“ [333] women and children.” Sherman replied in these words: “I give full credit to your statements of the distress that will be occasioned by it, and yet I shall not revoke my order, because my orders are not designed to meet the humanities of the case.” At the end of five days the women and children of Atlanta were expelled from their houses and driven from the city, and before they had passed into the Confederate lines, they were robbed by the Federal officers and soldiers who were sent to guard them, of the few articles they had been permitted to take with them. The Commercial complains that Sherman was not banquetted at Atlanta. Had Sherman possessed the decency of a well-bred dog, he would never have shown himself in Atlanta after the atrocities he there committed. A Northern view of the Prison Question. Colonel John F. Mines, a well-known journalist, delivered a lecture in Utica on Life in a Richmond prison, in the course of which he said:
Heretofore a large portion of the Radical orator's method of firing the northern heart, lay in the plea of so-called barbarities on the part of the Confederates to their prisoners of war. Whenever a southern congressman rises in his seat to speak in behalf of his constituents, the cry of “rebel brigadier” is raised, and when a street fight occurs in Vicksburg or New Orleans, there is a cry of “barbarities,” and an echo of “Andersonville.” That one word “Andersonville,” has been as effective as was the sweet word, “Mesopotamia,” when it fell from the lips of Whitfield the preacher. The key to Confederate treatment of the Federal prisoners was found in the fact that they had very little for themselves, and gave the best they had to their prisoners. While the northern officer in the Richmond prison had his baker's bread three times a day, and his meat twice a day, the Confederate sentinel had only his corn cake and molasses, varied by a little meat occasionally. If the northern officer in his quarters felt the rude blasts of winter, his sentinel, clad in thin homespun, shivered like a leaf as the keen wind swept through his slight rags, and held out skeleton hands to the fire. Their blankets were taken from their beds at home, worn by use, and some of the officers carried a little roll of carpet in lieu of other covering. This was the spirit of the south. The officer of our guard, a Georgian, once exhibited to the speaker, with pardonable pride, a sword he had put together from a scythe-blade, with sheepskin scabbard, and handle of southern oak. The men were terribly in earnest
