Martyria; or, Andersonville Prison
by Augustus C. Hamlin · English · Gutenberg #37813 · 402,864 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Martyria; or, Andersonville Prison
Author: Augustus C. Hamlin
Release date: October 21, 2011 [eBook #37813]
Most recently updated: January 8, 2021
Language: English
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[Illustration: VIEW FROM THE MAIN GATE. Taken from rebel photographs of
the prison when it contained thirty-five thousand men. Original picture in
possession of the author.]
MARTYRIA;
OR,
ANDERSONVILLE PRISON.
BY AUGUSTUS C. HAMLIN.
LATE MEDICAL INSPECTOR U. S. ARMY, ROYAL ANTIQUARIAN, ETC.
_Illustrated by the Author._
BOSTON:
LEE AND SHEPARD.
1866.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by
A. C. HAMLIN,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Maine.
Cambridge Press
DAKIN AND METCALF.
STEREOTYPED AT THE
BOSTON STEREOTYPE FOUNDRY.
TO THE MEMORY OF THE MEN
WHO STEADILY UPHELD THE CAUSE OF CIVIL LIBERTY,
AND WHO PREFERRED LINGERING DEATH,
IN THE MIDST OF UNPARALLELED PRIVATIONS AND HORRORS,
RATHER THAN DISHONOR AND DENIAL OF THEIR BIRTHRIGHTS,
_THIS BOOK_
IS RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED.
NOTE.
The author presents for review neither style nor language: he offers
simply the story of the wrong and the heroism, the cause and effect, as it
rises in his mind.
Neither does he, at this late date, seek to rekindle the smouldering
embers of hate and conflict, nor, Antony-like, attack persons under the
recital of the wrongs. Vengeance does not belong to the human race. There
are times in the history of men when human invectives are without force.
"There are deeds of which men are no judges, and which mount, without
appeal, direct to the tribunal of God."
AUGUSTUS CHOATE HAMLIN.
BANGOR, September, 1866.
MARTYRIA.
[Illustration]
"They never fail who die
In a great cause. * * * *
They but augment the deep and sweeping thoughts
Which overpower all others, and conduct
The world at last to freedom."
_Byron._
I.
History weighs the social institutions of men in the scale of Humanity.
Time, slowly but surely, accumulates the evidence which relates to their
materials. It calmly but firmly unveils the statues which men erect as
their principles, and with "that retributive justice which God has
implanted in our very acts, as a conscience more sacred than the fatalism
of the ancients," lays bare the secret springs of action which have
prompted the deeds of heroism or baseness, of virtue or crime.
Nations are political institutions, and like the system of nature, which
is governed by positive and fixed laws, so they likewise are swayed and
directed by mysterious forces, and influenced and moulded into form by
those external circumstances which are greatly within the control of man.
Their rise and decadence is in direct ratio to the nature and integrity of
their customs, the structure of their social fabrics, the vigor of the
spirit of independence which animates their thoughts, or the strength of
the despotism which consumes their vitals. "Liberty brings benedictions in
spite of nature, and in defiance of the same nature tyranny brings
maledictions. Slavery has always produced only villany, vice, and misery."
Men cannot perpetuate a creed or a system that is not founded on the
eternal principles of justice and virtue, no more than they can control
the elements--no more than they can remove or obliterate those
geographical boundaries, beyond which the human races cannot pass in
pursuit of the forms of wealth or the dreams of ambition.
The Belgian, who has studied so long and so faithfully the laws of
metaphysics, exclaims, "All those things which appear to be left to the
free will, the passions, or the degree of intelligence of men, are
regulated by laws as fixed, immutable, and eternal as those which govern
the phenomena of the natural world!"
II.
Along the southern tier of the great States which form the American
Republic, whose gigantic structure and almost supernatural vigor already
overshadow and animate the older civilizations of the world, we observe
vast extents of level and alluvial lands and deltas, or "rather a series
of littoral bands of remarkable disposition," which the ocean left when
receding from the mountain shores of the interior to its present limits,
or which slowly and gradually emerged from their watery bed in the
upheavals during the long intervals of the earth's ages.
This immense territory, stretching from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, and
hardly broken throughout this long distance by undulations of the soil,
embraces more than six hundred thousand square miles--an extent greater
than that of France and the States of the Germanic Confederation combined.
Eight millions of human souls inhabit the one, whilst one hundred millions
people the other. Ignorance and brutality darken the one, intelligence and
humanity illuminate the other.
III.
The proximity of the sea, the configuration of the soil, the presence or
absence of mountains, affect the growth and character of nations, and
leave their impress upon their institutions. Climate and purity of blood
complete the determination in the problem of life, the progress and degree
of development. Upon these external causes also depend, in a great
measure, the vigor of the imagination, the sentiment of the grand and the
beautiful, the vivacity and purity of the soul.
The cold breezes of the temperate zones conduce men to wisdom, reason, and
philosophy. The enervating atmospheres of hot climes incline the mind and
body to repose, and often pervert the notions of natural justice. In the
one, the mind is ever delighted and refreshed by the varying scenes of
nature; in the other, the forms of the mournful and the terrible alone
excite the imagination.
IV.
We have seen these lands occupied for more than two centuries by the
emigrants from European countries; we have seen the reckless adventurer,
the noble exile, the fugitive from justice, the outcast of society,
blended together here in the experiment of colonization.
The form is still the same, for form is always more persistent than
material in organic life, but the sterling and generous qualities of the
primitive stock have greatly changed.
We have seen in these lands Slavery--that relic of barbarism, that
leprosy, the foulest that ever preyed upon the vitals of any
state--transplanted by that accursed Dutch ship, under the guise of
Humanity, flourish, increase, and assume, during this brief period, the
proportions of a despotism so powerful, so tenacious, as to defy and
resist, almost successfully, the entire strength and resources of the
Republic, enriching the slave faction with enormous wealth, but debasing
and deteriorating the morals, the blood of the poor and non-slaveholding
whites.
This increase of three millions of black men were held in bondage as human
cattle by a few thousand white men. To these unfortunate creatures society
extended no generosity, no consideration, but what reduced them still
lower in the scale of organized beings, and chained them more closely in
the sordid and selfish interests of their remorseless masters. To teach
the black man to read, even the light of the divine Gospel, was a matter
of fine, and imprisonment, and sometimes death.
V.
Seeking to perpetuate this atrocious system, this right of brute force
over the helpless black, and establish a despotism with Slavery as its
basis, the arrogant faction boldly took up arms against the Republic.
"When Fortune," says the Latin historian, "is determined upon the ruin of
a people, she can so blind them as to render them insensible to danger,
even of the greatest magnitude."
Their appeals to arms were in the name of justice and glory, but they were
without the echo of liberty and humanity. They summoned the masses of poor
whites, whom they had degraded below the level of the slave, to rise and
fight for their liberties, which were as empty as the winds of the desert.
There were no liberties, no privileges for the poor whites, but to curse
poverty and question God's providence.
The individual desires of the few had usurped and swallowed up the rights
of society. There was no society but the relation between the black man
and his master. The law, order, and force were all within the control of
the rich slaveholder.
The masses were either their tools, or too abject to be considered as
dangerous; too ignorant to be feared as seditious, too poor to be regarded
as anything more than trash, below the level and the value of the negro.
This condition of the poor whites was the result of physical, political,
and moral causes, long and silently at work.
VI.
The pretence for strife was resistance to oppression, and the extension
and perfection of liberty to the masses; yet they impelled the people to
passion, without mingling a single truth with the illusions with which
they decorated their standards. Whilst they talked of the independent
spirit of the new government, and the glory of resisting the oppressive
policy of the invaders, every act and edict gathered closer and stronger
the bonds which degraded and burdened the poor white.
The owner of seven slaves was exempt from the hazard of battle, but
poverty and starvation of family were no causes of exemption for the
non-slaveholder.
The real design, concealed by the strife, was the foundation of an empire
of gigantic and seductive form, radiant and glittering with the splendid
architecture of aristocratic sovereignty, but without reason or
conscience.
The resolve was to control the production of the principal staples of
industry and trade, and subject the commercial world to their caprices.
Thus they preferred the intoxications of conquest, the gratifications of
lust, to the triumphs of true civilization, to the congratulations of a
redeemed race. They cared not for reputation among the nations of the
earth, nor immortality, nor renown; and they neglected or despised those
happy stars which, now and then, conduct men and races to glory. "Glory
belongs to the God in heaven; upon the earth it is the lot of virtue, and
not of genius--of that virtue which is useful, grand, beneficent,
brilliant, heroic."
VII.
Revolutions almost always spring from the noble and generous enthusiasm of
youth; but seditions arise from the vulgar and ignoble crowd, or from the
outcast few, who would, for wealth, sacrifice all that honor and nature
hold dear; or for the meaner gratifications of self-aggrandizement, would
crumble into dust, and scatter to the winds of the earth, the noblest
institutions and laws of mankind. Who will say that this resort to arms
was an insurrection of justice in favor of the weak, or that it was a
revolt of nature against tyranny?
The agitations of revolutions stir up the innermost natures of men, and
from the revelations out of the depths appear the extreme qualities of the
soul, elevated or debased, according to the inspirations from Heaven or
the influence of a vile cause.
What rays of intellectual light, what flashes of genuine eloquence, burst
forth during the tempestuous times of this period to illumine their
progress or define the glory of their future? When the minds and
imaginations of men are moved in civil war, they betray, in spite of
themselves, the nobility or meanness of their cause. Even the ignorant,
says Quintilian, when moved by the violent passions, do not seek for what
they are to say. It is the soul alone that renders them eloquent. Only the
hoarse clamors for revenge, or the hollow laugh against the remonstrance
of humanity, do we hear from their tribunals and halls of legislation.
Fatuity possessed their minds, and rather than not succeed in their
designs, the leaders would have preferred a dreary solitude to the best
interests of humanity, or, like Erostratus, they would have rather burned
down the temple of liberty itself.
"Pejus deteriusque tyrannide sive injusto imperio, bellum civile."
VIII.
Civil liberty is again triumphant, but at what a sacrifice of human life!
What a deluge of blood has been poured over nature's fields, where the
contending armies have struggled together! A half a million of lives have
been yielded up in this the nation's sacrifice.
"The tree of Liberty," said Barere, "is best watered with the blood of
tyrants;" but how few among this immense host of victims were the
originators of the sedition! The merciless schemers of bloody and cruel
wars rarely expose their precious lives to the chances of combat.
During the existence of the slave system, and the long period of its
progress, what has it produced to enrich the heritage of the human mind?
Where are the holy and pure traditions, the bright recollections?
Neither wisdom nor philosophy has appeared, nor those arts which serve to
form the "happy genius of nations." There are countries where the march of
ideas is accelerated only by the force of selfish passions; and
philanthropy, that true index of civilization, only appears when it is
required by mercantilism or political ambition. The aims and influences of
commercial and political life can debase and destroy the noblest impulses.
"It is a grand and beautiful spectacle," exclaims the eloquent Rousseau,
"to see man issue forth out of nothingness, as it were, by his own proper
efforts, to dissipate, by the light of his reason, the shadows in which
nature had enveloped him, to elevate himself even above himself, to glance
with his spirit even into the celestial regions, to pass, with the stride
of a giant, even as the sun, through the vast expanse of the universe, and
what is still greater and more difficult, to enter one's self, and study
there man, and to understand his nature, his duties, and his end."
IX.
Civilization claims to introduce the elements of peace, happiness, and
prosperity into the structure of society, and to transform the sword and
the spear into the harmless implements of husbandry; yet with a swifter
pace the engines of war increase, man thirsts as fiercely for the blood of
his fellow-man, and the dormant spirit of destruction is as ready to
illume the torch, as in the reckless times of past history. Even in this
enlightened age we are constantly reminded of the truth and force of the
remark of Hannibal: "No great state can long remain at rest. If it has no
enemies abroad, it finds them at home; as overgrown bodies seem safe from
external injuries, but suffer grievous inconveniences from their own
strength."
The motives of self-aggrandizement by force of arms appear to be innate in
human nature. We see men maintaining monstrous ideas. We see great armies
singularly swayed by single minds, in defiance of truth and reason. The
soldiers of Catiline fought to the last gasp, and perished to a man,
embracing the eagle of Marius--"Marius, who sprang from the dust the
expiring Gracchi flung towards heaven," and who first dared attack the
aristocratic nobility, and defend the down-trodden rights of the oppressed
plebeian. There are mysterious laws, which seem to regulate the expansion
and the decay of the human families. There are unseen forces which now and
then impel vicious men to their own destruction.
X.
ANDERSONVILLE--a name which has been stamped so deeply by cruelty into the
pages of American history--is one of those miserable little hamlets, of a
score of scattered and dilapidated farm-houses, which relieve the monotony
of the wide and dreary level of sand plains, which, covered with immense
forests, interspersed with fens, marshes, corn and cotton fields, stretch
away, in unbroken surface, from Macon down to the Florida shores. The
plantations, which were tilled by slave labor, are almost concealed in the
recesses of the forests, so thickly wooded is the country. Here and there
only, where the savannas are of unusual fertility, do the cleared lands
give a wide and extended view of the landscape, but the primeval pines
everywhere hide the distant horizon.
[Illustration: J. H. Bufford's lith. Boston, Mass.]
The song of the laborer rarely disturbs the silence, which is oppressive.
Song is the impulsive outburst of a heart filled with joy and hope. The
slave has neither. His voice is the cry of anguish, of a soul burdened and
crushed, and is more like the moan of the winds than the accents of
civilized man.
The physical aspect of the white inhabitant indicates the local
impressions and inspirations--listless and apathetic in look, lank and
haggard in form. There are countries, there are even limited localities,
where the moral and mental faculties expand in accordance with external
impressions. The laws of beauty and deformity are regulated by the
condition and circumstances of the outward world to a remarkable degree.
The landscape, the sunshine, and the luxuriance at Corinth and Athens gave
rise to the most beautiful flowers of art and love, and to that wonderful
type of human beauty, which the world has since lost; but the rugged and
stern defiles of the mountains of Calabria, of Albania, and the dreary
marsh fens of the Campagna, or of the Netherlands, still produce
characters that rival in ferocity the hyenas of the desert.
* * * * *
Nature appears to have selected for man the sites where are performed the
noble acts which charm and enlighten the mind, or the dark deeds which
cause men to ponder and regret the frailty of their organization. "It
seems that the instincts of war conduct from age to age the armies of
successive empires to the same rendezvous of contest, and that geography
has laid off in advance certain fields of battle, as a sort of arena for
these great immolations of humanity." "Hungary," said Sobieski, "is a
clump of earth, which, if squeezed, would give out but human blood." The
name and look of Andersonville will always be synonymous with and
suggestive of cruelty.
XI.
At the distance of eight hundred paces from the railway which connects the
town with Central Georgia on the north and the Gulf of Mexico on the
south, appears the Prison Stockade, which was located by the Winders of
the Rebel army, at the suggestion of Howell Cobb, in 1863, and occupied
for its specific purpose in February, 1864.
It is situated about fifty miles south of Macon, and its position on the
geographical map is defined by longitude 7 deg. 30' west from Washington,
latitude 32 deg. 10' north of the equator, corresponding in the western
hemisphere to the central region of Algiers.
A dense forest of primeval trees covered the spot which was selected by
the engineers when they marked out the line of the prison. The massive
pines were levelled by the strong arms of several hundred negro slaves,
and when their branches were cut away, they were placed side by side,
standing upright in the deep ditches, which were excavated with
regularity, and in parallel lines, north and south, east and west. Thus
were formed the boundaries of the palisade, wherein nearly forty thousand
human beings were to be herded at one time. The surface of the earth
was cleared completely away, so as to give full play to the elements of
destruction.
[Illustration: VIEW OF THE STOCKADE as the rebels left it.--Page 19.]
Neither shade nor shelter was there to protect from the storm, or from the
merciless rays of an almost tropical sun. Not a tree nor a shrub was left
there to cast a shadow over the arid and calcined earth. There was simply
a rampart of logs, rising from fifteen to eighteen feet in height above
the surface of the ground. This rampart measured at first ten hundred and
ten feet in length by seven hundred and seventy-nine feet in width, and
was surrounded, at a distance of sixty paces, by another palisade of rough
logs more than twelve feet in height. It was afterwards lengthened, in the
autumn of 1864, to sixteen hundred and twenty feet.
This enormous structure still stands there, with its giant walls of trees,
undisturbed.
* * * "May none those marks efface,
For they appeal from tyranny to God."
XII.
A small stream of water, which arose in two branches scarcely a thousand
paces distant, in bogs and fens whose bitterness and impurities continued
with the current, passed through the central portion of the enclosed space
with sufficient volume to supply the wants of many thousand men, if it had
been properly received, protected, and economized.
