To form an idea of the awful mortality which reigned here, let us review
the records of the hospital prisons, and the casualties of armies of
foreign as well as our own country. These comparisons must, however, be
received with much allowance, for the circumstances which led to death are
very different.
* * * * *
In the prisons of Switzerland, before they were improved, the mortality
was 25 to 35 per 1000. In the county jails of England it is reckoned at 10
per 1000; in the terrible hulks (Les Bagnes) of France it is 39 to 55 per
1000, including epidemics of cholera.
The average mortality of the London hospitals, where only the severer
cases of disease and accident are received and treated, is nine per cent.
In the hospitals of Dublin it is less than 5 per cent.; in the civil
hospitals of France it is from 5 to 9 per cent.; in the military hospitals
of the same country it is much less; at Val de Grace it was 4 per cent.
for a period of forty years; at Vincennes it was 2 per cent. for a long
period; at the Gros Caillou, for a term of eleven years, it was less than
3 per cent. out of 55,000 patients.
The mortality at Moyamensing Prison for many years was 1 per cent., and in
the New York Penitentiary less than that for seven years. The average
deaths in the prisons of Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, and Maryland,
was about 2 per cent. The death-rate of the rebels confined in our
military prisons was small, comparatively: at Fort Delaware it was 2 per
cent, for eleven months; at Johnson's Island it was 2 per cent., or 134
deaths out of 6000 prisoners, for the period of twenty-one months.
The loss at the rebel prison at Elmira is not known for the entire term;
but it was much less than the rebel "Vinculis" desires to make it.
His own statements make but 4 per cent. during the worst month for
instance: "Now out of less than nine thousand five hundred prisoners on
the first of September, 386 died that month."
"At Andersonville the mortality averaged 1000 per month out of 36,000
prisoners, 1/36. At Elmira it was 386 per month, out of 9500, or 1/25 of
the whole. At Elmira it was 4 per cent.; at Andersonville less than 3 per
cent.
"If the mortality at Andersonville had been as great as at Elmira, the
deaths should have been fourteen hundred and forty per month, or fifty per
cent. more than they were."
The official records of Andersonville show that Vinculis is greatly in
error; for, instead of fourteen hundred and forty, the great number he
imagines, they were even more; for the figures show two thousand six
hundred and seventy-eight for September, or more than fifteen per cent.,
and in October fifteen hundred and ninety-five, or more than twenty-seven
per cent., and in the month of August three thousand men died, and on the
twenty-third of that month one hundred and twenty-seven perished, or one
every eleven minutes out of the number present.