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others flooded with filthy water; exposed to frost and heat; to the bullets of brutal guards used in wanton sport; beaten, bruised and cursed; driven to madness and idiocy; starved into skeletons; and, worse than all, tortured by the false declaration, made only to lacerate, that their Government had forsaken them, thus leaving them no other hope for relief from misery, than death.
To nearly fourteen thousand sufferers, that everlasting relief came.
The graves of twelve thousand nine hundred and twenty of the victims tell the dreadful tale.
Of these only about four hundred and fifty are unknown.1
It was pleaded, in extenuation, that the Confederates had not the means for feeding the Union prisoners, and that the lack of food for them was caused by its great scarcity.
The Committee of the Sanitary Commission say that, after collecting all testimony possible to be obtained, “
it appears that the Southern army has been, ever since its organization, completely equipped in all necessary respects, and that the men have been supplied with every thing which would keep them in the best condition of mind and body, for the hard and desperate service in which they were engaged.
They knew nothing of famine or freezing.
Their wounded and sick were never neglected.
So do the few details of fact that could be extracted, without suspicion of their object, from the soldiers of the Southern army, confirm the reasoning which accounts for its efficiency.
The conclusion is inevitable.
It was in their power to feed sufficiently, and to clothe, whenever necessary, their prisoners of war. They were perfectly able to include them in the military establishments, but they chose to exclude them from the position always assigned to such, and in no respect to treat them like men taken in honorable warfare.
Their commonest soldier was never compelled, by hunger, to eat the disgusting rations furnished at the Libby to United States officers.
Their most exposed encampment, however temporary, never beheld the scenes of suffering which occurred daily and nightly among United States soldiers in the encampment on Belle Isle.
The excuse and explanation are swept away.
There is nothing now between the Northern people and the dreadful reality.”
To this conclusion of the Committee may be added the fact, mentioned on page 414, that throughout Georgia, the State in which the Andersonville prisoner-pen was situated, and where starvation was most rife, General Sherman found a superabundance of food.
It was pleaded that the Conspirators and military officers nearest to them, were ignorant of the cruelties inflicted by these subordinates.
And General Robert E. Lee,--“--a greatly over-rated military leader — a man of routine — cold, undemonstrative, ambitious, the pet of the Virginians because he was a member of one of their ‘first families’--without the moral courage to take the responsibility-so popular with the army that he might have ended the war any time after the capture of Atlanta,” as one of the most successful
1 Dorrance Atwater, of Connecticut, was a prisoner at Andersonville, and, in June, 1864, was detailed as clerk in the Confederate Surgeon's office, to keep the daily record of deaths. While there, he secretly copied the entire list of the dead, which he furnished to the Government after his release. In the cemetery, not far from the prisoner-pen, and which contained fifteen acres, a stick was placed at the, head of each grave, on which was inscribed the name of the occupant, his rank, regiment, and company, and the date and cause of his death. By this means Miss Barton, and Government officers sent for the purpose, were enabled to identify the graves of nearly every dead soldier there. Mr. Atwater accompanied Miss Barton on her visit to the Andersonville prisoner-pen.
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