THE RESPONSIBILITY--WHO WAS TO BLAME FOR ALL THE MISERY--AN EXAMINATION
OF THE FLIMSY EXCUSES MADE FOR THE REBELS--ONE DOCUMENT THAT CONVICTS
THEM--WHAT IS DESIRED.
I have endeavored to tell the foregoing story as calmly, as
dispassionately, as free from vituperation and prejudice as possible.
How well I have succeeded the reader must judge. How difficult this
moderation has been at times only those know who, like myself, have
seen, from day to day, the treason-sharpened fangs of Starvation and
Disease gnaw nearer and nearer to the hearts of well-beloved friends
and comrades. Of the sixty-three of my company comrades who entered
prison with me, but eleven, or at most thirteen, emerged alive,
and several of these have since died from the effects of what they
suffered. The mortality in the other companies of our battalion was
equally great, as it was also with the prisoners generally. Not less
than twenty-five thousand gallant, noble-hearted boys died around me
between the dates of my capture and release. Nobler men than they
never died for any cause. For the most part they were simple-minded,
honest-hearted boys; the sterling products of our Northern home-life,
and Northern Common Schools, and that grand stalwart Northern blood,
the yeoman blood of sturdy middle class freemen--the blood of the
race which has conquered on every field since the Roman Empire went
down under its sinewy blows. They prated little of honor, and knew
nothing of “chivalry” except in its repulsive travesty in the South.
As citizens at home, no honest labor had been regarded by them as too
humble to be followed with manly pride in its success; as soldiers
in the field, they did their duty with a calm defiance of danger and
death, that the world has not seen equaled in the six thousand years
that men have followed the trade of war. In the prison their conduct
was marked by the same unostentatious but unflinching heroism. Death
stared them in the face constantly. They could read their own fate in
that of the loathsome, unburied dead all around them. Insolent enemies
mocked their sufferings, and sneered at their devotion to a Government
which they asserted had abandoned them, but the simple faith, the
ingrained honesty of these plain-mannered, plain-spoken boys rose
superior to every trial. Brutus, the noblest Roman of them all, says in
his grandest flight:
Set honor in one eye and death in the other,
And I will look on both indifferently.
They did not say this: they did it. They never questioned their duty; no
repinings, no murmurings against their Government escaped their lips,
they took the dread fortunes brought to them as calmly, as unshrinkingly
as they had those in the field; they quailed not, nor wavered in their
faith before the worst the Rebels could do. The finest epitaph ever
inscribed above a soldier’s grave was that graven on the stone which
marked the resting-place of the deathless three hundred who fell at
Thermopylae:
Go, stranger, to Lacedaemon,--
And tell Sparta that we lie here in obedience to her laws.
They who lie in the shallow graves of Andersonville, Belle Isle,
Florence and Salisbury, lie there in obedience to the precepts
and maxims inculcated into their minds in the churches and Common
Schools of the North; precepts which impressed upon them the duty of
manliness and honor in all the relations and exigencies of life; not
the “chivalric” prate of their enemies, but the calm steadfastness
which endureth to the end. The highest tribute that can be paid them
is to say they did full credit to their teachings, and they died as
every American should when duty bids him. No richer heritage was ever
bequeathed to posterity.
It was in the year 1864, and the first three months of 1865 that these
twenty-five thousand youths mere cruelly and needlessly done to death.
In these fatal fifteen months more young men than to-day form the
pride, the hope, and the vigor of any one of our leading Cities, more
than at the beginning of the war were found in either of several States
in the Nation, were sent to their graves, “unknelled, uncoffined,
and unknown,” victims of the most barbarous and unnecessary cruelty
recorded since the Dark Ages. Barbarous, because the wit of man has not
yet devised a more savage method of destroying fellow-beings than by
exposure and starvation; unnecessary, because the destruction of these
had not, and could not have the slightest effect upon the result of the
struggle. The Rebel leaders have acknowledged that they knew the fate
of the Confederacy was sealed when the campaign of 1864 opened with the
North displaying an unflinching determination to prosecute the war to
a successful conclusion. All that they could hope for after that was
some fortuitous accident, or unexpected foreign recognition that would
give them peace with victory. The prisoners were non-important factors
in the military problem. Had they all been turned loose as soon as
captured, their efforts would not have hastened the Confederacy’s fate
a single day.
As to the responsibility for this monstrous cataclysm of human misery
and death: That the great mass of the Southern people approved of these
outrages, or even knew of them, I do not, for an instant, believe.