During the summer many springs burst forth from the soil on either bank of
the stream within the prison; but the water, neglected by the military
guards, soon became defiled by the feet and grime of the prisoners, and
then this portion of the enclosure, embracing several acres, was
transformed into a deep and horrible mire, quivering with those disgusting
forms of organic life which are produced by putrid and decaying matter.
The stench would have corroded the surface of adamant.
Within the two lines of palisades, and on the western side, was erected
the single bakery which was to furnish the munition bread for the
prisoners. Upon the hill to the northward, at the distance of two hundred
paces from the outer line, was strangely placed the building which was
known as the _kitchen_. The reason why this cookery was placed so far from
water, and the direct line of communication with the main gate, the
projectors alone can tell. Consider the enormous weight of provisions and
water which full rations to even ten thousand men would require daily.
Consider, then, the distance from the railway depot, the circuitous route
to the entrance of the prison, the mode, and inefficient transportation,
and you will have an idea of the ignorance, the carelessness, the
perversity or wilfulness, or call it what you will, which prevailed here
in the prison system, if system it can be termed.
XIII.
To the south, on the high land which overlooked the prison and its
appendages, was erected the two-story building which served as quarters
and offices for the officers and clerks. Along the same elevated ridge
were located the well-built huts of the guards, who were selected
from the Confederate Reserves of Georgia, under the command of Howell
Cobb, and numbered from three to five thousand men. Farther to the west,
along the same airy and commanding ridge, and close to the track of the
railway, appears the large two-story wooden buildings, which were built
and arranged, carefully and comfortably, for the sick of the rebel guards.
[Illustration: _PLAN OF PRISON GROUNDS_ ANDERSONVILLE
_Measured by Dr. Hamlin Copy right secured_]
XIV.
To the south-east, and at the distance of a stone's throw from the prison,
were placed the few miserable and decayed tents which were to serve as
hospitals, in mockery of science and humanity.
To-day the traces of this useless philanthropy have passed away, but the
results are fearfully shown in the field to the northward, where thirteen
thousand soldiers sleep in death,--the harvest of one short year! "Here,"
said one of the surgeons to the inquirer, "death might be predicted with
almost absolute certainty."
Here came a medical officer of the highest rank in the Rebel army, and one
of the most eminent _savans_ of the South, to study the physiology and
philosophy of starvation. The notes of that fearful clinic are preserved,
and may some future day startle the scientific world with their clearness,
their candor, their positive evidence of the cause of death. Thus the
scalpel silences the argument, the reasoning of sophistry.
That there was scarcity of medicines, and all of those delicacies known to
the cultivated or luxurious taste, there can be no doubt. Neither the
country, nor the desires of the people, produced or favored their
production; but let us thank Heaven there is proof that there were some
among the medical officers in whom the virtues of the heart were not
entirely reversed, who did protest against the needless deficiencies and
the system of treatment.
The sufferings here were less poignant than in the pen; for nature always
comes to the relief of dying mortals, and tempers the pangs of
dissolution.
Food was demanded, but it was wanting. Shelter and the pure air of heaven
were prayed for by gasping men; even these, too, were wanting. Yet close
by rose the gigantic pines, of the growth of centuries, standing in all
the grandeur of the primeval forests, and offering to the disordered
vision and senses of the dying wretches grateful shades, cool bowers, or
the images of home, and the forms of the well-loved, as the faint and
sinking traveller beholds them in the far-off mirage of the desert.
XV.
The dense pine forests on either side still attest the luxuriant growth,
which was regarded at the time of its selection as the finest timbered
land of all Georgia. These immense pines are even yet so near as to cast
their lengthened shadows, at morning and evening, over the accursed area
where so many noble men perished for want of shelter from the heat of the
noonday sun, the chilling dews of evening, and the frequent rain. The
shade temperature of this place sometimes rose to the height of 105 deg., even
110 deg. Fahrenheit. The sun temperature within the stockade must have
risen to 120 deg. and upwards, for the height of the walls prevented the free
circulation of the air. The heat of this region during the days of summer
is unusually great.
[Illustration: VIEW OF OFFICERS' STOCKADE, with rebel camps and hospitals
in the distance.--Page 21.]
Its elevation above the tide level is only about three hundred feet; and
the hot blasts from the burning surface of the Gulf of Mexico, which is
only about one hundred and fifty miles distant, sweep up over it
northward, without being deviated or modified by ranges of mountains. The
intervening country is unbroken, from distance to distance, by the
undulation of the soil, and resembles more the level of a wide, green sea
than the usual configurations of the solid earth. It bears the reputation
of being unhealthy, and it is not strange; for there are certain isolated
local climates which are absolutely pestilential, as we observe in the
detached mountain groups and table lands of India and Southern Europe. Its
isothermal line passes through Tunis and Algiers, and the hyetal charts
show it to be one of the most humid regions in America.
Fifty-five inches of rain fall here annually, whilst Maine, with her
constant fogs, receives but forty-two and England but thirty-two.
Was it possible for human life to endure these extremes of heat, rendered
still more positive by exposure to the damp and chilly dews of the nights
of southern latitude? It is a well-known fact, that neither men nor
animals can labor or expose themselves with impunity to the rays of the
noonday sun of tropical climes. Man, of all terrestrial animals, is the
least supplied with natural protectives.
XVI.
Around this ill-fated spot were stretched a cordon of connected
earthworks, which completely enveloped the palisades, and commanded, with
seventeen guns, every nook and corner of the enclosure. The forts were
well constructed, and provided against the chances of sudden and desperate
assaults. The cannon were well mounted, and placed in barbette and
embrasure. Lunettes and redoubts covered all the approaches to the two
great gates.
Several regiments of the rebel reserves constantly occupied the forts and
trenches, and guarded closely every avenue. Escape was impossible.
XVII.
To preside over this assemblage, with its arranged, premeditated, and
atrocious system, were selected men well known for their energy of purpose
and their ferocity of soul, and who hoped, like the Parthian, that cruelty
might seem to the eye of man a warlike spirit. Winder has already been
summoned to his God, without affording to the tribunals of men the
opportunity to judge of his justification or his shame. The wretched Wirz,
arraigned and convicted by the most overwhelming evidence, has since paid
the severest penalty which the majesty of violated law can exact on earth.
The instincts of nature always demand a certain respect for the memory of
the dead, no matter how the death may take place. But shall this shield
for the executioner obstruct justice, or reverence and admiration for the
remembrance of the virtues of the nobler victims? Let us bring to light,
and praise the heroism of noble men, even if we violate and break to
pieces the sacred mausoleums where a thousand criminals lie buried.
XVIII.
The dispositions of man depend greatly upon the associations of his early
life. The youthful and pliant organization is easily impressed by the
natural scenes of birthplace and childhood, and the effect of the views of
the savage mountain gorges, the dark and gloomy forests, or the distant
landscape, smiling in the rays of the sun, and decorated with the most
beautiful works of human industry, are felt hereafter in the labors and
conceptions of manhood. Men sometimes are but the living reflections of
the savage scenes among which they have been reared, and seldom do we see
them arise from that immense and world-wide mass of fallen humanity to
cherish anew, to maintain the noble principles of this earthly life, and
lead the willing world to the true worship of the Creator.
Wirz was born among the glorious mountains of Switzerland, where the lofty
and dazzling peaks of eternal snow, pointing upwards into the clear vault
of heaven, impress the human mind with sublimity, or where the deeper
glens sadden the heart and blast the aspiring imagination.
It seems that the natural impressions made upon this man in this beautiful
country were of an earthly and sordid character, for he has always
exhibited, in his wanderings in pursuit of fortune, the reckless and
degraded soul of a mercenary.
Seeking gain in the New World, he turned up in the Slave States when the
revolt was determined upon, and without reluctance, offered his services
to the frantic and savage horde. Although a Swiss and republican by birth
and inheritance, he does not hesitate between liberty and despotism. The
principles of political dogmas do not agitate him; it is the desire for
money, and an insatiate thirst for blood, blasting the natural heart with
cruel and remorseless passions, that led him blindly and swiftly to ruin.
The fatal plunge taken, and there was no return. The compunctions of
humanity passed over his seared and unfeeling conscience, with no more
effect than when the waves surge over the huge rocks which form the bed of
the deepest ocean.
He was selected for the fatal position by the brutal Winder, who first
observed him among the unfortunate prisoners of the first disastrous
battle of the republic. What should recommend him, then, to the notice of
this inhuman officer, can be easily conjectured by the survivors of the
prisons of that period. Cruelty then was pastime, it afterwards became a
law. It was then that some of the chivalry, after the manner of the tribes
of Abyssinia and Eastern Africa, made glorious trophies of the skulls and
the bones of their antagonists who had fallen in battle.
This man appeared at times kind and humane, and his voice had the accents
of benevolence; but when excited, natural sentiments recoiled with horror
at the depth and extent of his imprecations. This assumed gentleness of
disposition is of but little weight among the examples of history.
"I have often said," writes Montaigne, "that cowardice is the mother of
cruelty, and by experience have observed that the spite and asperity of
malicious and inhuman courage are accompanied with the mantle of feminine
softness." The ensanguined Sylla wept over the recital of the miseries he
himself had caused.
That daily murderer, the tyrant of Pheres, forbade the play of tragedy,
lest the citizens should weep over the misfortunes of Hecuba and
Andromache.
The beautiful eyes of the Roman maidens glistened with tears at the
imaginary sufferings of the inanimate marbles of Niobe and Laocoon, yet
how remorselessly they gave the signal of death to the defeated gladiator
on the arena of the Colosseum!
The warm, generous, natural impulses of the heart soon become affected,
impaired, and even reversed by brutal associations.
Circumstances develop greatly the characters of men, and they sometimes
rise to true greatness, or sink into baseness, according to the law of
effect, of contact, and example.
BOOK SECOND.
I.
"Plus in carcere spiritus acquirit, quam caro amittit."--_Tertullian._
"Eternal spirit of the chainless mind!
Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art,
For there thy habitation is the heart--
The heart which love of thee alone can bind:
And when thy sons to fetters are consigned--
To fetters, and the damp vault's dayless gloom,
Their country conquers with their martyrdom,
And Freedom's fame finds wings on every wind."
_Prisoner of Chillon._
Within the deadly shadows of this enormous palisade were assembled and
confined together at one time during the hot months of 1864, more than
thirty-five thousand soldiers, of the various armies of the United
States--more men than Alexander led across the Hellespont to the conquest
of Asia; more men than followed Napoleon in those glorious campaigns over
the bright fields of Northern Italy, where every helmet caught some beam
of glory.
Here were men of all conditions, birth, and fortune--some of the best
blood and sap of the republic.
The strong-limbed lumbermen from the forests of Maine, the tall, gigantic
men from the mountains of Pennsylvania, the hunters of the great
prairies of the West,--those men of wonderful courage and endurance,--the
artisan from the workshop, the student from his books, the lawyer from the
forum, the minister from the pulpit, the child of wealth, and the poor
widow's only son, were collected here in this field of torture.
[Illustration: VIEW OF INTERIOR OF THE PRISON, with the quagmire and
crowds of huts and men beyond. From rebel photographs.--Page 29.]
They were men in the prime of life--young, vigorous, and active--when they
surrendered themselves as prisoners of war. And as prisoners, they were
entitled to the care and treatment acknowledged by the general laws and
usages of civilized nations, and expected even more from those who boasted
of having revived the generosity and chivalric tone of the feudal ages.
Besides justice to all men, we owe special grace and benignity to those
who come into our power from the hazard of battle. However degraded the
suppliant may be, there is always some commerce between them and us, some
bond of mutual relation.
Why these men did not receive that respect which true courage always
accords to the vanquished brave, why they did not receive even that atom
of compassion which belongs to the nature of man, and which is seen even
among the lower animals, history, which loves to avenge the weak and
oppressed, and which affords to all men, to all nations, the opportunity
for their justification, their vengeance, their glory, will surely exhibit
in burning characters of horror and shame. There are men even now who
would sanctify the acts of cruelty of the rebellion over the very ashes of
this the nation's sepulchre. There are men even now who would outrage
virtue, and deify the crime. There are men living, like those of the
past, but not forgotten iron age, possessed of that remorseless fury,
that implacable hatred, which nothing could arrest, nothing could disarm,
and which could no more receive a sentiment of compassion than that
sophistry which allowed outrage and death to the tender and guiltless
child of Sejanus.
"Ut homo hominem, non iratus, non timens, tantum spectaturus occidat."
II.
The intention which directed the formation of this vast camp was Cruelty.
The system which governed, or rather the want of system which neglected,
each department, whether hospital or commissariat, meant Death. The
evidence against the leaders of the Confederacy is not wanting, neither is
it obscure. It is true that most of the witnesses have perished, or are
fast passing prematurely away; but the chain of circumstantial evidence is
so connected, so apparent, that, unless the faith of humanity changes,
that voice, which Tacitus calls "the conscience of the human race," will,
until the end of time, overwhelm with withering scorn the memory of these
men as the assassins of sedition, rather than the heroes and saints of a
just revolution.
We may search history in vain for a parallel in modern times.
Civilization, in its known vicissitudes, cannot point out a spectacle so
horrible.
The massacre, in hot blood, of the Tartars of the Crimea by Potemkin, will
not compare with this slow, merciless, implacable process of murder by
starvation, and violation of those hygienic laws upon which the principle
of life depends. The fusilades of that saturnalia of blood, the French
Revolution, which swept away whole generations, had the pomp of military
executions, which threw a gleam of brilliancy over the scene, and gave
momentary enthusiasm to the victims. Those great immolations of the
Saracens and Persians by the Tartars were as rapid as the cimeters could
flash. "The fury of ideas," says Lamartine, "is more implacable than the
fury of men; for men have heart, and opinion none. Systems are brutal
forces, which bewail not even that which they crush."
"See," said Timour to the learned men of Aleppo, "I am but half a man, and
yet I have conquered Irak, Persia, and the Indies." "Render glory,
therefore, to God," replied the Mufti of Aleppo, "and slay no one." "God
is my witness," said, with apparent sincerity, the destroyer of so many
millions of men, "that I put no one to death by a premeditated will; no, I
swear to you I kill no one from cruelty, but it is you who assassinate
your own souls."
III.
The world has never seen such a display of courage and devotion as was
exhibited by the intelligent masses of the freemen of the North, when the
liberties of the great republic were menaced by the fierce gestures of the
slave faction and their misguided supporters.
Men of all classes, forsaking home, kindred, and property, rushed to
present a living barrier to the impetuous march of the enraged and
misguided horde that pressed on with almost resistless fury, and
threatened to overwhelm and destroy the noblest fabric of the enlightened
mind. At last the carnage of battle has ceased. Nature smiles again, and
rapidly obliterates the marks of the ravages left upon her green fields,
where the huge and desperate armies have swayed and struggled in deadly
conflict. The emblems of civil liberty are again restored, the fasces
replaced; and it now becomes the country to arouse itself from the depths
of apathy, and revive those sentiments of tenderness and gratitude which
nature everywhere bestows upon the memory of those who upheld the cause of
liberty, and fell in its defence.
IV.
To understand fully the determined character, the steadfast loyalty, of
these brave and unfortunate men, we must consider at length the details of
this enclosure, with its hungry, emaciate, filthy mass of humanity, whence
arose a stench of death so powerful as to be perceived at the distance of
a league--the burning sky, the array of instruments of torture, the
manifest design of cruelty.
The suffering wretch had only to pronounce the magic words, "Allegiance to
the Rebel cause," and his sufferings and misery were at an end. The huge
gates flew open, and with grim smiles, the enfeebled and tottering
apostate was welcomed as an accession to the southern ranks.
But the republic was safe here, and the sacred fire of its altars burned
steadily through all the horrors and noxious vapors of this hell on
earth.
Strange to relate, that out of the seventeen thousand registered sick,
there is record of only about _twenty-five_ who accepted the offers to
save their lives, and took the oath of the rebels. Is it not wonderful
that this great number of men should thus, in silence, brave the horrors
by which they were surrounded, and remain firm in their convictions of
right and wrong? An entire army perished, rather than deny the country
which gave them birth! They would no more surrender their principles, than
their homes and altars, as ransoms for their lives.
Has the world's history a parallel to this devotion?
"But these are deeds which should not pass away,
And names that must not wither, though the earth
Forgets her empires with a just decay."
V.
Heroism in the damp and noxious prisons, where the noble qualities of the
mind are shaken and swayed by the sufferings of the body, is far different
from that which is displayed upon the battle-field, amid the glittering
and inspiring pomp of war.
The men at Thermopylae fought in the shadows of the soul-inspiring
mountains, and beheld, through the charm of distance, their homes and the
beautiful valleys they had sworn to defend. The Decii saw the shining
swords of their enemies when they rushed into battle, and the dying nobly
and the glory made all fear of death but of little weight.
