In the second place, the manufacture, purchase, issue or use of such projectiles for firearms by the Confederate States, is positively denied by the Confederate authorities, as the following correspondence will show:
Beauvoir, Miss., 28th June, 1879.
My Dear Sir— ... In reply to your inquiries as to the use of explosive or poisoned balls by the troops of the Confederate States, I state as positively as one may in such a case that the charge has no foundation in truth. Our Government certainly did not manufacture or import such balls, and if any were captured from the enemy, they could probably only have been used in the captured arms for which they were suited. I heard occasionally that the enemy did use explosive balls, and others prepared so as to leave a copper ring in the wound, but it was always spoken of as an atrocity beneath knighthood and abhorrent to civilization. The slander is only one of many instances in which our enemy have committed or attempted crimes of which our people and their Government were incapable, and then magnified the guilt by accusing us of the offences they had committed....
Believe me, ever faithfully yours,
Jefferson Davis.
General Josiah Gorgas, the Chief of Ordnance of the Confederate States—now of the University of Alabama—writes, under date of July 11th, 1879, that to his "knowledge the Confederate States never authorized or used explosive or poisoned rifle balls during the late war." In this statement also General I. M. St. John and General John Ellicott, both of the Ordnance Bureau, Confederate States army, entirely concur.
The Adjutant-General of the United States also writes me, under date of August 22d, 1879, as to the Confederate archives now in the possession of the National Government, as follows: "In reply to yours of the 18th August, I have the honor to inform you that the Confederate States records in the possession of this Department furnish no evidence that poisoned or explosive musket balls were used by the army of the Confederate States."
Rev. J. William Jones, D. D., Secretary of the Southern Historical Society, has written me to the same effect as to the archives in the possession of the Society.
In the third place, a brief examination of the United States Patent Office Reports for 1862-3, and the Ordnance Reports for 1863-4, will show that the "explosive and the poisoned balls" which the author of the "Pictorial History of the Civil War" so gratuitously charges upon the Confederates, were patented by the United States Patent Office at Washington, and were purchased, issued and used by the United States Government, and, what is still more remarkable, that neither of the aforesaid projectiles were in any sense explosive or poisoned.
In the Patent Office Report for 1862-3 will be found the following, with the corresponding illustration in the second volume: