were brought in, the poor invalids on the neighboring cots crawled from their beds and begged the peelings to satisfy the hunger that was gnawing them.
When complaint was made of this brutality to the sick, there was always a convenient official excuse. Sometimes the fault would be that a lazy doctor would not make out his provision return in time, in which case his whole ward must go without food, or with an inadequate supply, till the next day. Another time there would be a difficulty between the chief surgeon and the commissary, whose general relations were of the stripe characterized by S. P. Andrews as "cat-and-dogamy," which would result in the latter refusing to furnish the former with bread for the sick! In almost all cases the "spiritus frumenti" failed to get to the patients, or in so small a quantity after the various tolls that it would not quicken the circulation of a canary.
But the great fault, next to the scant supply of nourishment, was the inexcusable deficiency of medicine. During several weeks, in which dysentery and inflammation of the bowels were the prevalent diseases in prison, there was not a grain of any preparation of opium in the dispensary, and many a poor fellow died for the want of a common medicine, which no family is ordinarily without—that is, if men ever die for want of drugs.
There would be and is much excuse for such deficiencies in the South—and this is a matter which the Yankees studiously ignore—inasmuch as the blockade renders it impossible to procure any luxuries even for our own sick, and curtails and renders enormously expensive the supply of drugs of the simplest kind, providing they are exotics; but in a nation whose boast it is that they do not feel the war, with the world open to them and supplies of all sorts wonderfully abundant, it is simply infamous to starve the sick as they did there, and equally discreditable to deny them medicines—indispensable according to Esculapian traditions. The result of the ignorance of the doctors, and the sparseness of these supplies, was soon apparent in the shocking mortality of this camp, notwithstanding the healthfulness claimed for the situation. This exceeded even the reported mortality at Andersonville, great as that was, and disgraceful as it was to our government, if it resulted from causes which were within its control.
I know the reader, if a Northern man, will deny this, and point to the record of the Wirz trial. I object to the testimony. There never was, in all time, such a mass of lies as that evidence, for the most part, could have been proved to be if it had been possible to sift the testimony or examine, before a jury, the witnesses. I take, as the basis of my comparison, the published report made by four returned Andersonville prisoners, who were allowed to come North on their representation that they could induce their humane Government to assent to an exchange. Vana spes. Edwin M. Stanton would have seen the whole of them die before he would give General Lee one able-bodied soldier.
