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 of 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.
But we can make the case still stronger. Whose fault was it that the Confederacy was utterly unable to supply medicines for the hospitals of either friends or foe? Most unquestionably the responsibility rests with the Federal authorities. They not only declared medicines "contraband of war"—even arresting ladies coming South for concealing a little quinine under their skirts—but they sanctioned the custom of their soldiers to sack every drug store in the Confederacy which they could reach, and to destroy even the little stock of medicines which the private physician might chance to have on hand.
When General Milroy banished from Winchester, Virginia, the family of Mr. Loyd Logan, because the General (and his wife) fancied his elegantly furnished mansion for headquarters, he not only forbade their carrying with them a change of raiment, and refused to allow Mrs. Logan to take one of her spoons with which to administer medicine to a sick child, but he most emphatically prohibited their carrying a small medicine chest, or even a few phials of medicine which the physician had prescribed for immediate use. Possibly some ingenious casuist may defend this policy; but who will defend at the bar of history the refusal of the Federal authorities to accept Judge Ould's several propositions to allow surgeons from either side to visit and minister to their own men in prison—to
