MAJOR R. R. TURNER, C. S. A.
(Keeper of Libby Prison.)

It is said that the Confederate general, John H. Winder, under whose direction the stockade was built, was asked to leave a few trees inside of it, and erect some sheds for the shelter of the prisoners, but he answered, "No! I am going to build the pen so as to destroy more Yankees than can be destroyed at the front." Winder's well-known character, the place chosen for the stockade, all its arrangements, and the manner in which it was kept, leave no reasonable doubt that such was the purpose. When Mr. Davis and his cabinet were appealed to by the Confederate inspector of prisons, and others, to replace General Winder by a more humane officer, they answered by promoting Winder to the place of commissary-general of all the prisoners.

One of the prisoners, Robert H. Kellogg, sergeant-major of the Sixteenth Connecticut Regiment, who was taken to Andersonville when it had been in use about two months, says in his diary: "As we entered the place, a spectacle met our eyes that almost froze our blood with horror, and made our hearts within fail us. Before us were forms that had once been active and erect, stalwart men, now nothing but mere walking skeletons, covered with filth and vermin. In the centre was a swamp occupying three or four acres of the narrowed limits, and a part of this marshy place had been used by the prisoners as a sink, and excrement covered the ground, the scent arising from which was suffocating. The ground allotted to our ninety was near the edge of this plague spot, and how we were to live through the warm summer weather in the midst of such fearful surroundings was more than we cared to think of just then. No shelter was provided for us by the rebel authorities, and we therefore went to work to provide for ourselves. Eleven of us combined to form a family. For the small sum of two dollars in greenbacks we purchased eight small saplings, eight or nine feet long. These we bent and made fast in the ground, and, covering them with our blankets, made a tent with an oval roof, about thirteen feet long. We needed the blankets for our protection from the cold at night, but concluded it to be quite as essential to our comfort to shut out the rain. There were ten deaths on our side of the camp that night. The old prisoners called it 'being exchanged,' and truly it was a blessed transformation."

"CASTLE THUNDER," RICHMOND, VA.
(In this building Union prisoners were confined.)

At one time there were thirty-three thousand prisoners in the stockade, which gave a space about four feet square to each man. The whole number sent there was about forty-nine thousand five hundred, of whom nearly thirteen thousand died. At Salisbury prison the deaths were thirteen per cent. a month, and at Florence twelve per cent. Most of the deaths were from disease and starvation, but there were numerous murders. It was said that every sentry, on shooting a prisoner for violation of rules, received a month's furlough; and this was corroborated by the alacrity with which they seized any pretext for firing. In Libby, men were often shot for approaching near enough to a window for the sentry to see their heads. In Andersonville one was shot for crawling out to secure a small piece of wood that lay near the dead-line; and there were many incidents of that kind. Some of the men became deranged or desperate, and deliberately walked up to the dead-line for the purpose of being put out of their misery. There were many escapes from these prisons; but the fugitives were generally soon missed, and were followed by fleet horsemen and often tracked by bloodhounds, and though they were always befriended by the negroes, who fed them, concealed them by day, and guided them at night, but few ultimately reached the National lines.

A captain in the Eighty-fifth Pennsylvania Regiment, who was a prisoner in the hands of the Confederates, gives this leaf from his experience: "During the night of July 27, 1864, while several hundred of my brother officers were being transported from Macon to Charleston by rail, Captain Kellogg, of Wisconsin, Ensign Stoner, of New York, Ensign Smith, now of Washington, Lieut. E. P. Brooks, of Washington, Paymaster Billings, of the United States Navy, and myself, jumped from a car and escaped to the swamp, through which we hardly thought an alligator could have followed us. Late in the afternoon of the second day, however, we heard the deep baying of the dogs, and soon we were surrounded with dogs, which we held at bay with stout clubs until the two fiendish hunters had called them off. Before starting on our weary march back to that dread imprisonment, one of our captors took occasion to say: 'It's a good thing for you-uns that our catch-dogs gave out half a mile back, for I reckon they'd a tored you-uns up 'fore we-uns got thare.' He said the dogs that recaptured us were a mixture between the fox-hound and the beagle-dog, but that the large, brutish catch-dogs were a cross between the full South American bloodhound and the bull-dog. He said he kept two large packs of these dogs, with quite a number of catch-dogs, or bloodhounds, at Hamburg, which he hired out for the purpose of hunting escaped Yankee prisoners and runaway niggers. I saw Captain Holmes, of St. Louis, Mo., a prisoner of war at Macon, Ga., in July, 1864, who had been fearfully mangled and torn by a catch-dog in Alabama while he was trying to escape. I frequently saw two large South American bloodhounds outside of the stockade at Macon. At Andersonville they had a large pack of bloodhounds."

