Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

[615] charge that our medical officers, a body of men who had no superiors in any country, deliberately neglected the sick and wounded men in their official charge, so as to leave them to die. And there should be every desire to examine closely and see if there cannot be full and just reason for this admitted difference in the number of deaths.

I think the explanation is to be found in the difference of the physical condition of the patients. I appeal to the right-minded and just men who were the medical officers of the Confederacy, and also to the commanders of their troops, to agree to the fact that the very great deprivation of proper and substantial food supplied to the Confederates in the field brought their men to such a condition of constitutional health that they could not bear up under the sufferings and loss of blood resulting from wounds and operations, rendering them more susceptible to attacks of gangrene which were incurable. And the same want of proper food left them to become so weak in bodily strength and of so low vitality as to render them more susceptible to attacks of the diseases for which they were treated and with less recuperative power, so that much larger percentages of death resulted than would have been the case if they had been in full fed health and strength as were our prisoners when captured.

Would not a scratch from a minie ball upon the body of a Confederate, which would hardly be noticed on one of our soldiers, very frequently be followed by death? I feel very certain that this condition of the Confederates is the whole cause of the difference in the results of wounds and diseases of prisoners captured from their armies. Indeed, I believe I can say from my actual knowledge on the subject that the Confederate soldiers in the field could and did live on less good and solid food than our army wasted.

I do not desire, on my part, to accuse of deliberate cruelty and wrong any considerable portion of my countrymen who were my enemies, or to have my countrymen who served with me so accused by others. As a general fact, I do not believe it existed on either side.

Mr. Davis makes one assertion of fact which is very possibly true. It is based upon the statistical report of General Barnes, Surgeon-General of the United States Army, which I always believed to be erroneous, and which is now held so to be. In this report Barnes places the whole number of prisoners on the Union side at 270,000, and I believe that he is approximately correct, and that of the rebel