Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 01.djvu/188

ter rations to both our own soldiers and our prisoners? and why were the prisoners at Andersonville not supplied with wheat bread instead of corn bread? Answers to these questions may be abundantly found by referring to the orders of Major-General John Pope, directing his men "to live on the country;" the orders of General Sherman, in fulfilling his avowed purpose to "make Georgia howl" as he "smashed things generally" in that "great march," which left smoking and blackened ruins and desolated fields to mark his progress; the orders of General Grant to his Lieutenant, to desolate the rich wheat-growing Valley of Virginia; or the reports of General Sheridan, boasting of the numbers of barns he had burned, the mills he had destroyed, and the large amount of wheat he had given to the flames, until there was really more truth than poetry in the boast that he had made the Shenandoah Valley "such a waste that even a crow flying over would be compelled to carry his own rations." We have these and other similar orders of Federal Generals in our archives (we propose to give hereafter a few choice extracts from them), and we respectfully submit that, for the South to be abused for not furnishing Federal prisoners with better rations, when our own soldiers and people had been brought painfully near the starvation point by the mode of warfare which the Federal Government adopted, is even more unreasonable than the course of the old Egyptian task-masters, who required their captives to "make brick without straw." And to the complaints that the sick did not have proper medical attention, we reply that the hospital at Andersonville was placed on precisely the same footing as the hospitals for the treatment of our own soldiers. We have the law of the Confederate Congress enjoining this, and the orders of the Surgeon-General enforcing it. Besides, we have in our archives a large budget of original orders, telegrams, letters, &c., which passed between the officers on duty at Andersonville and their superiors. We have carefully looked through this large mass of papers, and we have been unable to discover a single sentence indicating that the prisoners were to be treated otherwise than kindly, or that the hospital was to receive a smaller supply of medicines or stores than the hospitals for Confederate soldiers. On the contrary, the whole of these papers go to show that the prison hospital at Andersonville was on the same footing precisely with every hospital for sick or wounded Confederates, and that the scarcity of medicines and hospital stores, of which there was such constant complaint, proceeded from causes which our authorities could not control.