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PoP's<br><b> War Crimes Against Southern Soldiers & Civilians</b>: Yankee Prisoners at Andersonville.

10/20/12

Yankee Prisoners at Andersonville.

DAILY CONSTITUTIONALIST [AUGUSTA, GA], July 1, 1864, p. 4, c. 1

Yankee Prisoners at Andersonville.

Some over-sensitive newspapers have complained of the manner in which the Yankee prisoners, 20,000 in number, are treated at Andersonville, Ga. The following remarks on the subject are pertinent. We copy from the Macon Telegraph:

"There has been in the papers, including our own by correspondents, a great deal of needless and causeless animadversion upon the condition of the prisoners at Camp Anderson. Correspondents, fresh from comfortable homes, surrounded with the appliances of luxury, comparing the condition of the prisoners with their own, are struck by the relative discomfort of the situation, and should they go to any camp in the field would doubtless be affected in the same way.

It is certain the Anderson prisoners of war are generally better rationed than the soldiers of our army, and as for being “without shelter” so far as that is true, it is the condition of our own brave soldiers in active service. As to the ratio of mortality, it is smaller than could be reasonably anticipated under the circumstances. Twenty-five thousand men in a permanent camp, under any possible condition, would exhibit heavy bills of sickness and mortality, and the wonder is, they are so comparatively light at Anderson—for these are Northern men suddenly transferred to a far Southern latitude and a total change of diet and water. The experience of the whole war has taught us at great sacrifice of life, that troops in the field in the summer time cannot be long camped in any one spot without a heavy sick list. but a permanent camp in the case of these prisoners is wholly unavoidable, and what is more, so great are their numbers, that it is necessarily a crowded camp. Is it any wonder, therefore, that in a crowd of twenty-five thousand, “scores” should be sickening and dying every day? We question whether the fact would not exist, even if the prisoners were all provided with comfortable ceiled houses and fed on chickens, eggs and buttermilk.

The charges and implications of inhumanity to these prisoners, are therefore, we believe, wholly groundless, and ought not to be made or insinuated by any Confederate prints. They have good food, as healthy a locality as could be obtained with the conditions of convenient transportation and as much latitude of space and motion as security and the available means at hand can provide or plan.

But on the other hand, look at the statements in regard to the treatment of Confederate prisoners of war, by the Federal authorities. The horrors of Fort Delaware are familiar to every mind. Thousands of as gallant men as ever lived—reared in elegance and ease, there breathed their last, upon beds of filthy mud and ooze, their parched lips moistened with stagnant ditch water, and condemned and wormy army bread their only fare.

Point Lookout has been better, but read the appended statement copied out of a late Richmond Sentinel. The prisoners at Anderson have been there for months, and will be there a month longer, only by the sufferance and devices of their own Government. The Confederate Government has ever been most anxious for a fair exchange. But it is understood that a large proportion of the prisoners now in our hands go out of service by the expiration of their terms of enlistment, while the Confederates who might be exchanged for them, would be still available as soldiers, the heartless despotism at Washington is totally averse to an exchange which would disproportionately increase the strength of the Confederate army.—While they charge the Confederates with wanton cruelty and neglect of these prisoners and shoot and starve the Confederate prisoners in their hands by way of “retaliation,” they very composedly elect that their own captured soldiers shall, month after month suffer these alleged cruelties. Time was when the sufferings of the Barbary prisoners moved heart of the Christendom and sent fleets and armies to their relief. But the Lincoln Government groans over treatment to its captured citizens which it represents as worse, and yet voluntary permits them to remain in captivity (lincoln stopped the exchange of prisoners) in order to eat up the alleged scarcity of feed supplies in the South, and avoid strengthening disproportionately the armies of the Confederates. It is the most grovelling, heartless and cowardly policy ever pursued by a people claiming Christian civilization.

SWR's (CulpeppersLightArtillery) Richard
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In 1866, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton reported that according to the Commisary General of Prisoners,
over 26,000 Confederate POWs died in prisons and hospitals.