In accordance with General Grant’s opinion General Butler then wrote a letter in reply to General Ould’s proposals of exchange.
In his famous Lowell speech, Butler said: “In this letter these questions were argued justly, as I think, not diplomatically, but obtrusively and demonstratively, not for the purpose of furthering an exchange of prisoners, but for the purpose of preventing and stopping the exchange, and furnishing a ground on which we could stand.” The men who languished at Andersonville and other Confederate prisons, played, in their sufferings and death, an active part in the termination of the war.
This part was not so stirring as charging on guns or meeting in the clash of infantry lines. But as the victims of a policy, dictated by the emergency of a desperate condition of affairs, their enforced, long continued hardships and sufferings made it possible for the Union generals and their armies to decide the deplorable struggle so much sooner, and to terminate the existence of the Confederacy by the surrender at Appomatox. No soldier or seaman, in this or any other country, ever made such personal sacrifices or endured such hardships and privations as those who fell into the hands of the Confederates during the late war. The recital of their sufferings would be scarcely believed were they not corroborated by so large a number of unimpeachable witnesses on both sides.
Colonel C. T. Chandler’s C. S. A. report on Andersonville, dated Aug. 5, 1864, in which he said: “It is difficult to describe the horrors of the prison, which is a disgrace to civilization,” was endorsed by Col. R. H. Chilton, Inspector General C. S. A., as follows: “The condition of the prisoners at Andersonville is a reproach to us as a nation.”
The sixty thousand graves filled by the poor victims of the several prisons, tells a story that cannot be denied or misunderstood. When we consider the hardships and privations to which these men were subjected, the wonder is not that so many died, but that any survived. We submit, it is hardly possible that any man who was subjected to the hardships and inhuman treatment of a Confederate prison for even two or three months only, could come out any other than permanently disabled. Statistics show that of those who were released, nearly five per cent. died before reaching home. In a few instances there was a roll kept of thirty to fifty of those men who, when released, were able to travel home alone, and it is now found that nearly three-fourths of the number have since died.
The roll of the Andersonville Survivors Association shows that during the year 1880, the number of deaths averaged sixteen and one-third per cent. of the total membership, showing an increase of five per cent. over the death rate of 1879.
But few of the most fortunate of these survivors will live to see the age of fifty, and probably within the next ten years the last of them will have passed away.
Congress has from time to time enacted laws most just and liberal (or that were intended to be so,) toward the men who were disabled in the late war, but a large majority of the prison survivors are excluded from a pension under these laws. This comes partly from the unfriendly spirit in which the pension department has been administered for the last six years, and partly from the peculiar circumstances surrounding their several cases.
Many paroled prisoners, on reaching the Union lines were at once sent home on furlough, without receiving any medical treatment. The most of these were afterwards discharged under General Order No. 77, dated War Department, Washington, D. C., April 28th, 1865, because physically unfit for service, and hence there is no official record whatever as to their disease.
If one of those men applies for a pension, he is called upon to furnish the affidavit of some army surgeon who treated him after his release and prior to discharge, showing that he then had the disease on which he now claims a pension. For reasons stated, this is impossible. The next thing is a call to furnish an affidavit from some doctor who treated the man while at home on furlough, or certainly immediately following his final discharge, showing that he was then afflicted with identical disease on which pension is now claimed. This is generally impossible, for many reasons.