Prison Life in the Old Capitol and Reminiscences of the Civil War

by James J. Williamson

“This Report is rendered especially important by reason of persistent efforts lately made by the Government of the United States and by associations and individuals connected or co-operating with it, to asperse the honor of the Confederate authorities and to charge them with deliberate and wilful cruelty to prisoners of war. Two publications have been issued at the North within the past year and have been circulated not only in the United States but in some parts of the South and in Europe. One of these is the Report of the joint select committee of the Northern Congress on the Conduct of the War, known as ‘Report No. 67.’ It is accompanied by eight pictures or photographs alleged to represent United States prisoners of war returned from Richmond in a sad state of emaciation and suffering.

“The intent and spirit of this report may be gathered from the following extract: ‘The evidence proves beyond all manner of doubt, a determination on the part of the rebel authorities, deliberately and persistently practised for a long time past, to subject those of our soldiers who have been so unfortunate as to fall into their hands to a system of treatment which has resulted in reducing many of those who have survived and been permitted to return to us to a condition both physically and mentally which no language we can use can adequately describe.’—Rep. p. 1.

“The other (Report) purports to be a ‘Narrative of the Privations and Sufferings of United States Officers and Soldiers while Prisoners of War,’ and is issued as a Report of a Commission of Inquiry appointed by the United States Sanitary Commission.

“The disingenuous attempt is made in both these publications to produce the impression that these sick and emaciated men were fair representatives of the general state of the prisoners held by the South, and that all their prisoners were being rapidly reduced to the same state by starvation and cruelty, and by neglect, ill-treatment and denial of proper food, stimulants and medicines in the Confederate hospitals. The facts are simply these:

“The Federal authorities, in violation of the cartel, having for a long time refused exchange of prisoners, finally consented to a partial exchange of the sick and wounded on both sides. Accordingly a number of such prisoners were sent from the hospitals in Richmond. General directions had been given that none should be sent, except those who might be expected to endure the removal and passage with safety to their lives; but in some cases the surgeons were induced to depart from this rule by the entreaties of some officers and men in the last stages of emaciation, suffering not only with excessive debility, but with ‘nostalgia,’ or home-sickness, whose cases were regarded as desperate, who could not live if they remained, and might possibly improve if carried home. Thus it happened that some very sick and emaciated men were carried to Annapolis, but their illness was not the result of ill-treatment or neglect. Such cases might be found in any large hospital North or South. They might even be found in private families, where the sufferer would be surrounded by every comfort that love could bestow. Yet these are the cases which, with hideous violation of decency, the Northern Committee have paraded in pictures and photographs. They have taken their own sick and enfeebled soldiers, have stripped them naked; have exposed them before a daguerrean apparatus, have pictured every shrunken limb and muscle, and all for the purpose, not of relieving their sufferings, but of bringing a false and slanderous charge against the South.

“A candid reader of these publications will not fail to discover that, whether the statements they make be true or not, their spirit is not adapted to promote a better feeling between the hostile powers. They are not intended for the humane purpose of ameliorating the condition of the unhappy prisoners held in captivity. They are designed to inflame the evil passions of the North; to keep up the war spirit among their own people; to represent the South as acting under the dominion of a spirit of cruelty, inhumanity and interested malice, and thus to vilify her people in the eyes of all on whom these publications can work.

“But even now enough is known to vindicate the South, and to furnish an overwhelming answer to all complaints on the part of the United States Government or people, that their prisoners were stinted in food or supplies. Their own savage warfare has wrought the evil. They have blockaded our ports; have excluded from us food, clothing and medicines; have even declared medicines contraband of war, and have repeatedly destroyed the contents of drug stores, and the supplies of private physicians in the country; have ravaged our country, burned our houses and destroyed growing crops and farming implements. One of their officers—(General Sheridan)—has boasted in his official report that in the Shenandoah Valley alone he burned 2,000 barns filled with wheat and corn; that he burned all the mills in the whole tract of country, destroyed all the factories of cloth, and killed or drove off every animal, even to the poultry, that could contribute to human sustenance. These desolations have been repeated again and again in different parts of the South. Thousands of our families have been driven from their homes, as helpless and destitute refugees. Our enemies have destroyed our railroads and other means of transportation, by which food could be supplied from abundant districts to those without it. While thus desolating our country in violation of the usages of civilized warfare, they have refused to exchange prisoners; have forced us to keep 50,000 of their men in captivity, and yet have attempted to attribute to us the sufferings and privations caused by their own acts.”

The report also contains a great amount of testimony concerning the cruel treatment of Confederate prisoners in Northern prisons.

Pollard, in his history of the “Lost Cause,” after reciting the extraordinary efforts made by the Confederate authorities to relieve the sufferings at Andersonville, says:

“Who was responsible for the sufferings of the sick and wounded prisoners at Andersonville, from August to December, 1864? The world will ask with amazement if it was possible that thousands of prisoners were left to die in inadequate places of confinement, merely to make a case against the South—merely for romance! The simple fact gives the clue to the whole story of the deception and inhuman cruelty of the authorities at Washington with reference to their prisoners of war—the key to a chapter of horrors that even the hardy hand of history shakes to unlock. To blacken the reputation of an honorable enemy; to make a false appeal to the sensibilities of the world; to gratify an inhuman revenge, Mr. Stanton, the saturnine and malignant Secretary of War at Washington, did not hesitate to doom to death thousands of his countrymen, and then to smear their sentinels with accusing blood.”