Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 3.

1 This Committee was composed of Doctors Valentine Mott and Edward Delafield, and Gouverneur Morris. Wilkins, of New York, and Doctor Ellerslie Wallace, Hon. John J. Clark Hare, and Rev. Treadwell Walden of Philadelphia. They were appointed by the Commission for “ascertaining, by inquiry and investigation, the true physical condition of prisoners recently discharged, by exchange, from confinement at Richmond and elsewhere within the rebel lines; whether they did, in fact, during such confinement, suffer materially for want of food, or from its defective quality, or from other privations or sources of disease; and whether their privations and sufferings were designedly inflicted on them by military or other authority of the rebel Government, or were due to causes which such authorities could not control.” The Committee visited camps of paroled prisoners at Annapolis and elsewhere, took large numbers of depositions in writing, and otherwise collected information which justified the conclusion of Senator Howard, mentioned in the text. The Committee said: “It is; the same story everywhere; prisoners of war treated worse than convicts, shut up either in suffocating buildings, or in outdoor inclosures, without even the shelter that is provided for the beasts of the field; unsupplied with sufficient food; supplied with food and water injurious and even poisonous; compelled to live on floors, often covered with human filth, or on ground saturated with it; compelled to breathe an air oppressed with an intolerable stench; hemmed in by a fatal dead-line, and in hourly danger of being shot by unrestrained and brutal guards; despondent even to madness, idiocy, and suicide; sick, of diseases (so congruous in character as to appear and spread like the plague) caused by the torrid sun, by decaying food, by filth, by vermin, by malaria, and by cold; removed at the last moment, and by hundreds at a time, to hospitals corrupt as a sepulcher, there, with few remedies, little care, and no sympathy, to die in wretchedness and despair, not only among strangers, but among enemies too resentful either to have pity or to show mercy. These are positive facts. Tens of thousands of helpless men have been, and are now

September, 1864.

being, disabled and destroyed by a process as certain as poison, and as cruel as the torture or burning at the stake, because nearly as agonizing and more prolonged. This spectacle, is daily beheld and allowed by the rebel Government. No supposition of negligence, or indifference, or accident, or inefficiency, or destitution, or necessity, can account for all this. So many, and such positive forms of abuse and wrong cannot come from negative causes. The conclusion is unavoidable, therefore, that these privations and sufferings have been designedly inflicted by the military and other authority of the rebel Government, and cannot have been due to causes which such authorities could not control.”

Such was the verdict of a committee of men whose ability, honor, integrity and fidelity, to the duties demanded by truth and justice, no man can rightfully question. It is the testimony of eye and ear-witnesses which no one, competent to speak, has ever dared to deny. We read with feelings of horror of the cruelty of the British in India, in blowing their Sepoy prisoners to atoms from the muzzles of cannon. That act was merciful compared to the fiendishness exhibited toward Union prisoners in the late Civil War. We read with feelings of horror of the tortures formerly inflicted upon prisoners by the savages of our wilderness. These were mild sufferings compared with those to which the Conspirators and their instruments subjected the soldiers of the Republic when they fell into their hands.