Page:Confederate Cause and Conduct.djvu/122

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History Committee, Grand Camp, C. V.
100

(1) (As Mr. Davis states it) "From the reports of the United States War Department, that though we had sixty thousand more Federal prisoners than they had of Confederates, six thousand more Confederates died in ISTorthern prisons than died of Federals in Southern prisons."

(2) That the laws of the Confederate Congress, the regulations of our Surgeon-General, the orders of our generals in the field, and those who had the immediate charge of prisoners, all provided that they should be kindly treated, supplied with the same rations that our soldiers had, and cared for when sick in hospitals and placed on precisely the same footing as Confederate soldiers.

(3) If these regulations were violated by subordinates in individual instances, it was done without the knowledge or consent of the Confederate authorities, which promptly rebuked and punished any case reported.

(4) If any prisoners failed to get full rations, or had those of inferior quality, the Confederate soldiers suffered the same privations, and these were the necessary consequences of the mode of carrying on the war on the part of the North, which brought desolation and ruin on the South, and these conditions were necessarily reflected on their prisoners in our hands.

(5) That the mortality in Southern prisons resulted from causes beyond our control, but these could have been greatly alleviated had not medicines been declared by the Federal Government as "contraband of war," and had not the Federal authorities refused the offer of our Agent of Exchange, the late Judge Ould, that each Government should send its own surgeons and medicines to relieve the sufferings of their respective soldiers in prisons—refused to accept our offer to let them send medicines, &c., to relieve their own prisoners, without any such privilege being accorded by them to us—refused to allow the Confederate Government to buy medicines for gold, tobacco, or cotton, &c., which it offered to pledge its honor should only be used for their prisoners in our hands—refused to exchange sick and wounded, and neglected from August to December, 1864, to accede to our Agent's proposition to send transportation to Savannah and receive without any equiv--