Here is even a stronger statement from a Northern source:
“New York, August 8, 1865.
“Moreover, General Butler, in his speech at Lowell, Massachusetts, stated positively that he had been ordered by Mr. Stanton to put forward the negro question to complicate and prevent the exchange.... Every one is aware that, when the exchange did take place, not the slightest alteration had occurred in the question, and that our prisoners might as well have been released twelve or eighteen months before as at the resumption of the cartel, which would have saved to the Republic at least twelve or fifteen thousand heroic lives. That they were not saved is due alone to Mr. Edwin M. Stanton’s peculiar policy and dogged obstinacy; and, as I have remarked before, he is unquestionably the digger of the unnamed graves that crowd the vicinity of every Southern prison with historic and never-to-be-forgotten horrors.
“I regret the revival of this painful subject, but the gratuitous effort of Mr. Dana to relieve the Secretary of War from a responsibility he seems willing to bear, and which merely as a question of policy, independent of all considerations of humanity, must be regarded as of great weight, has compelled me to vindicate myself from the charge of making grave statements without due consideration.
“Once for all, let me declare that I have never found fault with any one because I was detained in prison, for I am well aware that that was a matter in which no one but myself, and possibly a few personal friends, would feel any interest; that my sole motive for impeaching the Secretary of War was that the people of the loyal North might know to whom they were indebted for the cold-blooded and needless sacrifice of their fathers and brothers, their husbands and their sons.
“JUNIUS HENRI BROWNE.”
Now, what is the “inexorable logic” of this train of evidence? Either the calumnies against the South stand self-convicted, or those who have uttered them show themselves to have been worse fiends than they pretend to believe the Confederate authorities to have been.
But can a candid world credit the charge of cruelty against the South? Honorable enemies, even, will scorn the allegation of torture, of designedly inflicting suffering upon helpless men, against a people who, within the past six years, have so honorably illustrated the American name. Brave men are never cruel—cowards only delight in torture of the helpless. Cruelty to prisoners would be inconsistent not only with the known generosity of the Southern character, but with that splendid courage which the North will not dishonor itself by calling in question.
Until the suspension of the cartel, the Federal prisoners, even at the risk of their recapture, were kept in Richmond convenient for exchange. Confederate prisoners, on the other hand, were hurried to the Northern frontier, where the rigor of the climate alone subjected them to the most cruel sufferings. Driven by the course of the Federal Government, respecting the subject of exchange, the Confederate authorities selected a site for the quartering of prisoners, whom it was impossible to subsist in Richmond or its neighborhood. Andersonville was selected, in accordance with an official order contemplating the following objects: “A healthy locality, plenty of pure, good water, a running stream, and, if possible, shade trees, and in the immediate neighborhood of grist and saw-mills.” Such were the “horrors of Andersonville,” which the world has been urged to believe the Confederate Government selected with special view to the torment and death of prisoners.
The terrible mortality among the prisoners at Andersonville was not due either to starvation or to the unhealthiness of the locality. Federal soldiers were unaccustomed to the scanty and indifferent diet upon which the Confederates were fed, and which caused the death of thousands of delicate youths in the Southern armies. By this single fact may be explained much of the mortality at Andersonville. When to scurvy and other fatal forms of disease, produced by inadequate and unwholesome diet, are added the mental sufferings, which are peculiarly the lot of a prisoner, the despondency, and, in the case of the Andersonville prisoners, the despair occasioned by the refusal of their own Government to relieve them, we have abundant explanation of the most shocking mortality.