They are as little capable of countenancing such a thing as any people
in the world. But the crowning blemish of Southern society has ever
been the dumb acquiescence of the many respectable, well-disposed,
right-thinking people in the acts of the turbulent and unscrupulous
few. From this direful spring has flowed an Iliad of unnumbered woes,
not only to that section but to our common country. It was this that
kept the South vibrating between patriotism and treason during the
revolution, so that it cost more lives and treasure to maintain the
struggle there than in all the rest of the country. It was this that
threatened the dismemberment of the Union in 1832. It was this that
aggravated and envenomed every wrong growing out of Slavery; that
outraged liberty, debauched citizenship, plundered the mails, gagged
the press, stiffled speech, made opinion a crime, polluted the free
soil of God with the unwilling step of the bondman, and at last crowned
three-quarters of a century of this unparalleled iniquity by dragging
eleven millions of people into a war from which their souls revolted,
and against which they had declared by overwhelming majorities in
every State except South Carolina, where the people had no voice. It
may puzzle some to understand how a relatively small band of political
desperados in each State could accomplish such a momentous wrong;
that they did do it, no one conversant with our history will deny,
and that they--insignificant as they were in numbers, in abilities,
in character, in everything save capacity and indomitable energy in
mischief--could achieve such gigantic wrongs in direct opposition to
the better sense of their communities is a fearful demonstration of the
defects of the constitution of Southern society.
Men capable of doing all that the Secession leaders were guilty
of--both before and during the war--were quite capable of revengefully
destroying twenty-five thousand of their enemies by the most hideous
means at their command. That they did so set about destroying
their enemies, wilfully, maliciously, and with malice prepense and
aforethought, is susceptible of proof as conclusive as that which in a
criminal court sends murderers to the gallows.
Let us examine some of these proofs:
1. The terrible mortality at Andersonville and elsewhere was a matter
of as much notoriety throughout the Southern Confederacy as the
military operations of Lee and Johnson. No intelligent man--much less
the Rebel leaders--was ignorant of it nor of its calamitous proportions.
2. Had the Rebel leaders within a reasonable time after this matter
became notorious made some show of inquiring into and alleviating
the deadly misery, there might be some excuse for them on the
ground of lack of information, and the plea that they did as well
as they could would have some validity. But this state of affairs
was allowed to continue over a year--in fact until the downfall of
the Confederacy--without a hand being raised to mitigate the horrors
of those places--without even an inquiry being made as to whether
they were mitigable or not. Still worse: every month saw the horrors
thicken, and the condition of the prisoners become more wretched.
The suffering in May, 1864, was more terrible than in April; June
showed a frightful increase over May, while words fail to paint the
horrors of July and August, and so the wretchedness waxed until the
end, in April, 1865.
3. The main causes of suffering and death were so obviously preventible
that the Rebel leaders could not have been ignorant of the ease with
which a remedy could be applied. These main causes were three in number:
a. Improper and insufficient food. b. Unheard-of crowding together. c.
Utter lack of shelter.
It is difficult to say which of these three was the most deadly. Let us
admit, for the sake of argument, that it was impossible for the Rebels
to supply sufficient and proper food. This admission, I know, will not
stand for an instant in the face of the revelations made by Sherman’s
March to the Sea; and through the Carolinas, but let that pass, that we
may consider more easily demonstrable facts connected with the next two
propositions, the first of which is as to the crowding together. Was
land so scarce in the Southern Confederacy that no more than sixteen
acres could be spared for the use of thirty-five thousand prisoners?
The State of Georgia has a population of less than one-sixth that of
New York, scattered over a territory one-quarter greater than that
State’s, and yet a pitiful little tract--less than the corn-patch
“clearing” of the laziest “cracker” in the State--was all that could
be allotted to the use of three-and-a-half times ten thousand young
men! The average population of the State does not exceed sixteen to
the square mile, yet Andersonville was peopled at the rate of one
million four hundred thousand to the square mile. With millions of
acres of unsettled, useless, worthless pine barrens all around them,
the prisoners were wedged together so closely that there was scarcely
room to lie down at night, and a few had space enough to have served as
a grave. This, too, in a country where the land was of so little worth
that much of it had never been entered from the Government.
Then, as to shelter and fire: Each of the prisons was situated in the
heart of a primeval forest, from which the first trees that had ever
been cut were those used in building the pens. Within a gun-shot of
the perishing men was an abundance of lumber and wood to have built
every man in prison a warm, comfortable hut, and enough fuel to supply
all his wants. Supposing even, that the Rebels did not have the labor
at hand to convert these forests into building material and fuel, the
prisoners themselves would have gladly undertaken the work, as a means
of promoting their own comfort, and for occupation and exercise. No
tools would have been too poor and clumsy for them to work with. When
logs were occasionally found or brought into prison, men tore them to
pieces almost with their naked fingers. Every prisoner will bear me out
in the assertion that there was probably not a root as large as a bit
of clothes-line in all the ground covered by the prisons, that eluded
the faithfully eager search of freezing men for fuel. What else than
deliberate design can account for this systematic withholding from the
prisoners of that which was so essential to their existence, and which
it was so easy to give them?
