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Southern Historical Society Papers.


says, among other things, "When rice was given, the peas were withheld; but when they had no rice, this kind of peas was given instead." It is needless to tell how my blood boiled at such an atrociously malicious and false exhibition. No wonder the hatred of the North is kept alive, and the bloody chasm continually widened by such wicked and uncharitable displays as this in one of the largest and most enlightened States in the Union.

RATIONS TO GUARDS AND PRISONERS THE SAME.

I was for three months a clerk in the Commissary Department at Andersonville, and it was my business to weigh out rations for the guards and prisoners alike; and I solemnly assert that the prisoners got ounce for ounce and pound for pound of just the same quality and quantity of food as did the guards. The State authorities of Ohio ought to blush at thus traducing and slandering a fallen foe, and never in the first instance to have placed on exhibition for preservation as truth this fabrication of partisan hate. No Andersonville prisoner, unless he were lost to all sense of honor and shame, could make such a statement as that the rations were no more than the specimens shown.

WHY THE PRISONERS WERE FED ON CORN BREAD.

It has been charged as a crying shame upon the Confederacy by ignorant humanitarians that the South might at least have given the prisoners wheat bread occasionally; that they rarely ate corn bread in their own land, and that the bread we issued was made of meal so coarse and unsifted that it caused dysentery, thereby largely increasing the mortality. It is well known now that the South depends very largely, and with shame I confess it, on the West for her bread and bacon, and the cotton belt proper makes but little pretension of raising wheat, for the climate, it is said, is unsuited; so that the region round about Andersonville, being in the very heart of the cotton-growing section of Georgia, such a thing as feeding prisoners on flour was simply impossible, and the little flour that was obtained as tithes (one-tenth of all the crops raised was required by our Government) was devoted entirely to the use of the hospitals. Not only was this true of the territory immediately surrounding Andersonville, but of the whole South. Our own armies were unsupplied with flour, and perhaps not one family in fifty throughout the whole land enjoyed that luxury. The guards eat the same bread, or rather meal; the bread eaten by the prisoners being baked by regular bakers (prisoners detailed for that purpose), while the guards did their own cooking. The meal, however, was the same, and both were unsifted and in truth very coarse. I ate the unsifted meal always.

THE DEAD LINE.

Another cry of holy horror is raised every time the "Dead Line" is mentioned, as if this dead line was prima facie evidence that the