Here, instead of bright and glorious banners and the flash of arms, the
long array of men eager for the contest, and the songs, the shouts of
defiance, there was a vast ditch, crowded with living beings of scarce the
human form, haggard and unnatural in appearance--a sea of red and fetid
mud, trampled and defiled by the immense throng. Instead of the white
tents and canopies of military encampments, there were the ragged blankets
vainly stretched over upright sticks; there were the holes in the earth,
the burrows in the sand, like the villages of the rats of the great
prairies of the West. They were more like the dens of the beasts of the
desert than habitations for human beings.
No Christian hand ever penetrated to their depths to aid the sick and
suffering inmates, to nourish the hungry and console the dying, save one
Romish priest; and in spite of the horrors and dangers of the place, he
was faithful to his trust. Noble man! you have proved by these acts that
humanity is not a mendacious idol, and that devotion to humanity is not a
mere matter of gain and self-aggrandizement.
More than four thousand human beings perished in these excavations!
It seemed as though vengeance was prolonged beyond death itself.
"Where was thine AEgis, Pallas, that appalled
Stern Alaric and Havoc on their way?"
VI.
Life here was brief. The victims, as they entered the gate, were appalled
at the horrors that were presented to them in this living sepulchre.
Nature seemed to have abandoned the struggle early, and the young men
passed, with rapid pace, from youth--that youth so rich in its future--to
manhood, from manhood to old age. Neither prudence nor philosophy could
protect them from the grievous influences of the morbid conditions to
which they were exposed. The delicate and noble faculties were blunted and
destroyed. Some perished at once, almost as quickly as though struck by
the lightning of heaven, whilst others lingered, according to the strength
of the hidden resources, the reserved and superabundant powers of youth.
Among the few survivors of the present day we can learn of the fearful
struggle between life and death, by the gray hairs, the impassive
features, from which the smile of youth has fled forever, the feeble and
tottering steps of the man who has prematurely arrived at his limit of
earthly existence.
The integrity and character exhibited by these men, in the midst of these
tortures, is unsurpassed.
It was the same morale that immortalized the armies of Italy and Moreau,
that covered with splendor the heroes of Sparta and Rome, and proved
incontestably the superiority of the volunteer over the mercenary regular.
The wretched men died in silence, or with the name of home or the loved
ones on their lips, and adjuring their comrades to stand firm in defence
of their faith, their country, their God. "My treatment here is killing
me, mother; but I die cheerfully for my country." They died as the wounded
French died at Jemappes, with the delirium and exaltation of patriotism,
uttering at the last moment some of the strains of the songs of freedom,
and the names of country and liberty. "Thus the enthusiasm of the combat
prolonged or reproduced itself, and survived even in their agony."
The sufferings of these men, wasting, putrefying, dying daily by scores,
by hundreds, without touching the remorseless hearts of the
prison-keepers, recall to mind those monsters which history points out as
rising now and then from out the wreck of social order. It was one of the
results of Slavery, for Slavery weakens the natural horror of blood.
Cruelty is naturally progressive, for it engenders the fear of a just
revenge. New cruelties succeed, until extermination becomes the rule and
ends the scene.
"To hate whom we have injured is a propensity of the human mind," says
Tacitus.
VII.
At the distance of about five hundred paces northwestward from the
stockade, in a little field which is almost overshadowed by the
surrounding pines, appear a multitude of stakes standing upright in the
earth, in long and regular lines.
Upon every one of these fragments of boards figures have been carelessly
scratched by an iron instrument; and they run up to the appalling number
of almost thirteen thousand! Each stick represents a dead man,--a
hero,--and this multitude of branchless and leafless trunks reminds us
rather of a blasted vineyard than of a cemetery arranged for the human
dead.
[Illustration: VIEW OF THE GRAVEYARD, with its thirteen thousand victims,
as the rebels left it. Taken from rebel photographs in possession of the
author.--Page 37.]
I have seen many of the rarest sculptures in civilized lands, where art
has lavished and exhausted its powers to awaken sympathy for the dead, but
have met with none that moved my heart more impressively than the brief,
vague inscriptions, the rude memorials of this silent and neglected field,
where sleep an entire army of freemen, who preferred lingering death
rather than allegiance to a rebel and wicked faction.
Beneath the red clods of this field, thickly as the leaves of autumn, are
stretched side by side a number of men more numerous than all of the
American soldiers who perished by disease and casualty of battle during
the Mexican war--more than all of the British soldiers who were killed, or
perished from their wounds, on the bloody fields of the Crimea, the
desperate struggles at Waterloo, the four great battles in
Spain,--Talavera, Salamanca, Albuera, Vittoria,--and also the sanguinary
contest at New Orleans. All these losses of the sons of the British empire
do not build up a hecatomb of the human dead so high, so vast, so red, as
this one single link of the great chain of wrong that stretched from
Virginia to Texas.
There is no battle-field on the face of the globe, known to the antiquary,
where so many soldiers are interred in one group as are gathered together
in the broad trenches of this neglected field among the pine forests of
Georgia. What a gathering is this! What a monument of the incarnation of
political lust, of the reckless desperation, the implacability of the
depraved human heart, when resolved upon cruelty! The world does not
offer, among all of her extant memorials, a more terrible, a more
impressive comment upon the ambition, the power, the glory of mankind.
VIII.
Respect to the dead is an instinct of nature; and to leave the remains of
a fallen comrade upon the field, unhonored, is repugnant even to the red
men of the forest. How much more, then, does a civilized nation, of high
degree, owe to the memory of its brave defenders! Will it now forget the
noble sacrifice of its sons amid the debasing influences of commerce and
manufacture? Shall these sticks, which mark the nation's sacrifice,
moulder into dust, and with their brief inscriptions be swept away by the
winds of the world, and all traces of this heroism, this martyrdom, lost?
Here is something required more than brief, hollow, human gratitude, and a
sonorous, perishable epitaph.
Whatever rises above the level of this plain to commemorate for future
ages the devotion of the men who sleep beneath, should be of lasting
material, and as colossal as the gigantic proportions of the republic
itself: or the field should be levelled and swept, and every
distinguishing sign blended and effaced, and the true altar of memorial
erected in the hearts of all men who believe and revere those eternal
principles of love, justice, truth.
Liberty has but one inscription to offer, and that is the noble lines
which were traced on the dungeon wall in the blood of the noblest and
purest of the Girondins: "_Potius mori quam foedari_"--Death rather than
dishonor.
IX.
Impartial history will give to the memory of these men a place among the
records of useless murder.
The law of parole was all-sufficient to prevent their return to service,
and their absence from the fields of campaign would have been of no
material weight with the prolific North.
But the intent of their captors was cruelty; and they strove to reduce the
numbers, and to intimidate the courage, of the Federal soldiers, by acts
of savage barbarity, as the relentless Tartar hoped to terrify the Hindoos
into the profession of Mohammedanism by sacrificing multitudes, and
deluging whole countries in blood.
To deny the criminality is, as Lamartine says of the massacres of
September, "to belie the right of feeling of the human race. It is to deny
nature, which is the morality of instinct. There is nothing in mankind
greater than humanity. It is not more permissible for a government than
for a man to commit murder. If a drop of blood stains the hand of a
murderer, oceans of gore do not make innocent the Dantons. The magnitude
of the crime does not transform it into virtue. Pyramids of dead bodies
rise high, it is true, but not so high as the execration of mankind."
BOOK THIRD.
I.
Let us now examine and consider, with impartial eye, the Stockade in
detail--the locality, the hospital, the dietary, and, in fact, all that
relates to the condition of life in this region; reviewing at length the
laws which regulate the animal economy, and judging of cause and effect
with that spirit which Bacon calls the "_prudens quaestio_."
In selecting new grounds for the habitations of human families, whether in
large or limited numbers, particular care must always be observed,
especially in warm climes, or where malarial influences are known to
prevail. In the selection of places for the encampment of troops, the
problem is still more difficult to treat, on account of the general
dyscrasial condition of the soldier; and oftentimes far more skill and
prudence are required than in the choosing of a field for battle.
How many a noble regiment have we seen impaired in its effective strength,
and robbed of its glorious future, by the injudicious encampment, where
vain and ignorant officers have sacrificed the health and morale of their
men to please their fanciful ideas as to military etiquette--the form of
shelter, the position, and the regularity of the prescribed lines of
encampment!
In one of the last campaigns of Europe, when all the resources which
modern wealth could afford were lavished with unsparing hand, there was a
useless and preventible loss of life, that recalled the most disastrous
epidemics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
War is one of the natural laws for the demolition of the human race, and
we see the spirit of destruction silently at work among friends as well as
foes. The supreme commands seem mysteriously to be placed in the hands of
men who can cause the greatest devastation and sacrifice of life; who
march their columns steadily to the deadly and murderous assault when
there is no occasion for it; who encamp their troops in pestilential
lowlands, when the healthy heights offer safer and better accommodations.
"Nobilitas cum plebe perit, lateque vagatur ensis."
II.
It is a melancholy fact, attested by the distinguished Marshal Saxe, that
the military men of modern times are far less informed than the great
generals of antiquity in the profound knowledge of public hygiene, and
especially of that which relates to the economy of armies. We can admire,
but hardly improve, the physical education imposed upon the volunteers of
Sparta and the legionaries of Rome; and we have not surpassed their
scientific, yet rude alimentation, by which they marched over immense
distances with rapidity, and preserved their vigor and morale. From the
extant documents of the ancients, from Xenophon or Vegetius, it is shown
that their acquaintance with whatever related to clothing, encampment,
food, the graduation of exercises, and the employ of forces, was of the
highest character.
The effects of high and low lands, of good and bad water, on the diseases,
energy, character, and intellect of man, have been sketched in a masterly
manner by Hippocrates.
The exposure of a few hours to malignant influences may impair the
strength of an army to such a degree as to thwart the most skilful plans,
the wisest combinations for vigorous campaigns, as, for instance, the
Walcheren expedition of the English, the Neapolitan campaign of France,
when her army was reduced from twenty-eight thousand to four thousand
effective men, in one hundred hours, from an injudicious encampment at
Baie, or when Orloff lost his army in Paros, or, still later, the disaster
to the splendid division of the French army under Espinasse, in the fatal
Dobrutscha.
Armies have been lost, the fate of empires decided, by the violation or
neglect of the simple rules of hygiene; and all through the blood-stained
pages of military history do we observe examples, from the time when
Scipio lost the battle of Trebbia, or when Bajazet threw away his vast
empire on the plains of Angora, down to Kunersdorf, when the impetuosity
of Frederick the Great would not allow rest to his men or horses.
III.
In 1863 the depots near Richmond became so crowded by the Federal
prisoners that it became a matter of serious consideration to the rebel
authorities how to guard them, and attempt to feed them and the regiments
guarding them. Then the idea was conceived of forming a Great camp in the
Gulf States, in a locality fruitful in grain, and in a position secure
from raids from the Federal cavalry. Several locations were examined, but
none pleased the selecting officer, until he had examined the site at
Andersonville, to which he conceived a particular fancy. There were places
in this section of the country where pure water could be obtained in
abundance, but these spots were not so readily accessible, and wood was
not so plenty and handy as at this. There was another consideration in the
public view of its selection, that it was in the heart of the best
corn-producing region at that time in Georgia, and easy access could be
had with the everglades of Florida, where herds of half wild cattle roamed
at will.
It is not the belief of the writer, although there are many facts to
warrant such an inference, that the selection was made with the view of
deliberately destroying the prisoners openly, and without reserve, for
there were other localities far more pestilential than this; and yet, on
the other hand, there were also many situations infinitely more salubrious
and easy of access. There was in reality not much reflection in the
matter. The selectors thought only of the geographical and strategical
position; they cared not for its topography or its meteorology.
They consulted only their convenience. The idea of the preservation of the
lives of their unfortunate prisoners never troubled their minds, never
disturbed their conscience. They would build a safe and secure pen, and if
God, in his infinite and mysterious mercy, chose to summon from earth any
of the hapless wretches, they would not consider themselves as accountable
for the premature deaths. Such was their reasoning. Such was their
philosophy. Such was their conscience. The exult of Winder, when asserting
that he was doing more for the Confederacy than a dozen regiments at the
front, and the exclamation of Howell Cobb, when pointing to the ten
thousand graves, "That is the way I would do for them," were perhaps the
bravado of the southern slaveholder. Even at this late date we can find
men, of some tenderness, in this vicinity, who have reasoned their weak
minds into the idea and belief that no harm was ever done or intended; and
even if it can be proved, then the Federals only received what they
deserved, and no more than their own sons in the prisons of the North
endured.
Such was the conscience of the Pharisee.
Such was the remark made to the writer by a southern gentleman over the
graves of the victims.
IV.
The topographical features of the site are not particularly objectionable
for an encampment of a few hundred men.
The northern and southern banks incline sufficiently towards the stream in
the centre to allow of proper drainage. The stream itself furnished water
in sufficient volume to provide for the wants of ten thousand men, if it
had been turned from its channel above the stockade, and introduced into
the prison by simple sluices. But to this important item there was not the
least attention paid.
To preface the analysis of this stockade, &c., we may wisely review the
remarks of the late Dr. Jackson, the chief medical officer of the British
army.
V.
"A necessity occurs in war, on many occasions, which leaves no option of
choice in occupying posts of an unhealthy character: but there is,
unfortunately, an authority, derived from example and the sanction of
great names, which directs the military officer, when under no military
necessity, to fix his encampment on grounds which are unhealthy in
themselves, or which are exposed by position to the influence of noxious
causes, which are carried from a distance.
"Such advice proceeds from the desire to act on a presumption of
knowledge, which cannot be ascertained, rather than to act by the
experience of facts, which man is qualified to observe and verify.
"It is consonant with the experience of military people, in all ages and
in all countries, that camp diseases most abound near the muddy banks of
large rivers, near swamps, and ponds, and on grounds which have been
recently stripped of their woods. The fact is precise: but it has been set
aside to make way for an opinion.
"It was assumed, about half a century since, by a celebrated army
physician, that camp diseases originate from causes of putrefaction, and
that putrefaction is connected radically with a stagnant condition of the
air. As streams of air usually proceed along rivers, with more certainty
and force than in other places, and as there is evidently a more certain
movement of air, that is, more winds, on open grounds than among woods and
thickets, this sole consideration, without any regard to experience,
influenced opinion, and gave currency to the destructive maxim, that the
banks of rivers, open grounds, and exposed heights, are the most eligible
situations for the encampment of troops. They are the best ventilated:
they must, if the theory be true, be the most healthy. The fact is the
reverse. But demonstrative as the fact may be, fashion has more influence
than multiplied examples of fact, experimentally proved.
"Encampments are still formed in the vicinity of swamps, or on grounds
which are newly cleared of their woods, in obedience to theory, and
contrary to fact. The savage, who acts by instinct, or who acts directly
from the impressions of experience, has in this instance the advantage
over the philosopher, who, reasoning concerning causes he cannot know, and
acting according to the result of his reasonings, errs and leads others
astray by the authority of his name.
"The savage feels, and acting by the impression of what he feels, instead
of fixing his habitation on the exposed bank of large rivers, unsheltered
heights, or grounds newly cleared of their woods, seeks the cover of the
forests, even avoids the streams of air which proceed from rivers, from
the surface of ponds, or from lands newly opened to the sun. The rule of
the savage is a rule of experience, founded in truth, and applicable to
the encampment of troops, even of civilized Europeans.
"In accordance with this principle, it is almost uniformly true, _caeteris
paribus_, that diseases are more common, at least more violent, in broken,
irregular, and hilly countries, where the temperature is liable to sudden
changes, and where blasts descend with fury from the mountains, than in
large and extensive inclined plains, under the action of equal and gentle
breezes only. From this fact, it becomes an object of the first
consideration, in choosing ground for encampments, to guard against the
impression of strong winds, on their own account, independently of their
proceeding from swamps, rivers, and noxious soils.
"In countries covered with woods, abundantly supplied with straw, and
other materials applicable to the purpose of forming shelter, it is, upon
the whole, better to raise huts and construct bowers than to carry canvas.
The individual is exercised by labor, and as his mind is employed in
contriving and executing something for self-accommodation, he is furnished
with a daily opportunity of renewing the pleasure. The mode of hutting,
here recommended, effectually precludes the evils arising from those
contaminations of air in which contagion is generated--an evil which often
arises in tents, and is carried about with an army in all its movements in
the field."
* * * * *
The view of the ancients in regard to the encampment of troops may be
understood from the counsel of Vegetius: "Ne aridis et sine opacitate
arborum campis, aut collibus ne sine tentoriis aestate milites
commorentur."
VI.
As we have remarked before, the site of the prison was covered with trees
when its outlines were traced and surveyed by the rebel engineers. These
trees, felled to the ground, were hewn, and matched so well on the inner
line of the palisades as to give no glimpse of the outer world across the
space of the dead line, which averaged nineteen feet in width, and which
was defined by a frail wooden railing about three feet in height, from
fifteen to twenty-five feet distant from the palisades.
