The releas'd prisoners of war are now coming up from the southern
prisons. I have seen a number of them. The sight is worse than any sight
of battle-fields, or any collection of wounded, even the bloodiest.
There was, (as a sample,) one large boat load, of several hundreds,
brought about the 25th, to Annapolis; and out of the whole number only
three individuals were able to walk from the boat. The rest were carried
ashore and laid down in one place or another. Can those be _men_--those
little livid brown, ash-streak'd, monkey-looking dwarfs?--are they
really not mummied, dwindled corpses? They lay there, most of them,
quite still, but with a horrible look in their eyes and skinny lips
(often with not enough flesh on the lips to cover their teeth.) Probably
no more appalling sight was ever seen on this earth. (There are deeds,
crimes, that may be forgiven; but this is not among them. It steeps its
perpetrators in blackest, escapeless, endless damnation. Over 50,000
have been compell' d to die the death of starvation--reader, did
you ever try to realize what _starvation_ actually is?--in those
prisons--and in a land of plenty.) An indescribable meanness, tyranny,
aggravating course of insults, almost incredible--was evidently the rule
of treatment through all the southern military prisons. The dead there
are not to be pitied as much as some of the living that come from
there--if they can be call' d living--many of them are mentally
imbecile, and will never recuperate.[8]
Note:
[8] _From a review of_ "ANDERSONVILLE, A STORY OF SOUTHERN MILTTARY
PRISONS," _published serially in the Toledo "Blade" in 1879, and
afterwards in book form_.
"There is a deep fascination in the subject of Andersonville--for that
Golgotha, in which lie the whitening bones of 13,000 gallant young
men, represents the dearest and costliest sacrifice of the war for the
preservation of our national unity. It is a type, too, of its class. Its
more than hundred hecatombs of dead represent several times that number
of their brethren, for whom the prison gates of Belle Isle, Danville,
Salisbury, Florence, Columbia, and Cahaba open'd only in eternity. There
are few families in the North who have not at least one dear relative or
friend among these 60,000 whose sad fortune it was to end their service
for the Union by lying down and dying for it in a southern prison pen.
The manner of their death, the horrors that cluster'd thickly around
every moment of their existence, the loyal, unfaltering steadfastness
with which they endured all that fate had brought them, has never been
adequately told. It was not with them as with their comrades in the
field, whose every act was perform'd in the presence of those whose duty
it was to observe such matters and report them to the world. Hidden from
the view of their friends in the north by the impenetrable veil
which the military operations of the rebels drew around the so-called
confederacy, the people knew next to nothing of their career or their
sufferings. Thousands died there less heeded even than the hundreds
who perish'd on the battlefield. Grant did not lose as many men kill'd
outright, in the terrible campaign from the Wilderness to the James
river--43 days of desperate fighting--as died in July and August at
Andersonville. Nearly twice as many died in that prison as fell from the
day that Grant cross'd the Rapidan, till he settled down in the trenches
before Petersburg. More than four times as many Union dead lie under
the solemn soughing pines about that forlorn little village in southern
Georgia, than mark the course of Sherman from Chattanooga to Atlanta.
The nation stands aghast at the expenditure of life which attended the
two bloody campaigns of 1864, which virtually crush'd the confederacy,
but no one remembers that more Union soldiers died in the rear of the
rebel lines than were kill'd in the front of them. The great military
events which stamp'd out the rebellion drew attention away from the sad
drama which starvation and disease play'd in those gloomy pens in the
far recesses of sombre southern forests."
_From a letter of "Johnny Bouquet," in N. Y. "Tribune," March 27, '81._
"I visited at Salisbury, N. C., the prison pen or the site of it, from
which nearly 11,000 victims of southern politicians were buried, being
confined in a pen without shelter, exposed to all the elements could do,
to all the disease herding animals together could create, and to all
the starvation and cruelty an incompetent and intense caitiff government
could accomplish. From the conversation and almost from the recollection
of the northern people this place has dropp' d, but not so in the gossip
of the Salisbury people, nearly all of whom say that the half was
never told; that such was the nature of habitual outrage here that when
Federal prisoners escaped the townspeople harbor'd them in their barns,
afraid the vengeance of God would fall on them, to deliver even their
enemies back to such cruelty. Said one old man at the Boyden House, who
join'd in the conversation one evening: 'There were often men buried out
of that prison pen still alive. I have the testimony of a surgeon that
he had seen them pull'd out of the dead cart with their eyes open and
taking notice, but too weak to lift a finger. There was not the least
excuse for such treatment, as the confederate government had seized
every sawmill in the region, and could just as well have put up shelter
for these prisoners as not, wood being plentiful here. It will be hard
to make any honest man in Salisbury say that there was the slightest
necessity for those prisoners having to live in old tents, caves
and holes half-full of water. Representations were made to the Davis
government against the officers in charge of it, but no attention
was paid to them. Promotion was the punishment for cruelty there. The
inmates were skeletons. Hell could have no terrors for any man who died
there, except the inhuman keepers.'"