drove from their midst all who would not yield to their despotism, and filled their prisons with men who would not enlist under their flag. They have now crowned the rebellion by the perpetration of deeds scarcely known even to savage warfare.

"The investigations of your committee have established this fact beyond controversy. The witnesses called before us, were men of undoubted veracity and character. Some of the men occupy high positions in the army, and others high positions in civil life. Differing in political sentiments, their evidence presents a remarkable concurrence of opinion and of judgment.

"Our fellow-countrymen, heretofore sufficiently impressed by the generosity and forbearance of the Government of the United States, and by the barbarous character of the crusade against it, will be shocked by the statements of these unimpeached and unimpeachable witnesses, and foreign nations must, with one accord, however they have hesitated heretofore, consign to lasting odium the authors of crimes which, in all their details, exceed the worst excesses of the Sepoys of India."

In a letter from Camp Shiloh, or Pittsburg Landing, a correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, under date of April 24th, writes:

General Halleck is evidently determined not to let the grass grow under his feet.--This morning being the first day since the rains that it was possible to move artillery upon these execrable roads, he ordered a reconnoissance [sic] in force of the enemy's position on the road to Corinth. Early in the morning a portion of the division of Gen. Johnson and Col. Stumbaugh, the batteries of Capts. Terrell, Muchler, Goodspeed, and of Company H, Fifth regiment regular army, took up their line of march on the Corinth road, with three days' rations in their haversacks. The cavalry consisted of the Fourth Illinois, Col. Dickey, Second Kentucky, Third Kentucky, and Second Indiana, and a few companies of regulars, under the command of Major King. The Thirty-fifth Ohio and the Sixteenth Regular Infantry also accompanied the pieces.

I recognized as part of Gen. M'Cook's division the Thirty-second and Thirty-sixth Indiana, the Fifteenth and Forty-ninth Ohio, Seventy-seventh Pennsylvania, Thirtieth and Thirty-ninth Indiana, Thirty-fourth Illinois, and Seventy-sixth Ohio, with a battery.--Among the guns were five or six twenty-pound Parrotts and several Napoleons. The whole was under the command of Andrew Jackson Smith, General of Division, a very excellent officer, as I learn from old United States army men.

About nine miles from the landing, the force came upon and surprised a regiment or two of rebel infantry encamped in front of Pea Ridge, near the town or hamlet of Monterey. The rebels at first formed in line of battle, and delivered a volley, but fled immediately, many of them throwing away their arms. A number of them occupied a log-house, from which they also fired upon our men.

The nature of the country--it being pretty thickly wooded--prevented our troops forming in line, and they moved by the flank, in columns of four deep. The column was led by a regiment of regulars, which had been in the late action, but is mostly composed of recruits. It was found, I heard from an officer friend, impossible at first to bring these men under fire, and the Eighth Missouri, Colonel Peckham, being ordered to the front, passed by them at the charge, and soon took posession [sic] of the log-house and camp of the enemy.

In the meantime a force had been detailed to make a reconnoissance [sic] on the Purdy road. It was under the command of Col. Wood, the acting brigadier in Wallace's division. Of this force I have as yet nothing definite, but last night heard heavy firing to the front evidently artillery, and this morning, at day light Company A, Chicago Light Artillery, Lieut. Wood commanding, were ordered out with two days rations, so that some sharp work is in progress.

The report of the joint Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War, exposing the atrocities perpetrated upon the Union prisoners, and our wounded and dead, is destined to create a strong and indignant feeling in every part of the civilized world.

The witnesses examined by the Committee were men of undoubted character and truthfulness. They testify with one accord that the traitors were animated by the most savage and fiendish motives. As an evidence of the atrocity that characterized the rebel soldiery during and after the battle of Bull Run, it was in evidence before the Committee, that the wounded Union soldiers were bayoneted while lying on the field; that, in many instances, they were stripped entirely naked and buried with their faces downward, as an indignity; that their remains were exhumed from the grave, their bones taken by the Southern Slave-drivers and Sepoys as trophies, to be exhibited as evidences of their valor and heroism.

In dwelling upon these revolting exposures, says "Occasional," the Washington correspondent of the Press, the question is irresistibly presented whether a rebellion thus disgraced by inhumanity and crime deserves the countenance, much less the sympathy, of the people of the loyal States. Our brave countrymen who have gone forth to defend our imperilled [sic] Constitution, and whose arms are blessed by the prayers of their mothers and daughters and sisters at home, and who proclaim as they advance into the seceded territory, that their motto is restoration an not revenge, are subjected to treatment from which the roving Bedouin and the fiery Cossack would shrink with terror. The descriptions of cannibal warfare seem to have been the model of the slaveholding barbarians. When we contrast the forbearance of the Government, its charity, its generosity, its humanity in the reception and care of the rebel prisoners, with the mutilation of our wounded and the desecration of our dead, with the insults and ignominy heaped upon all who fell into hands of the leaders of this great treason; when we dwell upon the indiscriminate barbarities upon the armed and the unarmed, the old and the young, the unprotected and fugitive mother and her little children, we may well appeal to civilization and Christianity to judge between us and our infuriated adversaries. The Northern man who will not see in this contrast an invocation to patriotic action, a stimulant to forego all respect for the assassins and murderers who sustain the cause of the rebellion, should be marked with the scorn and detestation of his race. What? Constitutional rights for such as these? Who will ask it? Who will now contend that the authors of these crimes shall not be punished, that their worthless lives shall not answer to the stern behests of justice, and their estates shall not be confiscated? What party will dare to refuse to denounce them?

It is stated positively, says the Philadelphia Bulletin, in letters from Washington, that the Secretary of War has fully determined to have "contrabands" uniformed, armed and equipped at the forts captured on our Southern coast. The orders have been issued for the requisite supply of arms and uniforms. The Zouave style of dress has been selected, with braided jackets and baggy red trousers.

We have no idea that these blacks would ever make good soldiers in the field. But for garrison duty, with a proper proportion of well-trained white officers, they may be very serviceable. They are peculiarly well fitted for summer service at those localities in the South where the health of unacclimated whites is likely to suffer. Doubtless, with the taste for finery that characterizes the Africans, they will be very proud of their uniforms, and the pleasure of wearing them will excite their ambition to make good soldiers. The determination of the Secretary of War to employ the contrabands in this way will meet with general approval from the people.