waste indignation on this point as a part of the system, it is well to bear in mind that most of these cooks were our own men detailed for that duty. In their dearth of men the Confederates furnished only the scanty guard, never more than 1,500 in number. Prisoners did nearly all the work of the place. The fouling of the stream was, of course, mere shiftlessness, which under such circumstances could slay its tens of thousands while design was slaying its thousands.

The abuse of prisoners by their fellow prisoners however, needs separate discussion. In this place it is important to notice that they were not entirely dependent upon this stream for drinking water. All the narratives speak of wells in the pen, giving their number variously from fifty to two hundred, some of which yielded the purest and sweetest water. We ought to append this item to the following passage of Report No. 45: "Among the sufferings and agonies of the rebel prison-house there is hardly one that cannot be traced to the want of the necessary supply of water."

There are two points, however, in regard to the construction of the prison, in which the defense, at first sight, appears to have no case at all. The order, above referred to, prescribed shade-trees; and, in the clause "in the neighborhood of grist and saw-mills," unquestionably implied barracks. The presence of the one might have excused the absence of the other, but a thick forest on the place of the enclosure was cut down, and no barracks were built. The cutting down of the trees was accompanied by a circumstance which has given it the appearance of deliberate wickedness. Captain Winder, entrusted by his father, General Winder, with the laying out of the ground, was remonstrated with for cutting them down; but replied "I'm building a pen here that will kill more damned Yankees than can be destroyed at the front."*

Even this action and speech, however, can hardly be made to prove a deliberate purpose on the part of the Confederate Government, without assuming more than we have a right to assume about the source from which Captain Winder drew his inspiration.

This speech and the heated words of the Richmond Examiner

* Ambrose Spencer, witness on the trial of Captain Wirz.

of Oct. 30, 1863, so often quoted: "Let the Yankee prisoners be put where the cold weather and scanty fare will thin them out in accordance with the laws of nature," like so many similar expressions uttered on both sides, would have passed to the breezes, had not results tallied so fearfully with them. It is perhaps fortunate for us that all the hard proposals made by our officers for the treatment of Confederate prisoners have never been catalogued. But the bare facts carry with them. proof of at least criminal neglect. If the Confederate Government intended barracks and shade trees, a court martial of Captain Winder was the only clear course to prove such intention. The high officials of the Confederacy evince too much interested ignorance in this whole matter of the treatment of prisoners. General Lee testified before the Congressional Reconstruction Committee, that he was, till after the war, ignorant of who was in command at Andersonville. A place to which 45,000 prisoners were sent should have been well known to him. Such ignorance is a spot upon his noble character.

It is not improbable that the real reason for failure to provide barracks and leave the trees, though not urged with any force. by the Southern writers, was that General Winder believed that a clear open pen, allowing an unobstructed range for musketry and artillery was the easiest arrangement for keeping a mass of prisoners safely with a scanty guard. Tents, of course, were out of the question, for it is a well attested fact that in the last two years of the war there was not a tent in Lee's army except such as were captured from us.

Southern writers have generally chosen to assume that it was the intention of the officials to allow the prisoners to provide themselves with barracks, and point to the fact that they were allowed to do so at Millen. They allege that, at Andersonville and Florence, when prisoners went outside under a pledge not to escape they broke that pledge, and in many cases succeeded in escaping. Perhaps these prisoners were incapable of following the distinction of the law, by which they were required under ordinary circumstances to escape if they could, but to observe any pledge given for the sake of obtaining special privileges. The stoppage of fuel certainly may be attributed. to this breaking of pledges. And it is not impossible that the

But if we

loss of barracks may be ascribed to the same cause. make the very most of the depriving the prisoners of shelter, it constitutes a crime of the second magnitude rather than the first. Two thirds of them provided themselves with some sort of shelter, fully as good as that of the Confederate soldiers in the field. Living in the open air would even have some advan. tages, in hot weather, over living in crowded and improperly policed barracks.