[Illustration]
This line of stockade rose from fifteen to eighteen feet above the surface
of the ground, while the outer line of logs, which was erected about sixty
paces distant from the inner line, was formed of the rough trunks of
pines, and projected twelve feet above the earth. The original stockade
measured but ten hundred and ten feet in length, and seven hundred and
eighty-three feet in width; and within this space were jammed together,
for several months, from twenty-two thousand to thirty-five thousand men,
thus giving a superficial area to each man, when the prison contained
thirty thousand prisoners, but seventeen square feet, after deducting the
nineteen feet average for the dead line, and the quagmire, three hundred
feet in width. This measurement would allow for thirty-five thousand men
but fifteen square feet of area, or less than two square yards to each
person, or more than twenty times the density of Liverpool. This was all
the space that was afforded before the enlargement, and this reckoning
does not include roads or by-paths for communication among the prisoners.
Seventeen and a half square feet of earth are allowed for the coffin's
length in the field of sepulchres. There were here to be seen twelve acres
of living men, packed together like the immense shoals of fish in the
ocean, but like nothing that has life on the earth, not even the
ant-fields. The ratio of density was equivalent to more than sixteen
hundred thousand people to the square mile. The densest portion of East
London has the great number of one hundred and sixty thousand to the
square mile.
VII.
In the month of August the stockade was lengthened six hundred and ten
feet, by what influence or from what cause it is unknown; but nevertheless
it was enlarged to the length of sixteen hundred and twenty feet,--thus
making the entire area sixteen hundred and twenty by seven hundred and
eighty-three feet. This enlargement was a salutary movement on a small
scale, but it only prolonged the sufferings of the victims. The thirty
thousand men had now twenty-two acres, minus the dead line and marsh, or
thirty square feet per man, or three and a half square yards. There were
actually, during this month, thirty-five thousand men within the prison,
and some authorities give me as high as thirty-six thousand. This density
is enormous, and cannot be tolerated by animal life in any climate, in any
latitude, of the world. There must be space for organic life to develop
and maintain itself, otherwise it perishes. To give a correct idea of the
crowded condition of this pen, we do not know where to turn for example.
The great cities of civilized lands do not even approximate in their ratio
of populations.
The relation of density, in the three great divisions of London, give
thirty-five, one hundred and nineteen, and one hundred and eighty square
yards to each inhabitant. The densest portion of Liverpool, with its lofty
and immense brick ranges of buildings, swarming with industrial life,
gives more than eighty square feet to each person. The early Roman camps,
which are a marvel to military men, and the closest known to military
science, gave to the ordinary legion three hundred and sixty-seven
square feet of area to each man. The plans of Polybius give two hundred
and thirty square feet to each soldier of the consular army of two
legions, numbering nearly eighteen thousand men, and the descriptions of
Hyginus give similar ratios.
[Illustration: _PLAN OF PRISON GROUNDS_ ANDERSONVILLE
_Measured by Dr. Hamlin Copy right secured_
J. H. BUFFORD'S LITH BOSTON.]
The encampments of the United States infantry afford, in the most
restricted portion (between stacks of arms and kitchens), two hundred and
forty-four square feet per man, or seventeen hundred and thirty-one square
feet per man for the whole camp.
The space allowed by law for barracks alone is fifty-four square feet for
each soldier, reckoned on the basis of a full complement of men. The rules
of the rebel army concerning camps are the same as those of the
regulations of the United States army.
The United States prison at Elmira contained six thousand men, and
extended over forty acres. The other prisons, at Chicago, Johnson's
Island, Point Lookout, and Fort Delaware, were provided with spacious
exercise grounds, and furnished with covered barracks, built of proper
form, and fitted up with the required conveniences of life. Belle Isle,
which held ten thousand prisoners, had but six acres, and no shelter, no
conveniences whatever.
Andersonville, which contained over thirty thousand prisoners, had in the
stockade, before enlargement, but eighteen acres in all, and but twelve
acres for the use of the prisoners, minus the dead line and the marsh.
The prison at Dartmoor, in England (which was a paradise in comparison
with Andersonville), where our prisoners were held in captivity by the
English during the last war, furnished two hundred to three hundred
square feet to every prisoner in the barracks, besides allowing spacious
yards, where the prisoners were permitted to exercise daily. There were
there seven large two-story stone buildings, each one hundred and eighty
feet in length. Five thousand prisoners enclosed within twenty acres of
land at Dartmoor, thirty thousand in twelve acres, or thirty-five thousand
in twenty-two acres, at Andersonville.
VIII.
The timbers composing the stockade were of entire trunks of pines, massive
and solid, and measuring from one to three feet in diameter. They were
sunk into the earth for about five or six feet, and held in position at
the top by long, slender pines, nailed on the outer side by large iron
spikes. There were but two gates for this vast prison, and but two
corresponding apertures in the outer palisade. These gates were
constructed of massive timbers, and protected by a strong porch, occupying
a base of about thirty feet square. These were always strongly guarded, to
prevent the sudden rush of masses of men. At intervals of about one
hundred feet, were erected detached and covered platforms, upon the outer
side of the palisades, which, overlooking the summit of the wall, and the
enclosure beyond, served as sentry boxes. The sentries, perched
buzzard-like on the wall, could observe, from their high positions, at all
times, the actions, the motions of the uncovered prisoners, and with their
rifles shoot down the offending prisoner, whether he stood talking with
his comrades, in the centre of the space, or whether he approached the
sacred precincts of the dead line.
[Illustration]
Sometimes they threw down their unconsumed fragments of bread to the
hungry men. Sometimes they were hurled with curses; rarely were they
thrown from feelings of compassion. Yet there were some kind-hearted men
here, in the degrading position of the sentry box, who viewed the scene
with affright, and who wept bitterly over the awful torture and sacrifice
of life.
The author, travelling on foot among the mountains and forests of Northern
Georgia, after peace was declared, found these evidences of humane feeling
among the letters preserved in the humble cabins of the poor whites. That
unoffending men were shot down without warning, there is no doubt
whatever; that men, weary of torture, staggered to the dead line, and
calmly, joyfully received the fatal shot, there is positive evidence.
IX.
The trees were all removed from the enclosure, and with the specific
intent of cruelty, as was openly stated by the brutal builders. They
should have no shade, it was said, and no shade had the wretched men but
what was cast by the few ragged and rotten blankets and shelter tents that
the prison examiners passed by as utterly worthless in their examination
and search for articles of value, whether watches, bank notes, hats,
shirts, and even shoes. There were men who, robbed at the outer gates,
entered the prison almost naked. This system of robbery was open and
audacious, and it is said that the only prisoners who escaped spoliation
were those who were taken from Sherman when Atlanta fell, and when
consternation prevailed at the prison in consequence. It is positively
stated that it was sanctioned by Wirz and Winder. At all events, two men,
by the names of Hume and Duncan, robbed the prisoners systematically, and
appropriated the packages sent to the prisoners, from the United States,
to such an extent that few if any articles ever reached the poor men to
whom the boxes of food and clothing were sent.
These blankets and rags were vainly stretched over sticks, to form the
semblance of a habitation, wherever the earth gave firm foothold, even
along the borders of the pestilential marsh. Those who were destitute of
even these shreds of cloth, dug with their hands holes in the earth,
after the example of wild beasts, or with the slimy water from the brook
they built up, with handfuls of mud, little cabins over hollows scooped
out from below the surface of the ground, and as rude as the clumps of
earth, which that lowest degree of the human form--the Digger
Indian--inhabits.
[Illustration]
These may be seen at the present day, looking like the lodges of the
beaver, or the mounds of the marmots of the prairies, and half concealed
by those wild, useless, and noxious weeds which linger in, and cling to
the footsteps of man, as he wanders in his migrations over the
uncultivated lands of the globe.
Sometimes the heavy rains washed away the roofs of mud, inundating the
occupants beneath. Some of the poor wretches had not the strength to lift
up the incumbent mass of earth, and perished miserably in their dens.
There are now in these demolished excavations the bones of some of our
fellow-citizens, unknown and unhonored. The cry of distress was so
constant that few heeded the smothered moan. The stumps of the fallen
trees were grubbed up by the knives and fingers of the prisoners for
firewood to warm themselves with, or to cook their scanty food; even the
roots were followed down deep into the earth, for the purpose of obtaining
the means of warmth which were almost entirely denied them by the prison
keepers.
X.
There is no excuse for this wanton exposure to the vicissitudes of the
climate, for the forests adjoining were immense in their extent, and
thousands of the suffering men offered, begged to go and obtain material
to build sheds or huts to protect them from the inclemency of the weather.
Neither parole was allowed for this purpose, nor real attempts made to
obtain the building tools. To show the force of the argument that the
rebels had not sufficient aid, and that it would have been dangerous to
have paroled any of these prisoners, there is the fact that there were
several large steam saw-mills in the vicinity, and they could have easily
afforded, in few weeks, all the lumber required for the purpose of
shelter.
Was it recklessness, was it perversity, or was it malice aforethought,
that withheld from the prisoners the means of shelter? The few sheds that
were erected were not commenced until late in the term of its
occupation, too late to render much service. They were merely roofs of
boards, placed upon posts, at the distance of seven feet from the ground.
There were neither sides nor partitions to these sheds, and they were not
required during the hot months.
[Illustration: VIEW OF THE MANNER IN WHICH THE DEAD WERE INTERRED.
The bodies were laid in rows of one hundred to three hundred, and after
the earth was thrown over them a stake was thrust down to mark the place
of burial. This view is taken from a rebel photograph.--Page 57.]
Pity was not a virtue that was recognized here: the noble impulses of the
heart were reversed, and the natural instincts perverted.
The dead bodies of the thousands who perished within the stockade, without
medical attendance, were dragged forth, without care, and thrown
promiscuously into the common field-carts, which, with their carelessly
heaped-up burdens, proceeded to the trenches, where the dead heroes were
laid in long lines, side by side, two or three hundred in a trench, and
then a stick was thrust into the ground, at the head of each man, to
indicate the place of burial. For the care observed in the burial of the
dead after the carts arrived at the cemetery, and the preserving of the
records of the victims, and the place, we are indebted to our own men, who
were paroled especially for the purpose.
The only solicitude observed by the rebels during or after interment of
their victims, was shown by the civil engineer or surveyor of the town. He
thought that so much animal matter should not go entirely to waste, and so
commenced to plant grape vines over the mounds of the decomposing dead.
To show the utter want of decency which ruled all things connected with
the prison, it is stated by positive eye-witnesses that the same carts
that transported the dead, went forth (without being cleansed of their
reeking and disgusting filth), to the shambles and the depots for the
meat and corn for the living prisoners.
XI.
An eminent statistician has stated that mortality is in direct ratio to
the density of population, and that superficial area is as essential to
health as cubic space. To the writer's mind, the overcrowding of the men,
and their exposure to the variations of heat and cold, the influence of
moisture, and the foul emanations of the infected soil, were sufficient to
cause great destruction of human life; and when combined with the
deficient dietary, the imagination can hardly conceive of a better field
for disease and death than the condition of this swarming pen. All the
elements and combinations of physical destructiveness were here in full
play. "Losses by battle," says Sir Charles Napier, "sink to nothing,
compared with those inflicted by improperly constructed barracks, and the
jamming of soldiers--no other word is sufficiently expressive."
"Diseases," states the French Inspector Baudens, "slay more men than steel
or powder, and it is often easy to prevent them by a few simple hygienic
precautions."
In all campaigns where the care of the soldier is left to the military
man,--who is educated for destruction, and has not been taught in the
economy of life,--we see in the mortuary and non-efficient lists a
disgraceful and culpable array of thoughtless routine, vulgar prejudices,
and systems. In our Military Academies the elements and the means of
destruction are taught, but not a law unfolded that relates to the
principles of health, strength, and life. To alleviate the burden of the
military list by sanitary measures is an idea unheard of, or at least
unnoticed. "For these works," writes Chadwick, in his papers on "Economy,"
"a special training is needed for our military engineers, whose present
peculiar training is only for old works for war, and for those
imperfectly,--works for the maintenance of the health of an army being
necessary means to the maintenance of its military strength.
"The one-sided character of the common training of our military engineers
was displayed in the Crimea, in the proved need of a sanitary commission
to give instruction for the selection and the practical drainage of proper
sites for healthy encampments, for the choice collection and the proper
distribution of wholesome water, for the construction of wholesome huts,
and the proper shelter and treatment of horses as well as men."
XII.
In this enclosure, during a period of twelve months, from five thousand to
thirty-six thousand human beings ate, slept, and drank, whilst the piles
of filth were constantly accumulating, and the germs of infection silently
at work. There was no regularity in the arrangement of the interior. Men
collected in groups in the day time, and they lay in rows, like swine, at
night.
The stream, which with little ingenuity could have been turned to a
blessing for the prison, was allowed to be obstructed by the heaps of
grime; and enlarging its area, it assisted in forming the extensive
quagmires, which were several acres in extent. So little care was
observed for the comfort or the health of the prisoners, that all the
washings of the bakery, all the filth of the out-houses of the workmen,
were allowed to pass down and mingle with the current of the stream only
thirty feet above the point of entrance into the stockade. The traveller
can observe to-day that this malicious act of refined cruelty, or fatal
error in hygiene, was really perpetrated.
Besides this, the drains of the camp and the town above emptied themselves
into this stream which supplied the prison with water.
XIII.
The bakery was located on the west side of the stockade, about equidistant
from either line of palisade. It was of rough boards, and but one story in
height. Its interior disclosed two rooms, one of which communicated with
the two ovens, which were built of common brick. These two ovens--fourteen
feet in length by seven feet in width, and with one kneading-trough
fifteen feet long, and less than three feet in width--supplied the
prisoners with all the bread they obtained; and so far the writer has not
learned that there was any other source of supply.
These same ovens, kept red hot, and worked night and day, to the fullest
capacity, by the commissary bakers of the United States service, could not
have produced but eight thousand rations of white bread, and but nine
thousand six hundred rations of corn bread. This is the extreme limit; and
regarded by the workmen, who have made the calculations, as almost an
impossibility. The ordinary capacity of this establishment was probably
about four or five thousand rations of corn bread. This quantity, divided
daily among thirty thousand men, would give but a small morsel to each
one; and this gives the appearance of truth to the statement, that from
two to six ounces of corn bread were furnished as rations to the
prisoners.
[Illustration]
Ask a survivor of this prison treatment, if perchance you can find one,
how he preserved his life, and he will tell you, "By eating the rations of
the dying." Ten thousand men were sick or dying in this enclosure at one
time.
After the carts, with their scanty burdens of food, had passed into the
prison, and distributed their contents, ten or fifteen thousand of the
haggard and starving men might be seen collected together in the central
portion of the prison trading with each other. Some of the poor
wretches would be offering a handful of peas for a knot of wood no
larger than the human fist, in order that they might cook their allowance;
others offering, in barter, their remnants of clothing--a cap, or a shoe,
or anything they possessed--for a morsel of food.
[Illustration: _PLAN OF PRISON BAKERY_ ANDERSONVILLE Ga.]
The little knots of wood above mentioned had a standard value of fifty
cents; yet there were immense forests all around, and within sight on
every side.
XIV.
There appears to have been but one kitchen for this vast assemblage, and
that strangely situated--far in rear of the outer palisade, away from
water-course or spring. The soil to-day does not present traces of a
much-travelled road from its doorway to the main gate, distant about one
third of a mile by the route taken. Consider the enormous weight of
provisions which should have passed over this road when the prison
contained more than twenty thousand men. This kitchen was a plain
one-story shed, built of rough boards, one hundred feet in length, and
less than fifty feet in width. It contained in the interior two
medium-sized ranges, and four boilers of fifty gallons' capacity each. The
capacity indicated does not by far equal the cooking apparatus which is
required and furnished to the Lincoln and Harewood Hospitals, of
Washington, for twelve hundred men.
It is the opinion of the writer, who is familiar with the amount of
cooking apparatus required by large hospitals and camps, that this
kitchen, with its implements, could not, in the course of twenty-four
hours, by constant relays of industrious workmen, have furnished cooked
rations to more than five thousand men. There may have been other
arrangements for cooking in the open air; but there are no longer any
traces of such operations, nor has the writer any evidence that such was
the case.
[Illustration]
XV.
Upon the banks of the same stream, and near the railroad station, was
erected the stockade which was intended for the confinement of the
officers; but it was abandoned, after few weeks' occupation, partly from
motives of prudence and in fear of revolt in keeping officers near so
great a number of the rank and file of the army, and partly from the
unfortunate selection of the locality. The officers were removed to Macon,
and were confined there in the cotton sheds during a long period. This
pen, known as the officers' stockade, was built of pine-tree palisades,
fifteen feet high, and measured one hundred and ninety-five feet in length
by one hundred and eight feet in width, and was provided with a shed in
the interior forty-five feet long by twenty-seven feet wide, and also with
a walk, suspended on the outside of the palisade, for the use of the
sentries. The location and the provisions of this stockade were worse and
more dangerous than even the main prison.
