I remember a good man and neighbor, who lived near my school, who had four grown sons in the army, one by one killed outright in battle, one at Fort Donelson, one at the battle of Franklin, in Tennessee, another near Chattanooga, the last and youngest at Chickamauga. A while before the last two were slain, one had drawn a furlough to come home, but there being in his regiment a comrade from the State of Texas, to whom he was very much attached, and who was by no means well, though on duty, this son had the furlough he had drawn transferred to his Texas comrade, whom he sent to his father’s with a letter of introduction, asking for his Texas friend the same welcome that would have greeted himself.
Mr. Saunders, the Texan, came, and was welcomed in Mr. Weaver’s family as warmly as one of his own sons would have been, the more kindly by the family and all the neighborhood because he was debarred from visiting his own home. He spent three weeks in our settlement, and returned to camp much invigorated in health and spirits. In less than six months, both the sons were slain in battle, and a few weeks afterwards Mr. Saunders also fell and was buried in north Georgia.
My employer also had Texas relatives in our army, who came on their leave of absence to his home. They could not so much as hear from their own homes.
To make our situation worse, all the rice-growing lands of Georgia and South Carolina were overrun by Northern troops; and all the negro laborers of the large rice plantations, as well as those lying contiguous to the rice-growing districts, had been decoyed off by Federal troops, which more and more crippled the eastern half of our Confederacy, which was then burdened with the whole Confederate army, as well as thousands of Northern prisoners, to say nothing of the Federal army camped on this same half of the South. Corn and what little wheat could then be grown, with rice and sorghum syrup, formed the base of our supplies. Of course fruits and vegetables were grown, but being perishable were worthless for our soldiers or prisoners, so limited were our means of transportation.
Northern journals often ask why it was that the South gave Northern prisoners nothing to eat; and I must say here, that there is a sorrow deep-felt at the knowledge that our soldiers and the Northern prisoners both suffered for the want of sufficient food to nourish; they suffered both as to quantity and quality. But I ask in all candor, how could it be otherwise, hemmed in as the South was? Not one tenth of the government tithes of grain and meat, west of the Mississippi River, could reach us; the blockade was all around; the Federal army’s tents were pitched on Southern soil; detachments of the Union army were invading the narrowing space of territory left to raise provisions on, and were decoying off the laborers and destroying and laying waste the country through which they marched; every means we had to feed either our army or the Northern prisoners was disabled.
My brothers wrote home (without murmur or discontent) that they were living the greater part of the time on parched corn, which they either bought or begged; that they were foraging around in the country, on the mountain sides, and in the valleys, for succulent roots, leaves, and berries to allay the pangs of hunger; sassafras bushes were stripped in a trice of leaves, twigs, and bark, and eaten ravenously. They wrote that sometimes for two or three months they never saw so much as a slice of bacon, and then perhaps for a week or two a rasher of bacon the size of a pocket-knife would be issued to each man of their regiment. One of my brothers once drew from his pocket, when asked about his slice of bacon, the pocket-knife which he brought home after the war was over, and said: “It is a fact; the rasher of bacon was no longer, and about just as thick and wide as this knife.”
Such a slice they held over the fire with bread underneath to catch the drippings, so as to lose none. A brother-in-law of mine told me that he, as well as other soldiers of his division, lived on parched corn most of the time; sometimes they had roasting ears, either roasted in the ashes or eaten raw; that if they had money, they would buy the corn; if not, beg it; and at times they would be so crazed with hunger that if neither money nor begging would get it, they would steal it. At first the men were punished for stealing something to eat, but at last the sight of our hollow-eyed and ragged, emaciated soldiers appealed so to the sympathies of the officers that they could not find it in their hearts to punish their men for trying to keep soul and body together with pilfered corn. Times were almost as hard with citizens all over the South the last year of the war, as with our soldiers. Corn was twelve and thirteen dollars per bushel, and our government’s pay to its soldiers was only eleven dollars per month; so one whole month’s wages would not quite buy a bushel of corn.
What could be grown of provisions, in the waning of our Confederacy, was shared equally and willingly between our soldiers and their Northern prisoners. I verily believe, in the pressing need of the times the prisoners had the greater share. That was little enough, to be sure, but in that narrow space that was left to us as the Northern army advanced, where we had to hold our prisoners, there was almost no food or forage to be had. When the great “book of remembrance” is opened to view, on its pages white and fair the North will surely see, not that the South would not, but that the South could not, better feed the Northern prisoners, with all the mighty pressure that was being brought to bear against us. And of this fact I am very sure that, had there been an exchange of prisoners between the North and South toward the last days of our Confederacy, such as there was at first, and such as the whole South from our chief executive down to the humblest citizen was begging and praying for, as much for the unfortunate prisoners among us, as to have our soldiers in the ranks of our army again, there never would have been an Andersonville.