Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 1.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

The negroes offered every manner of indignity to the prisoners. Among other crimes they shot a dying man on his attempt to relieve nature. The conduct of the negroes at Point Lookout was incited by their white officers until it was frightful.

Henry H. Knight writes from Cary, Wake county, North Carolina, that he was captured at Gettysburg, taken to Fort Delaware, and suffered all that cold and mud could inflict upon their comfort and convenience. He was driven from poorly warmed stoves by Federal officers. The soldiers were beaten, starved and frozen to death. Seven were frozen one morning; others of them went to the hospital and died. At other times they were driven through the water, and were alternately robbed, frozen, tortured and starved. The great amount sent them by relatives was appropriated by the guards for their own use; and if they made complaint, the prisoners were shot, and the improbable story told that they had run guard, and that would be the last of their crime heard in the fort against the guards.

Some of these poor fellows were whole days without fire, when the snow was a foot deep, or the water covering the ground. The author saw hundreds of these prisoners in the city of Pittsburg in the early summer of 1865, on their way to the Southwest, in the most loathsome condition. Their pitiable suffering and mournful stories were sickening, and would crimson the cheek with unutterable shame and horror. No words can portray the picture that he saw with his own eyes. Swollen gums, teeth dropping from the jaws, eyes bursting with scurvy, limbs paralyzed, hair falling off of the heads, frozen hands and feet. These were those that escaped. The dead concealed the crimes of the murderers in the grave which was closed upon them, by hundreds.

W. C. Osborn, of Opelika, Alabama, states that he was captured on the 4th of July, 1863, and confined in Fort Delaware; that the rations were three crackers twice a day; most of the time no meat at all, but occasionally a very small piece of salt beef or pork. That he drank water within fifteen feet of the excrement of the fort, and could get no other. When cold weather returned the beds of each man were searched, and only one blanket left him. The barracks were inferior, and men froze to death in the terrible winter of 1863-4. Prisoners were shot for the most trivial offences. One man's brains were blown out and scattered on the walls, where they remained for many days, for no offence other than looking over the bounds, unconsciously. For other offences, men were tied up by the thumbs just so that their toes might touch the ground, for three hours at a time, until they would turn black in the face. Others were placed astride of joists, and forced to remain in that attitude for hours at a time, the coldest weather. These crimes against the persons of the prisoners, and their starvation,