These prisoners alleged (I quote from memory) that out of a population of about thirty-six thousand at that pen, six thousand, or one-sixth of the whole, died between the first of February and the first of August, 1864. Now at Elmira the quota was not made up till the last of August, so that September was the first month during which any fair estimate of the mortality of the camp could be made. Now, out of less than nine thousand five hundred prisoners on the first of September, three hundred and eighty-six died that month.
At Andersonville the mortality averaged a thousand a month out of thirty-six thousand, or one thirty-sixth. At Elmira it was three hundred and eighty-six, out of nine thousand five hundred, or one twenty-fifth of the whole. At Elmira it was four per cent.; at Andersonville, less than three per cent. If the mortality at Andersonville had been as great as at Elmira, the deaths should have been one thousand four hundred and forty per month, or fifty per cent, more than they were.
I speak by the card respecting these matters, having kept the morning return of deaths for the last month and a half of my life in Elmira, and transferred the figures to my diary, which lies before me; and this, be it remembered, in a country where food was cheap and abundant; where all the appliances of the remedial art were to be had on mere requisition; where there was no military necessity requiring the government to sacrifice almost every consideration to the inaccessibility of the prison, and the securing of the prisoners, and where Nature had furnished every possible requisite for salubrity.
And now that I am speaking of the death-record, I will jot down two rather singular facts in connection therewith.
The first was the unusual mortality among the prisoners from North Carolina. In my diary I find several entries like the following:
Monday, October 3d.—Deaths yesterday, 16, of whom 11 N. C.
Tuesday, October 4th.—Deaths yesterday, 14, of whom 7 N. C.
Now, the proportion of North Carolinians was nothing, even approximating what might have been expected from this record. I commit the fact to Mr. Gradgrind. Can it be explained by the great attachment the people of that State have for their homes?
The second was the absolute absence of any death from intermittent fever or any analogous disease.
Now I knew well that many of the sick died from this and kindred diseases produced by the miasma of the stagnant lake in our camp; but the reports, which I consolidated every morning, contained no reference to them. I inquired at the dispensary, where the reports were first handed in, the cause of this anomaly, and learned that Dr. Sanger would sign no report which ascribed to any of these diseases the death of the patient! I concluded that he must have committed himself to the harmlessness of the lagoon in question;
