Here there appears to have been neither system, nor order, nor humanity.
The chances of recovery were far less than the certainty of death. In
reality, it was almost certain death; for only twenty-four out of the
hundred who entered ever returned to the prison again. Those patients who
possessed sufficient strength helped themselves to what was at hand, and
what was afforded by the meagre dietary; those who had not, folded their
arms and died.
Medical men went through the formality of prescribing for the dying men,
but with formulae whose ingredients were unknown to them.
Some of these surgeons gloated over the distresses of their fellow-men,
and delighted in the awful destruction of life which was branding with
eternal infamy the manhood of their nation.
Others turned and wept, for humanity was not extinct. Those tears have in
part blotted out and redeemed the fearful inscriptions in that record of
the events of life which form the history of the human race.
It is not known that woman ever visited these precincts from feelings of
compassion, and offered to console the last moments of the dying. We do
know that they gazed upon the scene from a distance, but with what emotion
history wisely makes no note.
In Catholic countries we observe the hospitals attended by nuns, sisters
of mercy and charity, all eager to labor in behalf of humanity. Besides
these, the deaconesses of the Rhine and the beguines of Flanders have
acquired an imperishable record in history for their philanthropic
efforts. "There is nothing," says Voltaire, "nobler than the sight of
delicate females sacrificing beauty, youth, often wealth and rank, to
devote themselves to the relief of human miseries under the most revolting
forms." We have seen in our own time, in the hospitals of the Federal
armies, a devoted band of self-sacrificing women striving to perform
their part in the great work of philanthropy. Here woman never appeared.
There were, in reality, only the vivid impressions of horror, complaints,
groans, delirium, and the agony of death.
More than eight thousand of our men perished miserably in this neglected
and iniquitous spot.
Men were seen here in all stages of idiocy and imbecility from the effects
of starvation. They were seen asking for bones to gnaw to relieve the
pangs of hunger. Compassion never will believe that this request was made
by dying mortals, and that too in a hospital, which is regarded among men
as the holy institution of society, and even by infuriated combatants as
the only sacred precinct on the brutal fields of war.
The same wail of distress was heard on the plains of Texas, and along the
military lines of Virginia.
Thus the black flag, threatened by the rebel cabinet, was hoisted. Without
the courage to proclaim their intentions openly and boldly upon the
battle-field, they exhibited them in as sure, but different form, in the
management of their prisons.