Martyria; or, Andersonville Prison

by Augustus C. Hamlin

The official records of Andersonville show that Vinculis is greatly in error; for, instead of fourteen hundred and forty, the great number he imagines, they were even more; for the figures show two thousand six hundred and seventy-eight for September, or more than fifteen per cent., and in October fifteen hundred and ninety-five, or more than twenty-seven per cent., and in the month of August three thousand men died, and on the twenty-third of that month one hundred and twenty-seven perished, or one every eleven minutes out of the number present.

XIV.

In the hospitals of the allied forces, during the campaign of the Crimea, which were established along the banks of the Bosphorus and at Constantinople, there were admitted, during the twenty-two months of the war, one hundred and thirty-nine thousand patients, and of these nineteen per cent. were lost during the entire period, or at the rate of ten per cent. per annum.

One hundred and ninety-three thousand patients were admitted into the French hospitals during the same period, and but fourteen per cent. were lost, or less than eight per cent. per annum.

The mortality of the military hospitals of the army of occupation of Spain in 1824 was less than five per cent.

The extemporized and regular hospitals of Milan, says Baron Larrey, received during the Italian campaign thirty-four thousand sick and wounded; of whom fourteen hundred died, or four per cent., or forty men out of every one thousand. The temporary hospitals of Nashville received during the year 1864 sixty-five thousand sick and wounded, of whom twenty-six hundred died, or four per cent. The numerous hospitals of Washington treated in 1863 sixty-eight thousand patients, and lost twenty-six hundred, or less than four per cent.; and, in 1864, the same hospitals treated ninety-six thousand patients (forty-nine thousand sick and forty-seven thousand wounded), and lost six thousand, or six per cent. The department of Pennsylvania received fifty-six thousand patients in its various hospitals, and lost but two per cent. Twenty-nine thousand nine hundred patients were cared for in the medical and surgical wards of the fourteen great civil hospitals of London in 1861, and but twenty-seven hundred of these died, or nine per cent. The diary of the rebel War Clerk says, that in the hospitals of the rebel service sixteen hundred thousand patients were treated, with a loss of four per cent.; yet it appears from a surreptitious copy of the quarterly report ending 1864, relating to the prisoners in hospital at Richmond, that twenty-seven hundred patients were treated, and thirteen hundred and ninety-six died, or fifty per cent.; more than half of these cases were those of diarrhœa and dysentery, and only seventy deaths from fever. It appears from the official data of the Surgeon-General’s office, published in November, 1865, that eight hundred and seventy thousand cases of wounds and disease were treated by the medical staff of the United States army in 1862, and but two per cent. were lost; also, that in 1863, seventeen hundred thousand cases were cared for, with a loss of three per cent. only.

XV.

The statistics of the great armies of Austria, Sardinia, and France during the Italian war, when half a million of men met in conflict at Magenta and Solferino, show, according to Boudin, that but six thousand four hundred and ten men lost their lives—of the French, three thousand five hundred and five; of the Sardinians, one thousand and forty-five; of the Austrians, one thousand eight hundred and sixty. It is shown by the records of the British army, that, out of the aggregate number of four hundred and thirty-eight thousand British soldiers who were engaged in the twenty-two great battles of the British empire from 1801 to 1854, but fourteen thousand men were killed, or died of their wounds, or three per cent. These battles embrace those of Egypt, Spain, France, Waterloo, and the Crimea.

Contrast these blood-stained records with this one instance of rebel cruelty at Andersonville. Of the number of the Federal soldiers who have been held in captivity during the rebellion by the rebels, more than thirty thousand of them are now dead. We know from official records that twenty-three thousand are buried at Andersonville and Salisbury alone.