Southern prison with historic and never-to-be-forgotten horrors."
Who is to blame, Corporal Tanner?
My dear friend, the thing that irritates the Southern people is that you Northern people never fail, when you have an opportunity to libel the Confederate government for its ill-treatment of prisoners. We know it is absolutely false, and we know that any intelligent man in the North who knows the facts, knows it is false, and hence we very naturally resent it.
Now, I would like to do this: I would like for the G. A. R. to appoint three good, conservative men from there, and form a committee to bring out all the facts bearing on the treatment of prisoners, provided that the result of the investigation would be published in all the leading magazines of the United States and one or two each in England, Germany and France.
I think a great deal of the ignorance in the North of the period of 1850 to 1874, is due to the fact that Northern magazines and papers would not publish anything that reflected upon the Northern people, particularly during the war. Thousands of articles have been written for Northern magazines by Southern men, trying to put before the country the truth of that period and denying the scurrilous and libelous articles written by the Northern people of the South, but the publishers would refuse them and do even at this time.
Next week I want to inform Corporal Tanner of some reasons why the South is solid, and why it is so strange to the Northern people that the Southern people have not forgotten all about the war.
With much respect, comrade,
J. R. Gibbons,