XVI.
[Illustration]
On the pathway to the graveyard, not far from the prison, and in open
sight, was built the hut where the bloodhounds were kept, always ready to
track and pursue the fugitives, who were so fortunate as to escape by
evading the vigilance of the guards, or by the slow and dangerous process
of tunnelling beneath the palisades. The system of pursuit was so perfect,
the dogs so numerous and well trained, that it was very rarely that any
one escaped, and then it was only by the kind intervention of the black
man.
There were but nine bloodhounds kept here, but there were more than fifty
dogs, kept in relays, along the route of escape, extending from the town
to the city of Macon, fifty miles distant. The names of these inhuman
wretches, who kept and hunted with these hounds, are known to the writer,
the places of their residence, the number of their animals, and the price
they received for each hapless victim overpowered by their dogs. These
packs of hounds were generally accompanied by dogs of fierce and
determined courage, to seize and hold the object pursued until the hunters
arrived. The ordinary bloodhound of these regions is cowardly from
degeneration, and dare not face the look, nor disregard the voice of man,
and until the catch-dogs arrive and dash in, and lead the way, they bay
and show their teeth from safe distances; but the victim once disabled,
they tear and rend the living limbs without reluctance. The bloodhound is
said, when in a state of tranquillity, to be the most affectionate of all
the canine race, but when once excited, he no longer recognizes the blood
of his master from that of the stranger. That many men were pursued, and
caught, and paid for by the rebel authorities, at the price of thirty
dollars a head, there is abundant proof; that men were disabled, and torn
wantonly by the hounds, and afterwards died of their wounds, the writer
has positive proof. That Federal soldiers were overpowered and destroyed
in the forests by the dogs, and their brutal owners, there is evidence.
It did not shock the civil communities of the South to hear of the use of
the bloodhounds to pursue and maim men of their own race and nation, for
in every locality, for a long period past, it had been the custom to rear
and train dogs to catch the hapless slave who had incurred the rage of his
master, and vainly sought to escape from his fury in the obscure recesses
of the tangled forests.
Usage, by long repetition, had blunted the natural sympathies, so that
hate readily excused the difference in class and color.
XVII.
The bloodhounds here used appear to have been of a degenerate breed, and
to have lacked the great strength, the invincible determination, which the
true race possesses. The bloodhounds introduced into Cuba, to exterminate
the Indians, were ferocious and powerful animals. From these the present
stock in Southern Georgia were probably descended, and during three
centuries of change, have gradually lost their nobler qualities, but have
preserved the form. The true bloodhound is taller than the fox-hound, and
stronger in his make. His color is of a reddish brown, shaded here and
there with darker tints. His muzzle and jaws wide and strong, and the
frame firmly knit. His scenting power is extraordinary, and from time
immemorial his services have been made use of in tracking wounded animals
or fugitives from justice.
"Soon the sagacious brute, his curling tail
Flourished in air, low bending, plies around
His busy nose, the steaming vapor snuffs
Inquisitive, nor leaves one turf untried,
Till, conscious of the recent stains, his heart
Beats quick; his snuffing nose, his active tail
Attest his joy: then with deep, opening mouth,
That makes the welkin tremble, he proclaims
Th' audacious felon: foot by foot he marks
His winding way, while all the listening crowd
Applaud his reasonings, o'er the watery ford,
Dry sandy heaths, and stony, barren hills;
O'er beaten paths, with men and beasts disdained,
Unerring he pursues, till at the cot
Arrived, and seizing by his guilty throat
The caitiff vile, redeems the captive prey."
BOOK FOURTH.
I.
Animals eat that they may live. Man eats, not only that he may live, but
that he may gather strength, and fulfil his high destiny on earth.
When God gave form and animation to the dust of the earth, and man
appeared, he did not intend that the sustenance of life should be left to
chance or to careless selection. This intent of the Creator is revealed in
the study of the organic world, where wonderful varieties and productions
are offered to the appetite of man, in order that the "force of the
universe may glow within his veins," and that the faculties of his mind
may so expand that he may behold and comprehend the works and designs of
his Maker.
Food, next to the purity of the air, determines the degree of the physical
well-being; it gives the beauty of contour to the form; it builds up the
marvellous structure of the brain; the ravishing smile of the features,
the sublimity of thought, depend alike in great measure upon the benign
influence of food.
It not only gives to nations their characteristics of strength and
solidity, but it bestows upon society more of grace and refinement than
philosophy is willing to allow.
II.
The question of alimentation with the civil laborer, exposed to healthy
influences of properly distributed air and sunlight, and to the regular
motions of a well-conducted life, is easy of solution to the inquiring
mind.
But when it relates to the soldier, subjected to strange and unhealthy
influences, the explanations involve much study, care, and research.
In the natural condition of man it is easy to determine how much food will
support life and sustain physical exertion. The dietaries of the public
institutions of different countries, the experiments of physiologists, and
the records of history give the data with sufficient clearness. As to the
amount of food required daily to repair the waste and wants of the human
organism, much depends upon the degree of muscular exertion and nervous
excitation, as well as the temperature of the season. In the alimentation
of armies scientific principles must not be disregarded. Food must be
considered as force; it must contain, not only material, but power. The
strength of men, says Baron Liebig, is in direct ratio to the plastic
matter in their food.
In determining the absolute quantities of nutrient substances required by
the system, Lehman observes that there are three magnitudes especially to
be considered.
The first is the quantity requisite to prevent the animal from sinking by
starvation. The second is that which affords the right supply of
nourishment for the perfect accomplishment of the functions, and the last
is that which indicates the amount of nutrient matter which may, under
the most favorable circumstances, be subjected to metamorphosis in the
blood. No one of the four classes, the carbohydrates, the fats, the
albuminous matters, and the salts, will answer the purpose alone, but all
must be employed together, and this invariable proportion according to the
local, and, therefore, variable waste of the system. These considerations
indicate how complicated the problem is.
III.
Life is an action; the principle of life, whatever may be its nature, is
eminently and visibly a principle of excitation, of impulsion, a motive
power.
"It is taking a false idea of life," says Cuvier, "to consider it as a
simple link which binds the elements of the living body together, since,
on the contrary, it is a power which moves and sustains them unceasingly."
These elements do not for an instant preserve the same relation and
connection; or, in other words, the living body does not for an instant
keep the same state and composition. "This law," adds Flourens, "does not
affect alone the muscles, viscera, and tissues, but there is a continual
mutation of all the parts composing the bone." These views have been
substantiated by the extended experiments of Chossat, of Von Bibra, and a
host of experimentalists, showing how positive and decided are the changes
in the material composition of the body, and especially the constitution
of even the bone from the influence of food.
IV.
"It is from the blood that life derives the principles which maintain and
repair it. The more vigorous, plastic, and rich in nutritive material, so
much the more life increases and manifests itself, so much the quicker the
reparatory processes restore a lesion to its natural condition.
"The blood owes its vivifying properties to the presence of oxygen, which
it receives by the respiratory organs; but that nourishing fluid, to
complete its physiological _role_, needs to receive combustible and
organizable material."
These Protean principles of the healthy blood form one fifth of its
weight.
Oxygen unites with the carbon of the food in the blood of animals;
carbonic acid is formed and heat evolved. When the atmosphere is vitiated,
the oxygenating processes are diminished in ratio to the vitiation.
The experiments of Seguin, Crawford, and De la Roche show that in a
vitiated and highly heated atmosphere the blood is not thoroughly
decarbonized, thereby deranging the nervous system, and affecting the
animal functions as well as the mental faculties. The blood is subject to
incessant variations. The more feeble the respiration the less rich it is.
Man absorbs twenty to thirty quarts of oxygen every hour. The pure air is
a real food, and is as necessary for the development and repair of the
physical force as the more solid forms of matter. Nine ounces of carbon
are consumed every day, and the phenomenon of the expired carbonic acid
has its maxima and minima during the day, like the regular variations of
the barometer or the tides of the ocean.
V.
The great nervous prostration and the lack of energy which were observed
among the prisoners, were not due entirely to climate. The activity of the
nervous mechanism depends greatly upon the supply and purity of the
arterial blood. It is the same with the nerve fibres as with the nerve
centres, but in less degree. We observe that the exaltation and depression
of the nervous power are within the control of man by the administration
of certain drugs, or respiration of appropriate gases. The accumulation of
bile or urea in the blood diminishes the nerve energy. Many physiologists
enumerate moral depressions among the principal causes of epidemics; and
this opinion is not strange when we consider how completely the system is
under control of the nervous influence, and how much the supply of oxygen
and blood to the organs and tissues depend upon the nervous power; and how
much, moreover, the integrity of the nervous system depends upon the
purity of the blood.
In the process of starvation, during the struggle for life, the hidden
forces in reserve--the superabundant muscle, fat, tissues, even the
brain-substance--are gradually absorbed. The volume of blood may remain
the same, but the vivifying particles which circulate in the vital stream
are rapidly consumed by the wants of the wasting economy, and disappear.
And when these hematic globules are lessened to a certain limit below the
normal proportion death ensues. Vierodt has discovered that the limit of
this singular law is 52 per 1000 for the dog, and about 60 per 1000 for
some other species of the mammalia. The physiologists have shown how the
vivifying principles acquire vigor through the blood discs, and how these,
when absorbing pure oxygen through the pulmonary circulation, contribute
to the development of muscular fibre and the nervous material. Mammals and
birds, when deprived of food, die in ten to twenty days, losing from one
third to one half of their weight.
VI.
In determining the nutritive value of aliments by the study of their
chemical composition, we cannot adhere strictly to the results furnished
by analysis. For, says Baron Liebig, we cannot reckon upon results in the
human stomach with the same regularity as we would in the alembics of our
laboratories.
Physiologists divide alimentary substances into two classes: the
nitrogenous, which, according to Dumas, supply the demands of
assimilation, and the non-nitrogenous, which are called by Liebig
respiratories, from furnishing the products consumed by respiration.
Neither the one nor the other will alone support life indefinitely, and
when one or the other decreases below well-defined limits, health
declines, and finally life becomes extinct from inanition.
Milne Edwards gives, as the mean amount of these two classes, required for
all climates, not less than three hundred and fifteen grains of nitrogen
and thirty-three hundred and fifty grains of carbon in the twenty-four
hours. These views are adopted by most physiologists; yet the analyses of
Schlossberger and Kemp indicate that the idea of estimating the value of
food by the quantity of nitrogen it contains is a fallacious one.
The beautiful experiments of Bernard and the modern physiologists have
unfolded many of the laws that regulate digestion and assimilation. Yet
the human researches in the great arcana of nature are extremely limited,
in comparison with the vast range of physical phenomena, and every day we
are reminded of the remarks of Boerhaave to his students: "Let all these
heroes of science meet together; let them take bread and wine, the food
which forms the blood of man, and by assimilation contributes to the
growth of the body; let them try by all their art, and assuredly they will
not be able from these materials to produce a single drop of blood,--so
much is the most common act of nature beyond the utmost efforts of the
most extended science."
The composition of the typical food of nature is revealed to us in the
analysis of human milk.
VII.
The need of varied food is apparent to the casual observer, and it is well
proven in the immortal work of Cabanis. "The experience of civilized life
has shown," says Professor Horsford, in his admirable pamphlet on the
marching ration of armies, "that the human organism requires, to maintain
it in health, both organic and inorganic food.
"Of the organic, it needs nitrogenous food for the support of the vital
tissues for work; and saccharine, or oleaginous food, for warmth. Of the
inorganic, it needs phosphates for the bones, brain, muscles, and blood;
and salt for its influence on the circulation and the secretions, and for
various purposes where soda is required for a base; and doubtless both
phosphates and salt for many offices as yet imperfectly understood. 'A man
may be starved by depriving him of phosphates and salt, just as
effectively as by depriving him of albumen or oil.' (Dalton's Physiology.)
"The salts of potassa, magnesia, and iron, of manganese, silica, and
fluorine, are always present, and perform services of greater or less
obvious moment in the animal economy. These organic and inorganic
substances are essential, but they are not all that are needed. Man,
especially when compelled to exhausting labor, requires beverages and
condiments. He wants coffee, or tea, or cocoa; or, in the absence of
these, he may feel a craving for wine or spirits. He wants salt, pepper,
and vinegar. To preserve a sound body, then, there are required organic
and inorganic food, beverages, and condiments."
"A mixed food," says another writer, "which varies from time to time,
seems to be essential; and there can be no doubt that the changes which
physicians have recognized in the nature of the predominating diseases,
from century to century, are connected with changes which have taken place
in the nature of the diet. Excess of oil, albumen, and starch produce
liability to arthritic, bilious, and rheumatic affections; a deficiency of
oleaginous materials, scrofula, &c."
VIII.
In attempting to form a proper estimate of the alleged ration furnished by
the rebels to their prisoners at Andersonville, we will endeavor to arrive
at just conclusions by comparing the known quantities with the dietaries
of long-established hospitals, prisons, and the ration of armies of
different periods of history.
The effects of food upon the civil prisoners, both of the long and short
term, have been carefully studied by Christison, Liebig, Barral, and
Edwards; and it is conclusively shown by their statistics of the prisons
of Europe how much food will keep the prisoners in athletic condition when
exposed to healthy influences. The quantity of food required depends upon
the wants of the system and the quality of food consumed. Some articles
are far more nutritious than others, and are far less bulky; for instance,
the rice eaters of China, the potato and milk consumers of Ireland, eat
enormously, compared with the beef-eating people.
But rarely will a less quantity than seventeen ounces suffice for the
animal economy, and not then, even, unless it is the concentrated essences
and principles of carefully selected grains, and healthy meat from cattle
killed in their native pastures, like the scientific ration correctly
proposed by Professor Horsford. This ration is intended to enable armies
to change their base with intervals of more than a month, and to assist
raiding parties to perform long journeys without relying for subsistence
on the doubtful and difficult forage along the route, or on the distant
depots at the point of departure.
A handful of the ripe, golden grains, roasted and mixed with a little
sugar, with a few ounces of beef dried from the meat of healthy cattle
killed instantly, will sustain the power of life wonderfully. This is
shown by the mountaineers of the Cordilleras, of the Andes, and the Rocky
Mountains.
It was substantially the same ration that enabled the Romans to traverse
countries far remote from their main depots of supplies, and the Greeks to
advance across, with safety, the immense arid deserts of Asia. Any of our
splendidly equipped and fed armies of modern times would perish in a few
days along the route where Xenophon and his immortal ten thousand passed
with safety, and without much loss.
IX.
The mode of rationing the Roman armies, and the manner in which the
supplies were obtained and preserved, is well shown in the extant writings
of those times. Besides the allowance of wheat daily,--one to two
pounds,--the Roman soldiers often received a ration of pork, mutton,
legumes, cheese, oil, salt, wine, and vinegar. With the grain, a
porridge-pot, a spit, the casque for a cup, and with vinegar to mix with
their water,--which formed the regulation drink posea, or acetum,--they
marched rapidly, and retained their extraordinary vigor in the midst of
pestilential regions. Every soldier carried his own food for a given
length of time, which was from eight to twenty-eight days. "_Cibo cum
suo._" Hence Josephus wrote, the Roman soldier is laden like a mule. This
food was always of the best quality; and the wheat was always carefully
selected by a commission appointed for the purpose, as we may learn from
the inscription on the column of Trajan. This wheat was not always eaten
raw; but was oftener roasted, and crushed upon a stone.
"Frugesque receptas
Et torrere parant flammis et frugere saxo."
With all of these arrangements and movements, there was method even as to
the time of taking food. The soldier ate twice a day, and at appointed
hours--at the sixth hour, "Prandium;" and at the tenth hour, "Vesperna."
X.
The requirements of the system differ greatly, according to the degree of
heat, the purity of the air, and the degree of physical exercise. What
suffices at the equator would be but a morsel at the pole. What sustains
the quiet student would starve the active athlete.
When Volney spoke in surprise of the few ounces required to sustain the
Bedouin, he forgot the purity of the air of the desert, as well as the
indolent life of the Arab.
When we offer as example the frugal diet of Cornaro, which was twelve
ounces of solid food, with fourteen ounces of wine, daily, we must
remember that the celebrated man lived a life of moderation, avoided bad
air, and guarded against the extremes of heat and cold.
The data of Frerichs, the observations of Sir John Sinclair, and the
determinations of Professor Horsford, show that eighteen ounces of
properly selected food may sustain life; and they also show that the
nutrient substances must be of known value.
XI.
In forming our ideas as to the required amount of food necessary to
healthy vigor, we will not attempt to analyze the magnitudes of Lehman,
nor accept the statement of Chossat, that the animal body loses daily
about one twenty-fourth of its weight by the metamorphosis of tissue; but
will again examine the diet tables of the prisons, hospitals, and armies
of Europe, leaving the reader to form his own conclusions.
