thirty days if he failed. I accepted his terms, and with some difficulty got him through the lines. He failed, and returned within our lines, but just in time to be set at liberty again, as will appear further on. I regret that I have forgotten his name, and have no record of it.
I have already alluded to Captain Wirz's recommendation to put up more shelter. I ordered it, and thereafter daily a hundred or more prisoners were paroled and set to work in the neighboring forest. In the course of a fortnight comfortable log houses, with floors and good chimneys—for which the prisoners made and burnt the brick—were erected for twelve or fifteen hundred men, and were occupied by those in feeble health, who were withdrawn from the large stockade and separated from the mass of prisoners. This same man (Captain Wirz), who was tried and hung as a murderer, warmly urged the establishment of a tannery and shoemaker's shop, informing me that there were many men amongst the prisoners skilled in these trades, and that some of them knew a process of very rapidly converting hides into tolerably good leather. There were thousands of hides at Andersonville, from the young cattle butchered during the previous summer and fall, whilst the country yet contained such animals. I ordered this, too; and a few weeks later many of the barefooted prisoners were supplied with rough, but comfortable shoes; one of them made and sent to me a pair that surprised me, both by the quality of the leather and the style of the shoes. Another suggestion came from the medical staff of the post that I ordered to be at once put into practice: it was to brew corn beer for those suffering from scorbutic taint. The corn meal—or even whole corn—being scalded in hot water and a mash made of it, a little yeast was added to promote fermentation, and in a few days a sharp, acid beverage was produced, by no means unpalatable, and very wholesome. Captain Wirz entered warmly into this enterprise. I mention these facts to show that he was not the monster he was afterwards represented to be, when his blood was called for by infuriate fanaticism. I would have proved these facts if I had been permitted to testify on his trial after I was summoned before the court by the United States, and have substantiated them by the records of the prison and of my own headquarters, if these records were not destroyed, suppressed or mutilated at the time. But after being kept an hour in the court-room, during an earnest and whispered consultation between the President of the court and the Judge-Advocate, and their examination of a great mass of papers, the contents of which I could not see, I was politely dismissed without examination, and told I would be called at another time; but I never was, and thus Wirz was deprived of the benefit of my evidence. My personal acquaintance with Captain Wirz was very slight, but the facts I have alluded to satisfied me that he was a humane man, and was selected as a victim to the bloody moloch of 1865, because he was a foreigner and comparatively friendless. I put these facts on record now to vindicate, as far as
