The Prison Question Again—Prof. Rufus B. Richardson on Andersonville.
When in March and April, 1876, we published our discussion of the "Treatment of Prisoners," we sent the numbers containing it to leading newspapers and magazines all over the North, wrote them a letter enclosing our "summing up" of the points we claimed to have established, and begged them to point out any errors we had fallen into, and to send me their replies. There were at the time a few flippant or spiteful hits at this effort "to wipe out the ineffaceable crime of Andersonville," but no serious attempt at a reply, which we saw or of which we heard.
A year later the Nation attempted a reply which we published in full in our Papers, and to which we made, what judicious friends in whom we had confidence pronounced a triumphant rejoinder. The Nation declined our proposition to have a full discussion of the whole question which should appear in both journals, refused to reciprocate our courtesy by publishing the reply to their strictures, and thus the matter ended.
Some eighteen months ago Rev. Howard Miller, of Pennsylvania, to whom we had given a copy of our "Confederate View of the Treatment of Prisoners," published our "summing up" in the Philadelphia Times, and asked for a refutation of these "remarkable" statements. We wrote to Mr. Miller requesting that he would forward us any replies that might be made, but none have appeared so far as we have been able so ascertain. Now these papers were prepared much more hastily than was desirable, we lacked many important documents, our work was merely one of compilation, and we take no credit whatever to ourselves, and yet we do affirm that the facts presented have not been met, and are an unanswerable vindication of the Confederate Government from the charges of cruelty to prisoners, so recklessly made and so persistently repeated.
But Professor Rufus B. Richardson, Ph. D., of Bloomington, Indiana, has in the New Englander for November, 1880, an elaborate discussion of "Andersonville" which is so much fairer than anything that has previously appeared on that side, and which, indeed, so completely surrenders the whole question, by admitting that the United States Government alone was responsible for the failure of the cartel for the exchange of prisoners [and, as a consequence, for the detention and suffering of prisoners on both sides] that we would publish it in full but for its great length, and would advise any of our readers who may feel special interest in the subject to procure and study this able article.