The distinguished physiologist, Milne Edwards, maintains that the food
must contain three hundred and fifteen grains of nitrogen and three
thousand three hundred and fifty grains of carbon, otherwise the animal
economy loses force, and gradually deteriorates. The data of Frerichs give
the same views, and they accord with the observations of the ten years'
study of the regimens of the prisons of Scotland. Dumas, in his
calculations of the ration of the French army, gives as its equivalent
three hundred and thirty-five grains of nitrogen and four thousand nine
hundred and fifty grains of carbon.
In the prisons and hospitals of England, Scotland, France, and Germany,
the dietaries furnish from seventeen to twenty-eight ounces of nitrogenous
and carbonaceous food.
For a time, the solid ration of the prisons of Scotland was reduced to
seventeen ounces, but the prisoners lost weight. In the public
institutions of England we find the total quantity of solid food to be as
follows: The British soldier receives in home service 45 ounces; the
seaman of the Royal navy 44 ounces; convicts 54 ounces; male pauper 29
ounces; male lunatic 31 ounces. The full diet of the hospitals of London
furnish from 25 to 31 ounces of solid food, besides from one to five pints
of beer daily. The Russian soldier has about 50 ounces; the Turkish more
than 40 ounces; the French nearly 50 ounces; the Hessian 33 ounces; the
Yorkshire laborer 50 ounces; United States navy 50 ounces; and the soldier
of the United States army about 50 ounces, of solid food.
XII.
The food allowed to the prisoners at Andersonville, according to the
statements of the prisoners and other witnesses, was from two to four
ounces of bacon, and from four to twelve ounces of corn bread daily;
sometimes a half pint to a pint of bean, pea, or sweet potato soup, of
doubtful value. Vegetables were unknown. Thus giving a total weight of
solid food, per diem, of six to sixteen ounces of solid food. The amount
was not constant: some days the prisoners were entirely without food, as
was the case at Belle Isle and Salisbury. Neither was the deficiency
afterwards made good. The amount given was oftener less than ten ounces
than more.
The contrast furnished by the dietaries of our own military prisons, of
those of the British hulks (so much cursed during the last war), or by the
food given by the Algerine pirates to their prisoners and slaves, gives
rise to terrible convictions as to the regard the rebel authorities placed
upon the lives of their prisoners. The United States allowed to the rebel
prisoners held by them thirty-eight ounces of solid food at first; but
afterwards, in June, 1864, they reduced the ration to thirty-four and a
half ounces per day. The range of articles composing the ration was the
same as with our own troops, the exception being in the weight in bread.
In the Dartmoor prison in England, where our men were confined by the
English, when taken prisoners during the last war, and of which so much
cruelty has been alleged, the authorities allowed to the prisoners for the
first five days in the week 24 ounces of coarse brown bread, 8 ounces of
beef, 4 ounces of barley, 1/3 ounce of salt, 1/3 ounce of onions, and 16
ounces of turnips daily (or more than 50 ounces of solid food); and for
the remaining two days the usual allowance of bread was given with 16
ounces of pickled fish. The daily allowance to our men, at the Melville
Island prison, at Halifax, during the last war, was 16 ounces of bread, 16
ounces of beef, and one gill of peas; the American agent furnishing
coffee, sugar, potatoes, and tobacco. The allowance on the noted Medway
hulks was 8 ounces of beef, 24 ounces of bread, and one gill of barley,
daily, for five days; and 16 ounces of codfish, 16 ounces potatoes, or 16
ounces of smoked herring, the remaining two days of the week. Furthermore,
in addition to these generous allowances of the British people, it can be
said that the quality of the food was almost always excellent.
The writer, with one exception, knows of no dietary to compare with that
adopted, or made use of without the formality of adoption, by the rebel
authorities in the treatment of their prisoners.
This exception is found in ancient history, which Plutarch has handed down
to us. The Athenians, captured at the siege of Syracuse, were placed in
the stone quarries of Ortygia, and fed upon one pint of barley and half a
pint of water daily. Most of them perished from this treatment.
XIII.
The corn bread furnished was made, according to the evidence, from corn
and the cob, ground up together, and sometimes mixed with what is called
in the south cow peas. It varied from four to twelve ounces in weight
daily, generally from four to eight ounces. A pound (of sixteen ounces) of
corn bread contains, according to chemical analysis, two thousand eight
hundred grains of carbon and one hundred and twenty-one grains of
nitrogen, and therefore the highest quantity of corn bread furnished, say
twelve ounces, afforded but two thousand one hundred grains of carbon and
ninety grains of nitrogen, leaving a deficiency, according to the
physiologists, of more than twelve hundred grains of carbon and two
hundred grains of nitrogen, to be supplied by the two or four ounces of
doubtful bacon.
That the bacon could not furnish this deficiency must be apparent to the
scientific observer. The quantity of bread alone, required to furnish the
desired amount of carbon and nitrogen, would have been over three pounds
daily, which quantity the prisoners did not have.
Milne Edwards, after treating at length the subject of alimentation, and
offering many examples, arrives at the conclusion that the mean quantity
of bread and meat required to sustain the life of man, consists of sixteen
ounces of bread and thirteen ounces of beef daily. This conclusion is
sustained by most of the experimentalists, and if lesser quantities are
used, they must be of choice selections. A small loaf of bread made of
flour, ground from ripe, healthy wheat, will accomplish more for nutrition
than two or three larger loaves, baked of damaged and unripe grain; and
likewise it is with meat: half a pound of beef from cattle killed
instantly in their native pastures, when the flesh retains all its natural
juices and sweetness, is worth more for the support of the system than two
or three pounds of beef from animals that have been fasted and terrified,
and have thereby lost, in a very great measure, their nutritious
qualities.
The flesh of mammalia undergoes a great change in its nutritive qualities
by reason of fasting, disturbance of sleep, and long-continued suffering,
resulting in its becoming not only worthless, but deleterious.
XIV.
Vegetable substances alone will not sustain life for a great length of
time in every climate, but there is a vast difference between the wants of
man at the equator and his necessities at the pole.
Nature requires for the working of her plans materials of diverse natures:
neither the oil, nor starch, nor sugar, will sustain life alone. Chemical
analysis and physiological history point out to us how positive is the
law which fixes the component parts of grains and plants, and how
imperative the necessity of adjusting in alimentation these forms of
nutritive matter, which spring up on every side in profusion, and offer
endless variety to the wants of man.
There must be harmony of certain principles; there must be union of
starch, of gluten, and fat, to complete the process of digestion and
assimilation. To feed a patient upon arrow-root, tapioca, or sago, and the
like, is to consign him to certain death. Instinct impels us sometimes to
make use of articles which our habits have thrown aside.
XV.
It appears from the reasoning of Baron Liebig, that when we replace the
flesh and bread of ordinary diet by juicy vegetables and fruits, the blood
is beyond all doubt altered in its chemical character, the alkaline
carbonates being substituted for the phosphoric acid and alkaline
phosphates, which are supposed to exert a disturbing influence in so many
diseases, especially typhoid and inflammatory affections. The gluten of
grain, and the albumen of vegetable juices, are identical in composition
with the albumen of blood, but there are varieties of wheat, the ashes of
which are in quantity and in relative proportion of the salts the same as
those of boiled and lixiviated meats, and it cannot be maintained that
bread made of such flour would, if it were the only food taken, support
life permanently.
The experiments of the French academicians, show that dogs fed
exclusively on white bread, made from the sifted flour, died in forty
days; but when fed on black bread (flour with the bran), they lived
without disturbance of health. Bread should always be made of grains grown
in healthy places, and should contain the entire seed, with the exception
of the husk; then it will realize the idea of Paracelsus: "When a man eats
a bit of bread, does he not therein consume heaven and earth, and all of
the heavenly bodies, inasmuch as heaven by its fertilizing rain, the earth
by its soil, and the sun by its luminous and heat-giving rays, have all
contributed to its production, and are all present in the one substance?"
Desiccated vegetables, which have lost the water of vegetation and other
gaseous elements, which chemistry thus far has been unable to discover,
cannot adequately replace the fresh articles; the particular principle,
the water of vegetation, can no more be restored to them than the dust of
the crushed quartz can be recrystallized by the simple addition of water.
XVI.
In the alimentation of armies bread is the basal element. If it be poor,
the whole system of the commissariat is deranged. History shows that it is
the most important item in the feeding of soldiers, and that many a
campaign, since the disaster to the army of Belisarius at Methon, has been
lost in consequence of the quality of its munition bread.
France allows to her soldiers 26 ounces of bread, England 24, Belgium 28,
Sardinia 26, Spain 23, Prussia 32, Austria 32, Turkey 33, United States
22, _Rebel Prisons_ 4 _to_ 12 _ounces_!
The quantity of corn meal allowed to the rebel soldiers by the rebel
government was about one and one-third pounds daily: this would give about
28 ounces of bread, allowing 30 per cent. of water, which is the rule
among bakers; at least it is the average quantity established by the civil
tax commission of Paris. Besides the corn meal they had six ounces of
bacon, and peas, and rice. This ration was sufficient to preserve life, as
it has been shown by the condition of the rebel armies; the bread alone
contained 4900 grains of carbon, and 210 grains of nitrogen, without the
aid of bacon or the peas. The bread alone has an excess of 1600 grains of
carbon, and a deficiency only of about 100 grains of nitrogen, which was
readily supplied by the bacon and other articles. Corn bread is one of the
chief articles of diet in the Southern States, and it is likewise used
extensively in the South of Europe. It makes heavy bread unless carefully
prepared and mixed with flour, and when mixed with the cob it often
produces a laxative effect, the degree of which depends greatly upon the
quantity the meal contains. When properly prepared with milk and the usual
ingredients, it becomes an agreeable and nutritious article of diet, but
carelessly handled, it is disagreeable to the palate and difficult to
digest.
The bread furnished to the prisoners was simply mixed with salt and the
dirty water from the brook, or the foul spring in the rear of the bakery,
and then dried in the heat of the oven. That bad effects arose from such a
quality of bread cannot be doubted; the injurious influences of impure
water in panification have been pointed out by Boussingault, in a paper
presented to the French Academy in 1857.
It is the common saying in the Southern States, where the use of wheaten
bread is comparatively rare, that a bushel of corn contains more nutriment
than a bushel of wheat. Yet the southern wheat is superior to the northern
varieties, and is richer in the azotized, glutinous principles so
essential to the formation of blood and muscle. Vermicelli and macaroni
can be made only from the best southern wheat.
Of the varieties of Indian corn in America, the yellow flinty corn is
reckoned the sweetest and most nutritive; the white corn of the South
makes the fairest, but considerably the weakest flour. We do not find
special fault with the coarsely ground meal, provided the cob is not
included, for Mayer has pointed out, in discarding the commercial bran we
throw away fourteen times as much phosphoric acid as there is in superfine
flour. In this bran are contained most of the layers of gluten, in which
are lodged the phosphates and the companion nitrogenous compounds--the
sources of living tissues. The nutritious Graham bread is an example; also
the pumpernickel of Westphalia, the black bread of Russia, the coarse
oatmeal of Scotland, contain all the gluten, all the phosphates and
nitrogenous compounds, as well as the starch of the grains. Such was the
bread that Celsus considered as equal to flesh in its capacity of
nourishing.
XVII.
Fresh meat was rarely furnished to the prison, according to the reports
and statements of witnesses, and we should doubt that it was furnished at
all, if it were not for the number of sections of the horns of cattle
which are strewn about the enclosure, and which the prisoners had used for
drinking dishes; still, many of these horns may have been taken from the
cattle killed for the guards.
That the issue of fresh beef would have been beneficial to the men, there
is no doubt; in fact, the experiment at Jamaica, which continued twenty
years, proves it; for the troops who were fed with a larger allowance of
fresh meat suffered far less from dysentery than any of the troops of the
West India islands. There is always great difficulty in preserving the
good qualities of fresh meat in hot climes, and, on the other hand, the
use of salt meat in the same regions is apt to engender scorbutic
disorders. Whenever putrefactive fermentation begins with any kind of
meat, or any recently living nitrogenized substance, catalytic action
takes place, ammonia is evolved, and the product is no longer pleasant to
the taste or nutritious to the system. Food, when even exposed to vitiated
air, becomes deteriorated in quality, just as good flour is rendered
worthless by mixture with the damaged fungoid grain. Butchers' meat on the
average affords but thirty-five per cent. of real nutritive matter, at
least such was the opinion presented to the French Minister of the
Interior by Vauquelin and Percy. Accepting this determination, we may form
some idea of the relative value of the scanty allowance of the doubtful
beef furnished to the prisoners, if it was furnished at all.
That bacon was furnished, there is no doubt; neither has the quantity been
underrated by the sufferers themselves, as we shall presently see. And
there is no reason why the quality should not have been most excellent,
unless it had been selected for the purposes of cruelty. There is evidence
that it was sometimes of very bad quality; but that it was generally and
systematically selected to disgust the prisoners, we are unwilling to
believe, although we have evidence that rotten bacon was furnished by
contractors, and the fact boasted of by them. The influence and effect of
this decomposed food may be surmised by the following remark of Donovan:
"Flesh contains the elements of some of the most deadly poisons that are
found even in the vegetable kingdom; a slight change in their mode of
combination, or of the ratio of their quantities, may convert nutriment
into a source of death."
XVIII.
There is another very important item to be considered in the dietary of
this prison, and that is the quality and quantity of the water furnished
for potable purposes. "Water," says Milne Edwards, "is an aliment, as well
as sugar and fibrine; for it is indispensable for the nutrition of the
body, and, by whatever means it arrives in the economy, its _role_ is
always the same."
The water consumed in the prison was obtained from the brook, and from the
few wells or springs within the stockade. The volume of water in the brook
was quite sufficient to furnish all the drinking water desired, if it had
been introduced into the stockade by means of sluices. As it was, the
course of the stream was left to nature, and no effort made to prevent its
defilement by the camps situated farther up, or by the bake-house located
close by. All the camps on the declivities about Andersonville were
drained into this stream. Some few wells were sunk in the prison which
yielded scanty supplies, and there were also a few springs undefiled; but
the quality of water everywhere was surface water, tinged and tainted with
the impurities of the soil and the infections of the collected filth. The
thirst, which was excessive among the prisoners, could only be slaked by
drinking the impure waters. Yet a very little care on the part of the
rebel authorities would have increased the comfort of the prisoners in
this respect, and prevented the loss of life to a very considerable
degree.
"The preservation of potable water," writes Felix Jacquot, "is certainly
one of the capital points of hygiene."
"I am sometimes disposed to think," states Dr. Letheby, the health officer
of London, "that impure water is before impure air as one of the most
powerful causes of disease." In cold climates slight impurities in the
drinking water are not of vital importance; but in the tropics, and the
adjacent regions, the least decayed vegetable or animal matter renders it
injurious and unpalatable, and often is the determining cause of disease,
especially enteric, to a fearful degree.
XIX.
During the months of June, July, August, and September, 1864, there was an
aggregate number of prisoners of about twenty-eight thousand for each
month. To supply this vast number of men with bread would have been
ordinarily no easy task, requiring, as it would have done, twenty-eight
thousand rations of bread daily, or eight hundred and forty thousand
rations monthly. We have shown that the bakery could not have furnished
more than ninety-six hundred rations of corn bread, of the United States
weight of twenty ounces, or ninety-six hundred rations daily, or two
hundred and eighty-eight thousand rations monthly, and probably furnished
but five thousand rations daily, or one hundred and fifty thousand rations
monthly. If this deficiency of a half a million of rations existed, how
can it be explained?
Was munition bread brought from a distance to supply the deficiency? When
and whence, we will ask?
During the period embracing the months of July, August, and September,
1864, the rebel commissary furnished, according to his statements, two
hundred and twenty-three thousand bushels of corn meal, and thirty-seven
hundred bushels of flour for the prison.
There was, during this time (ninety-two days), a monthly aggregate of
twenty-nine thousand prisoners, who required twenty-nine thousand rations
of corn meal daily; or, multiplied by ninety-two days, two million six
hundred and sixty-eight thousand rations for the period of three months;
or, allowing the same weight as the rebel ration, we have 2,668,000 x
1-1/3 = 3,567,333 pounds of corn meal, or seventy-one thousand one
hundred and forty-six bushels, allowing fifty pounds to the bushel. If we
now estimate the rebel garrison to have been four thousand in the
aggregate, we will have for the requirements, 4000 x 92 x 1-1/2 = 552,000
pounds of meal, or ten thousand one hundred and ninety bushels, which
gives, as total for the prison and garrison, eighty-one thousand two
hundred and eighty-six bushels of corn meal.
Yet the commissary states that he sent two hundred and twenty-three
thousand bushels, or almost three times as much as the quantity required.
This is a strange statement to make, as we shall endeavor to show.