CAMP DOUGLAS, AT CHICAGO.
(Confederate prisoners were confined here.)

The crowded condition of the prisons in 1864 was owing to the fact that exchanges had been discontinued. A cartel for the exchange of prisoners had been in operation for some time; but when it was found that the Confederate authorities had determined not to exchange any black soldiers, or their white officers, captured in battle, the United States Government refused to exchange at all, being bound to protect equally all who had entered its service. Paroling prisoners on the field was also discontinued, because the Confederates could not be trusted to observe their parole. There had been much complaint that Confederate officers and soldiers violated their word in this respect, either because in their intense hatred of the North they could not realize that they were bound by any promise given to it, or because their own Government forced them back into its service. Many of them were captured with arms in their hands, while they were still under parole from a previous capture. All such, by the laws of war, might have been summarily executed, but none of them were. The thirty thousand taken by Grant at Vicksburg, and the six thousand taken by Banks at Port Hudson, in July, 1863, were released on parole, because the cartel designated two points for delivery of prisoners—Vicksburg in the West, and Aiken's Landing, Va., in the East—and Vicksburg, having been captured, was no longer available for this purpose, and Aiken's Landing was too far away. Three months later, the Confederate armies being in want of reinforcements, Colonel Ould, Confederate commissioner of exchange, raised the technical point that the prisoners captured by Grant and Banks had not been delivered at a place mentioned in the cartel, and therefore he declared them all released from their parole, and they were restored to the ranks. At Chattanooga, in November, Grant's army captured large numbers from Bragg's army whom they had captured in July with Pemberton and had released on a solemn promise that they would not take up arms again until properly exchanged.

Other difficulties arose to complicate still further the question of exchanges. At one time the Confederate authorities refused to make any but a general exchange—all held by either side to be liberated—which the National Government declined, since it held an excess of about forty thousand. It was observed, also, when partial exchanges were effected, that the men returning from Southern prisons were nearly all wasted to skeletons and unfit for further service, while the Confederates returning from Northern prisons were well clothed, well fed, and generally in good health. Photographs of the emaciated men from Andersonville and Belle Isle were exhibited throughout the North, and caused more of horror than the report from any battlefield. Engravings from them were published, in the summer of 1864, by newspapers of both parties, for opposite purposes—the Republican, to prove the barbarity of the Confederate authorities and the atrocious spirit of the rebellion; the Democratic, to prove that President Lincoln was a monster of cruelty in that he did not waive all questions at issue and consent to a general exchange. At a later period, the Confederate authorities, being badly in need of men to fill up their depleted armies, offered to give up their point about black soldiers, and exchange man for man—or rather skeleton for man—without regard to color. But as the war was nearing its close, and to do this would have reinforced the Southern armies with some thousands of strong and well-fed troops, and prolonged the struggle, the National Government refused. Efforts were made, both by the Government and by the Sanitary Commission, to send food, clothing, and medical supplies to those confined in the Confederate prisons; but only a small portion of these things ever reached the men for whom they were intended. At Libby Prison, at one time, boxes for the prisoners arrived at the rate of three hundred a week; but instead of being distributed they were piled up in warehouses in sight of the hungry and shivering captives, where they were plundered by the guards and by the poorer inhabitants of the city. In one case, a lieutenant among the prisoners saw his own home-made suit of clothes on a prison official, and pointed out his name embroidered on the watch-pocket.2

2 See "Narrative of Privations and Sufferings of United States Officers and Soldiers while Prisoners of War in the Hands of the Rebel Authorities. Being the Report of a Commission of Inquiry Appointed by the United States Sanitary Commission. With an Appendix containing the Testimony." (1864.) Valentine Mott, M.D., was chairman of the commission.