There was some excelBut, then, even the vile may not be methodical

But the crime of the first magnitude of which the South is accused is deliberate starvation. It will not do to disparage the testimony of the Andersonville prisoners because they were all enlisted men, and no officers. lent material in our rank and file. man knows when he suffers. He enough to give you a correct account of the ounces of bread and meat served out to him, but he feels and recognizes the death grip of starvation. A fair method would be to accept the story as well authenticated in all its essential parts, not losing sight, however, of the tendency of the average man to magnify his discomforts. Possibly the common soldier will bear to be reminded that cursing the commissary was a rather popular sin in our service. But, if we accept, as undoubted truth, that most of the men at Andersonville were continually hungry, that many were actually reduced to the eating of offal, and that hundreds died of starvation, it is still an open question whether all this was a part of a plan. It is no insult to the prisoners to tell them that their impressions will not settle that question. It is a matter for careful study; and the prisoners are here in the position of some Italian, born and bred under the shadow of the Pantheon, who finds his impressions of his native city corrected by some little blear-eyed German professor, who has never seen Rome, nor traveled ten miles from his native village. Study of the question does not mean a discussion as to how the ounces and fractions of ounces of bread and meat doled out to the prisoners coincided with the ounces and fractions of ounces absolutely required to sustain life, but rather a close attention to certain facts, alluded to, indeed, in prisoners' narratives, but never allowed their proper weight. One of these facts, which points like a guide post to

an important conclusion, is that great piles of corn bread, thrown away by the prisoners, lay moulding within the stockade. The conclusion, then, must be that it was corn bread, and not the lack of it, that was the cause of death. Upon this corn bread the Confederate soldiers lived and thrived. Our men in the field were exceedingly glad to get hold of a haversack of it, and made lively exchanges of wheat bread for it on the picket lines. But when they were kept on it for weeks, their stomachs refused to digest it, and hence came starvation, with diarrhoea and scurvy standing at the head of the list of diseases causing the greatest mortality. Now, before we charge the Confederate authorities with malignity in continuing this diet we must remember that the supply of flour was in 1864 practically cut off in the South. Wheat was becoming very scarce. The starving-out process was a part of our plan, and it was now working most effectively. Sherman was striking the belt of supplies and every time he burned a flour mill, he was fast reducing the minimum of flour to zero. The Confederate armies certainly had no flour.

Surgeon Jones, of the Confederate Army, whose visit to Andersonville made such a stir, in a report to the Confederate Surgeon General, speaks of the Confederate armies being on quarter rations as a fact too well-known to need mentioning. The Confederate General Heth makes the following state

ment:

"If the soldiers last winter under my command had been in prison, and had been restricted to the rations allowed them, they would have been found miserably insufficient. Some days they had no meat; at other times they had no meal

Had my men been in confinement, their sufferings would have been intense. But they were in the open air, they were free, they were active, they were constantly skirmishing with the enemy, they had opportunities of amusing themselves, and they had other things to think of besides their own personal discomforts. Had it been otherwise, the troops of my command would have been decimated by disease."

This passage, besides giving testimony to the inability of the South serves for two other important purposes. It suggests that the one evil of Andersonville, to which all others were subsidiary, was confinement, which allowed the prisoners to brood over their own discomforts for a space of time that must have seemed never ending. How the South claims to have

directed all its energies to the remedying of this evil, belongs under the second part of the discussion. It also shows how indefinitely Stephens' declaration of "equal rations to soldiers and prisoners" must be taken. For we see by this, that the Confederate soldiers' rations in the last year of the war were practically what each one could get.

The practice of withholding rations from the prisoners in case of certain breaches of prison discipline, or attempts to "tunnel out," until some one informed on the ringleaders, was productive of great suffering. But it was always possible to escape this by a strict submission to discipline.

In connection with this matter of willful starvation, it is interesting to notice how Pollard himself, in the Secret History of the Confederacy, either because his hatred of Davis gets the better of his habitual temper, or because he is really cooling off, strikes the via media for us. In his Third Year of the War he upbraids the Confederate Government for excessive kindness to the prisoners, saying: "It indulged them in a festival, and, while our prisoners were sighing in the dungeons and penitentiaries of the North, or at Johnston's (sic) Island; were (to use President Davis' own statement) exposed to the piercing cold of the Northern lakes by men who cannot be ignorant of, even if they do not design the probable result, a table d'hôte was spread in the Libby Prison at Richmond with all the luxu ries that the teeming markets of the North could afford. And this licentiousness, with its awful and terrible contrast to our own people, went by the name of Christian charity in Richmond, and was a pleasant humanity to be told in Europe."

On the next page (209) he starts a sentence more moderately, as if, conscious of having made an overstatement with his "table d'hôte," he were now trying to talk reasonably; but almost in spite of himself he ends in a striking hyperbole; thus, "It is seriously true that they " (prisoners) "fared as well as our own worn and hardened soldiers in the field. They were allowed in many instances to receive supplies from friends in the North; and it frequently happened that the occupants of the Libby actually lived better than the Cabinet ministers of the Confederacy." But in the Secret History he seems to come down with a jump into something like actuality. It is