The rebel ration allowed by their law gave thirty-seven and a half pounds
of corn meal, three pounds of rice, or five pounds of peas, ten pounds of
bacon, salt, &c., monthly, of twenty-eight days, or about twenty ounces of
meal daily, and about six ounces of bacon. We have, as an aggregate number
of men for the above period (prisoners and guards), 29,000 + 4000 x 92 =
3,036,000 men, requiring, according to law, three million seven hundred
and ninety-five thousand pounds of corn meal. Now the commissary states
that he furnished 226,700 bushels of corn meal and flour; or, multiplied
by 50 pounds = 11,335,000 pounds, thus giving to each man more than three
and one-fifth pounds of meal and flour; or, allowing the usual per cent.
of water, more than four pounds of bread. That these men had sixty-eight
ounces of corn bread apiece, or that they could have eaten it if they had
been furnished that quantity, is not for a moment to be considered. This
analysis betrays the falsity of the commissary's statement, and
invalidates the remainder of his accounts.
It cannot be said that this meal was to be stored for future use, for it
is well known that corn meal will not keep in this climate but for a few
days without fermentation taking place. There is, again, another serious
item to be considered in connection with this statement. Why should this
overplus, of more than seven millions of pounds of meal, be sent to this
prison, when the army of Virginia was calling loudly for grain? The
statement and the figures indicate simply a foolish desire to cover up
deficiencies, and that too in a very hasty manner.
XX.
The same commissary states that he sent, during the same period of time,
three hundred and thirty-nine thousand pounds of bacon, or five million
four hundred and twenty-four thousand ounces. This will give thirty-six
hundred and eighty-four pounds of bacon each day of the ninety-two days;
and, after allowing six ounces per man to the rebel garrison, we shall
have remaining but two thousand pounds to be divided among the twenty-nine
thousand prisoners, or about one and one seventh ounces of bacon to each
man. Thus the account of the commissary, if true, proves that the
statement of the prisoners, that they received but two to four ounces of
bacon daily, was correct.
If the full amount of bacon had been allowed, there would have been
required, at the rate of six ounces per man, ten thousand eight hundred
and seventy-five pounds daily, whereas there was in reality but two
thousand pounds, leaving a deficiency of more than eight thousand pounds
daily. If fresh beef had been allowed at the same rate as the bacon, there
would have been required ten thousand eight hundred and seventy-five
pounds daily, or a herd of thirty of the native cattle, allowing three
hundred and sixty pounds net weight to each carcass. If the full ration of
one pound of fresh beef had been furnished, there would have been required
more than one hundred and twenty of the same class of cattle daily.
XXI.
That the dietary of the prisoners was far from being adequate to their
wants there is no doubt, and it only remains to be determined whether this
deficiency arose from design, from ignorance, or from real scarcity of
food.
We have very serious doubts as to the truth of the statements that there
was a scarcity of food in this vicinity during the time of the occupation
of the prison.
At the time of its selection the region was considered to be the richest
in cereals of all the Southern States.
In times previous it had proved to be fertile, and during the progress of
the war the slave labor was undisturbed by the Federal troops. It is shown
by their own statistics that in 1860 the four counties near the prison,
and along the line of railroad, produced nearly fourteen hundred thousand
bushels of corn, thirty-three thousand bushels of wheat, three hundred
thousand bushels of potatoes, and more than one hundred thousand bushels
of beans and peas, besides forty-eight thousand bales of cotton. It is
highly probable that these quantities were doubled, if not trebled and
quadrupled during the succeeding years of the war, when the planting of
cotton was forbidden by rebel ukase, and all energy and labor were turned
to the production of food. There were in these four counties alone more
than twenty thousand slaves.
In the south of Georgia, in the wire-grass region, were great numbers of
cattle roaming at will, and the numbers in the everglades of Florida were
so vast, that two old steamboat captains offered to furnish the rebel
government, at this very period, with half a million pounds of salt beef,
along the railroads in Florida. Governor Watts wrote from Alabama in
April, 1864, that there were ten million pounds of bacon accessible in
that State. In September of the same year, Mr. Hudson, of the adjoining
State of Alabama, offered to deliver to the rebel government half a
million pounds of bacon in exchange for the same quantity of cotton.
The rebel war clerk, in his diary at Richmond, wrote, March 17, 1864, "It
appears that there is abundance of grain and meat in the country;" and
again, July 3, 1864, he notes down, "Our crop of wheat is abundant, and
the harvest is over."
According to the census of 1860, there were in Florida more than six
hundred thousand cattle and swine, and more than five millions in Georgia
and Alabama. These two States produced during the same year more than
sixty million bushels of corn and thirteen million bushels of potatoes.
(Vide Appendix.)
XXII.
[Illustration]
As to the arrangement for the distribution of the food, there was but
little attention paid to system. The prisoners were ordered to arrange
themselves into squads of two hundred and ninety men, and these squads
were then subdivided into three messes. None of these messes appear to
have been properly supplied with utensils to receive and distribute their
food. Every prisoner was obliged to take care of himself, and all around
the area of the stockade may be seen at the present day remains of bent
pieces of tinned iron, the rudely-fashioned little tub, and sections of
the horns of cattle which the poor prisoners had worked up with their
knives, and utilized for their necessities. Civilized men would never have
resorted to these primitive, rough, and slovenly means, if they had been
supplied with the ordinary utensils. At certain hours carts, laden with
the corn bread and bacon, were driven into the enclosure, and the rations
were distributed right and left. When soup was made, it was brought in
pails, and the prisoners received it in their horn cups, wooden tubs, or
as best they could. No drink was allowed but the water from the brook,
whose ripples were like the river Lethe, for they contained the elements
of oblivion and death.
XXIII.
It is evident to the writer that the quantity of food furnished to the
prisoners was far from being adequate to support animal life, and from
this deficiency alone he can explain to his satisfaction the enormous loss
of life. The admirable experiments of Boussingault and the French
academicians show how the increase of weight in the feeding of animals is
in direct proportion to the amount of plastic constituents in the daily
supply of food, and how positive is the law which regulates the animal
economy. Again, we can form some idea of the positive effects of the
horrible condition of the prison, and of the extremes of heat and moisture
upon the feeble digestion and assimilation, by the experiments of Claude
Bernard, who shows how these functions may be disturbed by external
influences, and how agony even causes the disappearance of sugar in the
hepatic organ, and how fear disturbs the glucogenic process. There is
connected with inanition a singular tendency to decomposition and
putridity, alike in the blood and viscera. The system left unnourished
rapidly wastes, and its vitality soon lessens to a degree beyond recovery.
This degree depends upon the forces in reserve, which belongs especially
to youth; middle age is less liable to impressions, but when once
affected, has less support from the system. The rapidity with which the
dead decomposed immediately after death, astonished the observing surgeon.
The prevailing diarrhoea and scorbutic condition were the results of the
want of food and the combined influences of the bad air and water, and not
the primary causes of the feebleness and death.
The effect of the want of food first appears in loss of color--wasting
away of the form, diminution of strength, vertigo, relaxation of the
system of the viscera as well as of the muscles, diarrhoea appears, and
rapidly closes the struggle of the natural forces for life.
A few days, or a few weeks, according to the initial condition, is
sufficient to test the tenacity of the powers of life. Death always takes
place whenever the diminution of the total weight of the body reaches
certain limits, which is from 40/100 to 50/100 of the usual weight. We
observe this law to be quite positive and regular with the lower animals,
with whom the effect of starvation has been well studied, and the limit of
loss, compatible with life, found to be 40/100 for mammals and 50/100 for
birds.
BOOK FIFTH.
"Les Hopitaux. C'est ici que l'humanite en pleurs accuse les forfaits
de l'ambition."
I.
The Hospital is the recognized type of mercy, in its broadest range of
benevolence, tenderness, and compassion, all over the countries of the
earth, wherever the noble sentiments of nature have force. It is one of
the emblems of the great religion of civilization. It is coeval with
Christ, for it appeared among the institutions of men in definite shape
only after the establishment of Christianity; and to its true exalting
effects upon the dispositions of men, the Christian religion owes in great
measure its rapid progress among the barbarous and pagan nations of the
earth.
In earlier times public charity was rare or impulsive among the civil
communities. It was only the suffering and disabled defenders of the
general service who were cared for at the expense of the state, as at the
Prytaneum among the Athenians, or the numerous asylums which munificent
Rome erected to the brave men who carved out with their strong arms and
their blades of steel the colossal forms of her glory and grandeur. The
magnificent ruins of Italica, which sheltered the disabled veterans and
heroes of Africanus, look down at the present day over the vast and
fertile plains of the Guadalquivir, to reproach later and higher
civilizations with neglect and ingratitude.
II.
But it is to the beneficent and sublime influences of Christianity that
are to be attributed the noble institutions of the present day, where the
suffering and infirm receive the attentions of science and the
consolations of humanity.
Never among civilized nations are they profaned for the purposes of
cruelty, never defiled by murder under the mask of philanthropy.
Enlightened communities vie with each other in self-sacrifice in the great
and heroic labor of devotion to suffering mortality. It is the
distinguishing degree of difference in their excellence, their refinement,
their religion.
It is the last thought and reflection of the dying man, who, in dividing
his worldly material with charity and benevolence, hopes to be kindly
remembered on earth. It is the first dawning idea of childhood, with its
infant hands filled with roses and garlands of flowers to relieve the
pains of human suffering, or adorn the pale features of the departed.
To delight in human misery is the last degree of earthly degradation and
perversity. The mockery of the agony of death belongs only to the fiends
of hell and their baser imitators.
III.
Not until some time after the occupation of the prison did the care and
condition of the sick attract the attention and excite the solicitude of
the prison-keepers. Then a space was selected to the eastward, and almost
adjoining the stockade, and here were pitched the decayed and dilapidated
tents which were to form the hospital.
The exact size of the space is not known, the boundaries having
disappeared since the evacuation; but the tents were arranged, it is said,
with some degree of regularity, and the collection was surrounded by a
fence, which served only to obstruct the circulation of free air, which
was of vital importance; and besides, the fence was of no service whatever
as protection against the escape of the inmates, as they were before
admission generally far too feeble to make even an effort.
The actual amount of accommodation furnished is not known. By some it is
stated that there were nothing whatever but a few rotten tent flies; by
others, and among them one of the surgeons, it is narrated that there were
tents to cover one thousand men, and three large kettles to provide for
their cooking, and nothing more. Yet the records show that there were
nearly four thousand men at one time in this hospital. This distribution
of the means for the protection and sustenance of life is too terrible to
be believed. Let us overlook it, for there is sufficient for execration
elsewhere, without turning to the more revolting violation and desecration
of one of the sanctuaries of civilization.
Beneath these tent covers there was neither straw, nor mattresses, nor
bunks: there was simply the bare earth, with no protection but what was
afforded by the rotten canvas, the scanty clothing, the ragged blanket,
which the hapless sufferer might possess. Many of the unfortunate men who
perished here had neither shelter nor clothing. The rapacity of the
captors had taken the remnants of the rags left by the fury of battle. For
this want of shelter, and couches to protect and rest the weary limbs,
there is no excuse, and there can be none; for in the adjoining forests
there were immense quantities of timber accessible, and easy of conversion
into manufacture, and the extremities of the boughs of the long-leaved or
Southern pine afforded the means of making comfortable and healthy beds.
There were then within the stockade many thousands of men accustomed to
the use of the axe, the adze, the saw, and the plane, who would have in
few days fashioned implements of steel out of the useless scraps of
railway iron lying at the depot, and transformed the forest into vast,
even magnificent buildings, replete with the comforts, the conveniences of
advanced art. There were artisans here, of education and ingenuity, who
could have formed out of the very dust of the place edifices as beautiful
and wonderful to the imagination and understanding as the reality was
repulsive and strange.
IV.
The guards furnished themselves with comfortable huts, arranged with the
common conveniences, and their bunks were suspended above the contact of
the treacherous ground. Their invalids were well cared for also in the
large hospital which was erected expressly for the garrison, and which
consisted of two large two-story wooden buildings, admirably arranged,
with the conveniences proper to the service. The kitchen, the dispensary,
the ventilation, and the general arrangement, showed that scientific care
and forethought had been observed there.
The hospital system of the rebels was quite complete, and most of their
hospitals throughout the country were well constructed and equipped; and
some of them were models of neatness, comfort, and scientific arrangement.
The garrison hospital at Andersonville offers a terrible contrast to the
open space, the wretched agglomeration, which the rebel authorities called
a hospital for the prisoners.
It is true that the commanding officers were compelled, from some unknown
pressure,--whether the sense of shame, or dictate from Richmond,--to order
and commence the erection, at a late date, of a new hospital stockade.
This was to consist of a high palisade, about one thousand feet in length,
with twenty-two open sheds erected in the interior; but it was never
finished, nor occupied, and it remains to-day as it was left by the rude,
black artisans, one of the evidences of either remorse or reluctant
obedience to the lingering sense of natural compassion of its senseless
and heartless rulers.
V.
In the organization of a hospital the most important parts are the system
of nursing and the supply and cooking of food; when these are observed,
much exposure to the elements can be endured.
Pestilences are retarded, and sometimes completely checked, in their
destructive career when opposed by generous alimentation and sympathetic
care; and the vital powers,--the _vis medicatrix naturae_,--rally their
mighty strength for renewed effort. We have for instance the great and
marked change in the healthy condition and the mortality of the British
army before Sebastopol in the spring of 1856, when England poured out
lavishly her treasures, and sent men of scientific ability to correct the
well-nigh fatal errors of hygiene which were committed by her military
men.
We have also another instance in the check of a devastating pestilence at
New Orleans, as observed and mentioned by Dr. Cartwright. "As soon as a
generous public diffused the comforts of life among the seventy thousand
destitute emigrant population of New Orleans, last summer, the pestilence,
which was sweeping into eternity three hundred a day, immediately began to
disappear, before frost or any other change in the weather, its artificial
fabric being broken down by the beneficent hand of the American people."
VI.
Here there appears to have been neither system, nor order, nor humanity.
The chances of recovery were far less than the certainty of death. In
reality, it was almost certain death; for only twenty-four out of the
hundred who entered ever returned to the prison again. Those patients who
possessed sufficient strength helped themselves to what was at hand, and
what was afforded by the meagre dietary; those who had not, folded their
arms and died.
Medical men went through the formality of prescribing for the dying men,
but with formulae whose ingredients were unknown to them.
Some of these surgeons gloated over the distresses of their fellow-men,
and delighted in the awful destruction of life which was branding with
eternal infamy the manhood of their nation.
Others turned and wept, for humanity was not extinct. Those tears have in
part blotted out and redeemed the fearful inscriptions in that record of
the events of life which form the history of the human race.
It is not known that woman ever visited these precincts from feelings of
compassion, and offered to console the last moments of the dying. We do
know that they gazed upon the scene from a distance, but with what emotion
history wisely makes no note.
In Catholic countries we observe the hospitals attended by nuns, sisters
of mercy and charity, all eager to labor in behalf of humanity. Besides
these, the deaconesses of the Rhine and the beguines of Flanders have
acquired an imperishable record in history for their philanthropic
efforts. "There is nothing," says Voltaire, "nobler than the sight of
delicate females sacrificing beauty, youth, often wealth and rank, to
devote themselves to the relief of human miseries under the most revolting
forms." We have seen in our own time, in the hospitals of the Federal
armies, a devoted band of self-sacrificing women striving to perform
their part in the great work of philanthropy. Here woman never appeared.
There were, in reality, only the vivid impressions of horror, complaints,
groans, delirium, and the agony of death.
More than eight thousand of our men perished miserably in this neglected
and iniquitous spot.
Men were seen here in all stages of idiocy and imbecility from the effects
of starvation. They were seen asking for bones to gnaw to relieve the
pangs of hunger. Compassion never will believe that this request was made
by dying mortals, and that too in a hospital, which is regarded among men
as the holy institution of society, and even by infuriated combatants as
the only sacred precinct on the brutal fields of war.
The same wail of distress was heard on the plains of Texas, and along the
military lines of Virginia.
Thus the black flag, threatened by the rebel cabinet, was hoisted. Without
the courage to proclaim their intentions openly and boldly upon the
battle-field, they exhibited them in as sure, but different form, in the
management of their prisons.
VII.
The stories relating to vaccination with poisonous matter are doubtless
untrue. That there were disastrous effects from vaccination is probably
correct, but they must have been the results of accident. Similar
consequences have been observed in civil communities, in armies, and in
hospitals. Serious results have been noticed by the writer in our own
armies and hospitals.
Vaccine matter is extremely liable to decomposition; and when heated, even
by the warmth of the body, fermentation arises, and by catalytic action
putrefaction results, forming a positive poison. That the directors of
this hospital should resort to such means for the destruction of human
life is not at all probable, for the process required labor: and besides,
the wretched invalids died with sufficient rapidity without the
intervention of this new art of malice.
VIII.
