We will next introduce the following
STATEMENT OF GENERAL J. D. IMBODEN.
It touches on points which we have already discussed, and anticipates some others which we shall afterwards give more in detail. But it is a clear and very interesting narrative of an important eyewitness; and we will not mutilate the paper, but will give it entire in its original form:
General D. H. Maury,
Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Southern Historical Society:
General—At your request I cheerfully reduce to writing the facts stated by me in our conversation this morning, for preservation in the archives of your society, and as bearing upon a historical question—the treatment of prisoners during our late civil war, which it seems certain politicians of the vindictive type in the North, led by a Presidential aspirant, have deemed it essential to their party success to thrust upon the country again in the beginning of this our centennial year.
It is to be hoped that after the lapse of ten years since we of the South grounded our arms, passion has so far yielded to patriotism, reason, and sentiments of a common humanity in the minds and hearts of the great mass of intelligent people at the North, that all the facts relating to the great struggle between the States of the North and South may be calmly presented, if not for final decision by this generation, at least to aid impartial mankind in the future to judge correctly between the conquering and the vanquished parties to the contest; and to fix the responsibility where it attaches, to the one side or the other, or to both, for sufferings inflicted that were not necessarily incident to a state of war between contending Christian powers.
I now proceed to give you a simple historical narrative of facts within my personal knowledge, that I believe have never been published, although at the request of Judge Robert Ould, of this city, who was the Confederate Commissioner for the Exchange of Prisoners, I wrote them out in 1866, and furnished the MS. to a reporter of the New York Herald. But the statement never appeared in that journal, for the reason assigned by the reporter, that the conductors of the Herald deemed the time inopportune for such a publication. My MS. was retained by them, and I have never heard of it since.
It is, perhaps, proper to state how I came to be connected with the prison service of the Confederate States. An almost fatal attack of typhoid fever, in the summer and fall of 1864, so impaired my physical condition that I was incapable of performing efficiently the arduous duties of my position as a cavalry officer on active service in the mountains of Virginia, and therefore I applied to the
