Second. He speaks of hearing some of the prisoners exonerate the Confederate Government, and lay all the blame of their continued imprisonment on the Federal Government. There is too much truth in this statement to be pleasant to us as patriots, but let us see if these men were wholly to blame in this matter.
We had heard all sorts of discouraging rumors for the last ten months. The rebels had told us that Lincoln would not exchange prisoners unless the negroes were put upon the same basis as whites. That was just and honorable in the Government, but it was death to us. The fact is that of all the forty-five thousand prisoners that I saw in Andersonville there were not to exceed a half dozen negroes, and they were officers’ waiters. The rebels did not take negroes prisoners who were captured in arms, they killed them on the spot, and we knew it, but perhaps our Government did not.
For my own part I never exonerated Confederates for the part they took in cases where they might have done better. It is true that they could not furnish us such a quality of food as our Government furnished Confederate prisoners, but the excuse that they had not enough for their own soldiers is too flimsy as shown by the supplies that Sherman’s men found in Georgia on that famous “March to the Sea” after we had been removed from Andersonville. And even if they were short of food, they had enough pure air and water, and enough land so that we need not have been compelled to drink our own filth, nor breathe the foul effluvia arising from the putrefaction of our excrements, nor be crowded at the rate of thirty-three thousand men on twelve acres of ground, as we were at Andersonville. There was wood enough so that men need not have been compelled to eat corn meal raw. There was no valid excuse for robbing men of their little all and then turning them into those prisons, to live or die, as best they could.
When we come to the part our Government took in this matter it is simply this; General Grant was of the opinion that we could perform our duty as soldiers better in those prisons than we could if exchanged. Exchange meant giving a fat rebel soldier, ready to take the field, for a yankee skeleton ready for the hospital or the grave. Considered as a military measure I admit it was right; but considered from a humanitarian point, it was simply hellish.