This much for the circumstantial evidence connecting the Rebel
authorities with the premeditated plan for destroying the prisoners.
Let us examine the direct evidence:
The first feature is the assignment to the command of the prisons of
“General” John H. Winder, the confidential friend of Mr. Jefferson
Davis, and a man so unscrupulous, cruel and bloody-thirsty that at
the time of his appointment he was the most hated and feared man in
the Southern Confederacy. His odious administration of the odious
office of Provost Marshal General showed him to be fittest of tools
for their purpose. Their selection--considering the end in view, was
eminently wise. Baron Haynau was made eternally infamous by a fraction
of the wanton cruelties which load the memory of Winder. But it can be
said in extenuation of Haynau’s offenses that he was a brave, skilful
and energetic soldier, who overthrew on the field the enemies he
maltreated. If Winder, at any time during the war, was nearer the front
than Richmond, history does not mention it. Haynau was the bastard son
of a German Elector and of the daughter of a village, druggist. Winder
was the son of a sham aristocrat, whose cowardice and incompetence in
the war of 1812 gave Washington into the hands of the British ravagers.
It is sufficient indication of this man’s character that he could look
unmoved upon the terrible suffering that prevailed in Andersonville in
June, July, and August; that he could see three thousand men die each
month in the most horrible manner, without lifting a finger in any way
to assist them; that he could call attention in a self-boastful way
to the fact that “I am killing off more Yankees than twenty regiments
in Lee’s Army,” and that he could respond to the suggestions of the
horror-struck visiting Inspector that the prisoners be given at least
more room, with the assertion that he intended to leave matters just
as they were--the operations of death would soon thin out the crowd so
that the survivors would have sufficient room.
It was Winder who issued this order to the Commander of the Artillery:
ORDER No. 13.
HEADQUARTERS MILITARY PRISON,
ANDERSONVILLE, Ga., July 27, 1864.
The officers on duty and in charge of the Battery of Florida Artillery
at the time will, upon receiving notice that the enemy has approached
within seven miles of this post, open upon the Stockade with grapeshot,
without reference to the situation beyond these lines of defense.
JOHN H. WINDER,
Brigadier General Commanding.
Diabolical is the only word that will come at all near fitly
characterizing such an infamous order. What must have been the nature
of a man who would calmly order twenty-five guns to be opened with
grape and canister at two hundred yards range, upon a mass of thirty
thousand prisoners, mostly sick and dying! All this, rather than
suffer them to be rescued by their friends. Can there be any terms of
reprobation sufficiently strong to properly denounce so malignant a
monster? History has no parallel to him, save among the blood-reveling
kings of Dahomey, or those sanguinary Asiatic chieftains who built
pyramids of human skulls, and paved roads with men’s bones. How a man
bred an American came to display such a Timour-like thirst for human
life, such an Oriental contempt for the sufferings of others, is one of
the mysteries that perplexes me the more I study it.
If the Rebel leaders who appointed this man, to whom he reported
direct, without intervention of superior officers, and who were fully
informed of all his acts through other sources than himself, were not
responsible for him, who in Heaven’s name was? How can there be a
possibility that they were not cognizant and approving of his acts?
The Rebels have attempted but one defense to the terrible charges
against them, and that is, that our Government persistently refused
to exchange, preferring to let its men rot in prison, to yielding up
the Rebels it held. This is so utterly false as to be absurd. Our
Government made overture after overture for exchange to the Rebels,
and offered to yield many of the points of difference. But it could
not, with the least consideration for its own honor, yield up the
negro soldiers and their officers to the unrestrained brutality of the
Rebel authorities, nor could it, consistent with military prudence,
parole the one hundred thousand well-fed, well-clothed, able-bodied
Rebels held by it as prisoners, and let them appear inside of a week in
front of Grant or Sherman. Until it would agree to do this the Rebels
would not agree to exchange, and the only motive--save revenge--which
could have inspired the Rebel maltreatment of the prisoners, was the
expectation of raising such a clamor in the North as would force the
Government to consent to a disadvantageous exchange, and to give back
to the Confederacy, at its most critical period one hundred thousand
fresh, able-bodied soldiers. It was for this purpose, probably, that
our Government and the Sanitary Commission were refused all permission
to send us food and clothing. For my part, and I know I echo the
feelings of ninety-nine out of every hundred of my comrades, I would
rather have staid in prison till I rotted, than that our Government
should have yielded to the degrading demands of insolent Rebels.
