Extracts from an officer's diary.
From the private journal of a Confederate officer high in command, both at
Andersonville and other Southern prisons, I glean the annexed facts, the first bearing directly upon the foregoing:--“At one time an order came to Camp Lawton to prepare 2,000 men for exchange.
The order from
Richmond was to select first the wounded, next the oldest prisoners and the sickly, filling up with healthy men according to date.
This party went first to
Savannah,
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as arranged, but by some mistake the ships were at
Charleston, and the poor wretches had to be taken there; and every one who knew the
Southern railroads in those days; and the difficulty or rather impossiblity to procure food for such a crowd along the road, will know what those poor fellows suffered.
At
Charleston they were refused, the commissioner declaring that ‘he was not going to exchange able-bodied men for such miserable specimens of humanity.’
(The term used was more brutal). Finding him obdurate,
Colonel Ould requested him to take them without exchange.
This he refused with a sneering laugh, and the crowd was ordered back.
Never did the writer of this witness such woe-begone countenances, in which misery and hopelessness were more strongly painted, than shown by those poor fellows on their return.
And the curses leveled against the rulers who thus treated the defenders of their country were fearful, although certainly well deserved.
As the stockade-gate closed upon them the surgeon in charge said to the writer: ‘Poor fellows!
the world has closed upon more than half of them; this disappointment will be their death-knell.’
His words proved true.
Who murdered those men?
Let history answer the question.”
