allow each to furnish medicines, &c., to their prisoners in the hands of the other—and finally to purchase in the North, for gold, cotton, or tobacco, medicines for the exclusive use of Federal prisoners in the South? Well might General Lee have said to President Davis, in response to expressions of bitter disappointment when he reported the failure of his efforts to bring about an exchange of prisoners: "We have done everything in our power to mitigate the suffering of prisoners, and there is no just cause for a sense of further responsibility on our part."
The Nation says: "We find it difficult to put ourselves in the position of an historian who thinks that this refusal of General Winder and Lieutenant Wirz to furnish shelter was justified by an attempt to escape made by one of the first parties allowed to go outside the stockade months before." Now this, as the reader can readily see by glancing at the sentence, is very different from what we wrote. We did not justify "a refusal of General Winder and Lieutenant Wirz to furnish shelter" (on the contrary, if these "judicial" gentlemen of The Nation will stop their bald assertions and prove that there was such a "refusal," we will join them in strong condemnation of it), but we cited this incident to account for the fact that details of prisoners were not made for the purpose for some time after the first parties violated their paroles and threw away implements which could not be replaced. That these details were made afterwards, our testimony abundantly shows.
We might have mentioned several other reasons for the delay in providing more comfortable quarters for the prisoners at Andersonville: 1. It was always expected to very greatly reduce the number by the establishment of other prisons which were being prepared as rapidly as the means at hand would allow. 2. It was hoped that the United States authorities would surely consent to an exchange of prisoners when the Confederates agreed to their own hard terms, which Judge Ould had finally done. 3. And when our Commissioner proposed in August, 1864, to deliver at Savannah from ten to fifteen thousand prisoners which the Federal authorities might have without equivalent by simply sending transportation for them, it was reasonably supposed that Andersonville would be at once relieved of its over-crowding, for it was not anticipated that the United States Government would be guilty of the crime of allowing its brave soldiers to languish, suffer and die from August until December when "the Rebels" opened the doors of the prison and bade them go without conditions. 4. We ought to have brought out more clearly in our discussion the bearings of the