There is one document in the possession of the Government which seems
to me to be unanswerable proof, both of the settled policy of the
Richmond Government towards the Union prisoners, and of the relative
merits of Northern and Southern treatment of captives. The document is
a letter reading as follows:
CITY POINT, Va., March 17, 1863.
SIR:--A flag-of-truce boat has arrived with three hundred and fifty
political prisoners, General Barrow and several other prominent men
among them.
I wish you to send me on four o’clock Wednesday morning, all the
military prisoners (except officers), and all the political prisoners
you have. If any of the political prisoners have on hand proof enough
to convict them of being spies, or of having committed other offenses
which should subject them to punishment, so state opposite their names.
Also, state whether you think, under all the circumstances, they should
be released. The arrangement I have made works largely in our favor. WE
GET RID OF A SET OF MISERABLE WRETCHES, AND RECEIVE SOME OF THE BEST
MATERIAL I EVER SAW.
Tell Captain Turner to put down on the list of political prisoners the
names of Edward P. Eggling, and Eugenia Hammermister. The President is
anxious that they should get off. They are here now. This, of course,
is between ourselves. If you have any political prisoners whom you can
send off safely to keep her company, I would like you to send her.
Two hundred and odd more political prisoners are on their way.
I would be more full in my communication if I had time. Yours truly,
ROBERT OULD, Commissioner of Exchange.
To Brigadier general John H. Winder.
But, supposing that our Government, for good military reasons, or for
no reason at all, declined to exchange prisoners, what possible excuse
is that for slaughtering them by exquisite tortures? Every Government
has ap unquestioned right to decline exchanging when its military
policy suggests such a course; and such declination conveys no right
whatever to the enemy to slay those prisoners, either outright with the
edge of the sword, or more slowly by inhuman treatment. The Rebels’
attempts to justify their conduct, by the claim that our Government
refused to accede to their wishes in a certain respect, is too
preposterous to be made or listened to by intelligent men.
The whole affair is simply inexcusable, and stands out a foul blot on
the memory of every Rebel in high place in the Confederate Government.
“Vengeance is mine,” saith the Lord, and by Him must this great crime
be avenged, if it ever is avenged. It certainly transcends all human
power. I have seen little indication of any Divine interposition
to mete out, at least on this earth, adequate punishment to those
who were the principal agents in that iniquity. Howell Cobb died as
peacefully in his bed as any Christian in the land, and with as few
apparent twinges of remorse as if he had spent his life in good deeds
and prayer. The arch-fiend Winder died in equal tranquility, murmuring
some cheerful hope as to his soul’s future. Not one of the ghosts of
his hunger-slain hovered around to embitter his dying moments, as he
had theirs. Jefferson Davis “still lives, a prosperous gentleman,”
the idol of a large circle of adherents, the recipient of real estate
favors from elderly females of morbid sympathies, and a man whose mouth
is full of plaints of his wrongs, and misappreciation. The rest of the
leading conspirators have either departed this life in the odor of
sanctity, surrounded by sorrowing friends, or are gliding serenely down
the mellow autumnal vale of a benign old age.
Only Wirz--small, insignificant, miserable Wirz, the underling, the
tool, the servile, brainless, little fetcher-and-carrier of these men,
was punished--was hanged, and upon the narrow shoulders of this pitiful
scapegoat was packed the entire sin of Jefferson Davis and his crew.
What a farce!
A petty little Captain made to expiate the crimes of Generals, Cabinet
Officers, and a President. How absurd!
But I do not ask for vengeance. I do not ask for retribution for one
of those thousands of dead comrades, the glitter of whose sightless
eyes will follow me through life. I do not desire even justice on the
still living authors and accomplices in the deep damnation of their
taking off. I simply ask that the great sacrifices of my dead comrades
shall not be suffered to pass unregarded to irrevocable oblivion;
that the example of their heroic self-abnegation shall not be lost,
but the lesson it teaches be preserved and inculcated into the minds
of their fellow-countrymen, that future generations may profit by it,
and others be as ready to die for right and honor and good government
as they were. And it seems to me that if we are to appreciate their
virtues, we must loathe and hold up to opprobrium those evil men whose
malignity made all their sacrifices necessary. I cannot understand what
good self-sacrifice and heroic example are to serve in this world, if
they are to be followed by such a maudlin confusion of ideas as now
threatens to obliterate all distinction between the men who fought and
died for the Right and those who resisted them for the Wrong.