Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

In a short time Commissioner Ould received the following response:

This was the whole Federal reply to the humane proposition of the Confederacy-this the brief indication of their cruel purpose to let their prisoners rot and die in insufficient prisons, merely for the purpose of pointing a libel and colouring a story against the Southern Confederacy. The offer of Commissioner Ould was on the extreme of generosity. He proposed, when the enemy had a large excess of prisoners, to exchange officer for officer and man for man. This arrangement would have left the surplus in the enemy's hands. But the liberal offer, which would have instantly restored to life and freedom thousands of suffering captives, was never even heeded at Washington; it was brutally calculated there that such a delivery from the prison pens of Andersonville and elsewhere would put so many thousand Confederate muskets in the field, and cut off a chapter of horrours, from which it had been convenient to draw texts on the subject of “rebel barbarities.” To keep that text before the world was the determined purpose at Washington. It had again and again been announced that the subsistence of the Confederacy lad fallen so low-chiefly through the warfare of the enemy making it a point to destroy in all parts of the country supplies of every kind — that its own soldiers were compelled to subsist upon a third of a pound of meat and a pound of coarse corn meal or flour every day. With such reduced rations, Confederate soldiers themselves were often exposed with thin and tattered clothes to the freezing winter storms, without tents, overcoats, blankets or shoes. In these circumstances it was impossible to provide properly for many tens of thousands of prisoners at Andersonville, Salisbury, and other places south of Richmond, where crowded quarters, prepared only for smaller numbers, and frequent removals to prevent recapture, added to the discomfort of the prisoners, and swelled the list of mortality. The authorities at Washington refused to do their own part to relieve the sufferings of these unhappy men, and deliberately decreed the extension of their sufferings that they might put before the world false and plausible proofs of “rebel barbarity.”

It is simply in opposition to all that is known of Southern generosity in the war to believe that the sufferings of Andersonville were the result