In all military hospitals, food is to be regarded as the principal
medicament. With good food, the results of surgery may be foretold with
tolerable certainty, and the obstructions to the medical treatment lessen
greatly or disappear. Without the aid of pure, healthful, life-giving
aliment, the duration of animal life is always brief when exposed to
vicious and hostile influences.
The ration used here, or the system of dietary, was not constant; neither
do we know sufficiently well the quantity, or quality, or variety, to form
a true and candid estimate of its value in sustaining the physical
strength, or repairing the waste and metamorphose of the organs and
tissues of the system.
We know, however, that it was supposed to be bacon, flour, and corn
bread--rarely fresh meat; and vegetables were almost unknown. The only
vegetables and delicacies were either obtained in exchange, at exorbitant
rates, for the little currency which the prisoners had managed to secrete
among their rags, or they were now and then introduced stealthily by a
few of the humane surgeons at the peril of their lives. Persons whose
systems are weakened by want of proper food, by exhaustion from excessive
labor, or exposure, or disease, require a great variety of articles from
which to select the substances which a depraved but instinctive palate
often craves. Food which would disgust the healthy appetite, will not
quicken into action the debilitated and flickering sensation of taste.
During an enfeebled condition, loathsome morsels become injurious; for
digestion is clearly at the command of the mind, and is often checked by
its caprices.
IX.
The effect of gentle care and kindly sympathy is more felt, more marked in
the military hospitals, than in the civil. Home is farther away, and the
sense of loneliness which all invalids experience is far more oppressive.
Here it is that woman's influence is the strongest, and her sweet
disposition, her friendly, compassionate smile, seems to prolong life, and
put to flight the advancing shadows of death. "It is not medicine," says
Charles Lamb; "it is not broth and coarse meats served up at stated hours
with all the hard formality of a prison; it is not the scanty dole of a
bed to lie on which a dying man requires from his species. Looks,
attentions, consolations, in a word, sympathies, are what a man most needs
in this awful close of human sufferings. A kind look, a smile, a drop of
cold water to a parched lip--for these things a man shall bless you in
death."
With soldiers, these little attentions have great effect; partly from the
law of contrast with the roughness of their every-day occupations and
life, and partly from the rarity of such influences. And finally, when
grim Death appears, there is with them a singular philosophy, calmness,
and resignation. The writer has observed this upon many battle-fields, and
in the hospitals far removed. Rarely do we hear lamentations, regrets, and
shrieks for help: the conscious man folds his arms, and resigns himself to
his inward thoughts, thinking, perhaps, of
"His native hills that rise in happier climes,
The grot that heard his song of other times,
His cottage home, his bark of slender sail,
His glassy lake, and broomwood blossomed vale."
X.
The forms of disease observed here were simple, and they seldom exhibited
positive indications, or, rather, the immediate effects and influences of
malaria. Neither of the four great pestilential diseases
appeared--cholera, yellow fever, plague, or remittent fever.
The diseases treated, or noted down rather upon the hospital register,
were generally the different forms of inanition, or of exhaustion of the
powers of life by the absorption of noxious vapors, or by the exposure
when in feeble condition to the extremes of heat and moisture.
The mortality among the patients removed to this place was perfectly
appalling. Nearly eight hundred men out of every thousand perished. Yet
this might have been foretold from the horrible condition, the
pre-arranged destitution of the hospital. Besides carefully selected
food, pure and dry air is indispensable for the recovery of a diseased
condition, and damp and vitiated air is sure to retard improvement, or to
induce complications.
Neither food nor healthy atmosphere were afforded.
The symptoms of the patients indicated the want of food, and were not in
reality the signs of actual disease. And the post-mortems made at this
hospital revealed the absence of lesion, save those consequent upon
starvation or prolonged suffering.
The minutes of this clinic are very extensive and particular, and they
exhibit in overwhelming proof the cause of death.
Life was prolonged to the last degree of the natural vitality, and among
the phenomena observed, the law of muscular irritability, as discovered
and explained by Brown-Sequard, was well illustrated. There was no
cadaveric rigidity; for the want of nutrition, the vitiated atmosphere,
the exposure to the vicissitudes of climate, had weakened and utterly
destroyed all nervous power. Immediately after the cessations of the
functions of life, putrefaction appeared and progressed with great
rapidity.
XI.
In discussing the rate of mortality of this hospital, we cannot with
propriety assume a standard for comparison, for nowhere can we turn to
analyze results from similar causes. We may, perhaps, take the data and
statistics of our own military prisons, but the contrasts are too fearful
for credulity. We will consider these at length, with other comparisons,
in the next Book.
"The truth is in the facts, and not in the spirit that judges them."
XII.
The want of system cannot be charged to the fault of the organization of
the rebel Bureau of Medicine, for that was well arranged and strictly
governed.
It may partly be ascribed to the general carelessness of the officers in
charge, and partly to the desire of the rulers that the numbers of
prisoners should decrease, and consequently their labors should diminish,
no matter how, nor how quickly.
That there were men in charge of the patients who were destitute of all
moral scruples, of all refined and humane sentiments, there can be no
doubt, but there were a few men who did not partake of the general madness
of the spirit of destruction, and who exhibited a tender regard for the
sufferings of their fellow-men. The names of Thornberg and Head will
always be preserved as among the only few redeeming acts in the story of
the great wrong. The sympathy of these men was undisguised, and when
protest failed to produce kindly impressions, or to bring alleviation to
misery, they secretly sought to succor the dying men from their own scanty
store at the peril of their lives.
Dr. Head was not only threatened with death by the brutal Wirz, but he was
actually imprisoned for a short time for giving to the dying some
vegetables which he had gathered from his little garden. "Sire," said the
noble Surgeon Larry to Napoleon, "it is my avocation to prolong life, and
not to destroy it."
Let no man attempt to recall the scenes that took place in this wretched
enclosure, which was falsely called a hospital; let no man attempt to lift
the veil of darkness which now obscures the acts or the animus which
governed and directed this mockery of philanthropy, for the human mind
already staggers under the load of horror which is imposed by the events
of every-day life, and advanced civilization has no desire to renew the
recollection of the atrocities of the dark ages.
BOOK SIXTH.
"To die, is the common lot of humanity. In the grave, the only
distinction lies between those who leave no trace behind and the
heroic spirits who transmit their names to posterity."--_Tacitus._
I.
It is always difficult to determine the natural duration of life, or the
death-rate for any locality or any class of people, since the range of
circumstances that affect the health of men and animals is so vast, that
it requires great research, powers of analysis and comparison; so
extensive a knowledge of the phenomena and the laws of life, that few men
have the courage to attack, or the ability to comprehend and solve the
complex problem.
In our estimations we must consider what is due to the agencies of the
natural world, such as geology, meteorology, and the like, as well as to
age, constitution, temperament, anterior professions, and morbid
predispositions, also the exaltation and demoralization of moral action.
"We see," says Buffon, "that man perishes at all ages, while animals
appear to pass through the period of life with firm and steady pace." The
great naturalist shows how the passions, with their attendant evils,
exercise great influence upon the health, and derange the principles
which sustain us; how often men lead a nervous and contentious life, and
that most of them die of disappointment. Buffon is right, and the English
statistics show us that the duration of life is generally in proportion to
its happiness and regularity, and that miserable lives are soon
extinguished.
Hope sometimes forsakes the stoutest hearts, and with hope disappears the
mainspring of earthly life.
II.
In deciding upon the causes of the excessive mortality at Andersonville,
there is not much obscurity to contend with. But we must admit that there
must have been some mortality, for there is a determined duration of life
for every species of animal; and we must also allow that under the most
favorable circumstances, the death-rate of soldiers encamped in this
unhealthy locality would have been far beyond the normal limit.
From calculations based upon the most accurate and extensive observations
made in England for a long series of years, it was determined that a
mortality of less than two per cent. per annum for all ages might be
assumed as a fair average rate of deaths in a population where sanitary
measures were properly attended to.
It is noticed by eminent observers, that the mean rate for Europe is about
three per cent.; which is regarded as excessive, being about double of
what is estimated as the natural ratio.
Our distinguished statistician, Dr. Edward Jarvis, remarks that the
mortality of two per cent. in England includes all ages--infancy as well
as the last decades of life; and he states that the proper rates for
comparison are those of the males in England of the military age, which is
observed to be less than one per cent.
He shows that the death-rate of the soldier in England is less than one
per cent., and also considers the stated mortality of three per cent. for
the continent of Europe as much too high. The mortality on the continent
is greater than in England, and greater in England than in Scotland.
In times of peace, the mortality of soldiers is not much greater than that
of the civil laborers; but during campaigns no limit can properly be
given, for the vicissitudes are so rapid, and the exposures so varied,
that the chances of life and death cannot be estimated with fairness, or
with any degree of certainty. But when encampments are arranged, and
occupied for any considerable length of time, the possibilities and
probabilities of health may then be considered with propriety.
III.
These chances and these causes of general mortality depend upon the
atmospheric influences, the mephitism of the soil, the density of the
population, and the excellence of the food and shelter, as well as upon
the natural vigor and strength of the individual.
Some classes of human beings have greater tenacity of life than others,
but all are affected by vicious influences, and yield sooner or later to
the elements of destruction. "Everything in the animal economy is
regulated by fixed and positive laws."
"We live on our forces," says Galen: "as long as our forces are sound, we
can resist everything; when they become weak, a trifle injures us." The
truth of this remark is well illustrated in the life of the soldier, whose
health is in exact ratio to the condition in which he is placed. And his
mode of existence, the combined influence of food, exposure, and the
training of mind and body, give a peculiar character, which requires, when
disabled, special modification of treatment, and a particular kind of
experience. The ancient physiologists distinguished two kinds, or rather
two provisions of strength--the forces in reserve and the forces in use;
or, as they said, "Vires in posse et vires in actu;" or, as Barthez
describes it, the radical forces and the acting forces.
The young soldier, supported by this buoyancy of the unknown force of
life, recovers from terrible shocks and disasters to his system, while the
old man, fatigued and exhausted by the great and protracted labors of
active campaigns, feels that he has the hidden resources--the reserved and
superabundant powers of youth--no longer.
IV.
"The atmospheric influences, the mephitism of the soil, and the inhabited
locality, are the three principal conditions of the causes of general
mortality," says Pringle.
He should have added food; for diet, of all external causes, affects the
condition of the human race more than any other. Those who have observed
the mortality curve follow the harvests in Ireland and Germany, and
noticed how strangely the number of the dead corresponded to the
scantiness of food, and those who have experimented with the feeding of
domesticated animals, will agree with me on this point.
Let us review these three great principles of destruction, as laid down by
the distinguished European authority, and apply them in the explanations
of the mortality at Andersonville.
V.
It has been observed by medical men, from the time of Hippocrates down to
the present day, that the effects of a heated atmosphere, saturated with
moisture, are very injurious, and exceedingly prolific of disease.
Air at 32 deg. of Fahrenheit, according to Leslie, contains, when saturated
with moisture, 1/160 of its weight of water; at 59 deg., 1/80; at 86 deg., 1/40;
at 113 deg., 1/20; its capacity for moisture being doubled by each increase of
27 deg. of Fahrenheit.
The degree of heat within the stockade sometimes rose to beyond 110 deg.
Fahrenheit, and the degree of humidity was correspondingly as great. That
moisture exerts more influence in the production of disease than any other
meteorological condition, is well observed in every-day life. M. Bossi
found, in his investigations, that the extreme and constant humidity of
the atmosphere affected the barometer of health very markedly, and he
established the following ratio of mortality for the different regions:
The ratio for mountains and elevated regions he observed to be one in
thirty-eight; on the banks of rivers, one in twenty-six; on the level
plains, sown with grain, one in twenty-four, and in parts interspersed
with pools and marshes, one in twenty.
VI.
The influence and value of pure and healthy air may be seen in the
simplest physiological observations.
Animal life is fed and sustained by respiration, as well as vegetable
life. It is from the blood that animal life derives the materials and
forces which maintain it, and we have seen how this owes its vivifying
properties, in a great measure, to the oxygen which it receives from the
respiratory organs, and how its power is in direct ratio to the purity of
the air breathed. A vitiated atmosphere manifests itself at once in the
nutritive powers of the vital stream; and the more feeble the respiration,
the less rich the blood. This "oxygen enters by the lungs into the blood,
and with the blood flows on and circulates through the body; it also
enters partly into the composition of the tissues, so that it is a real
food, and it is as necessary to the construction of the human body as the
other forms of food which are usually introduced into the stomach."
The weight of oxygen, says Professor Johnston, taken up by the lungs,
exceeds considerably that of all the dry, solid food which is introduced
into the stomach of a healthy man.
Man consumes one hundred gallons of air every hour, ordinarily with
eighteen respirations per minute, and two hundred and six cubic feet of
air is the minimum for the preservation of health. The minimum allowed to
the English hospitals by artificial ventilation is twenty-two hundred
cubic feet the hour. The patients of St. Guy's receive four thousand cubic
feet of fresh air every hour. The quantity required by the sick is
enormous, to compensate the products of respiration, and all the
deleterious evaporations of the locality where they are placed, and all
other effluvia of diverse natures. In the Hospital Lariboissaire, at
Paris, where about fifteen hundred cubic feet of air are furnished by
machinery every hour, a taint is perceptible in the atmosphere: and Morin,
in his experiments at Hospital Beaujon, thought that two thousand cubic
feet were hardly sufficient. Dr. Sutherland believes four thousand feet to
be necessary. The quantity, however, is nothing compared to quality. The
quality is of the highest importance. The air must contain the vivifying
properties of its normal constitution, or it loses force, and death must
ensue. The source of animal heat is in the mutual chemical action of the
oxygen and the constituents of the blood conveyed by the circulation. When
the atmosphere is impure the oxidating processes are much diminished. We
receive into our lungs about one hundred gallons of air per hour, and from
this we absorb about five gallons of oxygen, or about one twentieth of the
volume of air inspired.
"The essential and fundamental condition of all respiration is the
reciprocal action of the nourishing fluid, and a medium containing
oxygen." Dumas believes that oxygen is necessary to the conservation of
the vitality and proper structure of the globules of the blood; also that
the integrity of these organisms is one of the essential conditions to the
arterialization of the nourishing stream.
Milne Edwards, also, maintains that the great absorbing powers of the
blood exist in the globules. The normal number of these globules is one
hundred and twenty-seven out of the thousand component parts of the blood;
but they vary according to the barometer of health; sometimes they are
observed in disease to descend to sixty-five. Vierodt has shown how a
certain limit in the number of blood globules in the mammalia cannot be
passed in the descending scale without death taking place. Simon and
others have also shown how a careful and nutritious regimen may increase
these globules in the blood of the consumptive, bringing them up from
sixty-four to even one hundred and forty-four.
The blood of man is the richest of all the mammalia, and it contains,
according to Berzelius, three times as many hydrochlorates as the blood of
the ox.
Its richness depends upon the species and individual, and also upon the
degree of health, it varying according to the condition of the person.
"A diseased pathological condition causes a diminution in the proportion
of active principles of the nourishing fluid, and especially in fibrine,
of which the abundance is allied to the most important activity of the
vital work in some parts of the organism." "The blood," says Dr. Jones,
"is not only distributed by innumerable channels through every recess of
the body; the blood is not only the source of all the elements of
structure; the blood not only furnishes the materials for all the
secretions and excretions, and for all the chemical changes,--but the
blood is in turn affected by the physical and chemical changes of every
vessel, of every nerve, of every organ and texture of the body. It is
evident then that the constitution of the blood will depend upon the food,
upon the vigor and perfection of the organs of digestion, respiration,
circulation, secretion, and excretion; upon the vigor and perfection of
the nervous system, and of all the organs and apparatus; and upon the
correlation of the physical, vital, and nervous forces. The character of
the blood will then vary with the animal; with the organ and tissue
through which it is circulating; with the age, sex, temperament, race,
diet, previous habits, occupation, and previous diseases; with the soil
and climate; and with the relative states of the activity of the forces."
VII.
Thus it appears how important is the function of respiration, and how
vital the necessity for pure air.
Pure dry air contains about 21 gallons of oxygen, and 79 gallons of
nitrogen out of 100, and about one gallon of carbonic acid out of 2500.
Man will consume, on the average of 20 respirations a minute, or 1200
respirations the hour, about 20 pounds of air, and give off 2-1/2 pounds
or more of carbonic acid, besides half a pound of watery vapor, per diem,
or, according to Andral and Gavaret, 22 quarts of carbonic acid per hour.
We have shown in the chapter on Alimentation how this process of
respiration affects the nutrition, and how serious the results of its
disturbance. The purer the air, the more perfect the type of men and
animals. This was understood by the ancients, and they established their
most famous schools for gladiatorial training at Capua and Ravenna.
The same law is observed at the present day by the admirers of the
race-horse. The purity of the air gives purity to the blood, and the blood
builds up the system in like proportion of excellence.
VIII.
Fifteen hundred cubic inches, or twenty-two quarts, of carbonic acid are
expired from the lungs every hour, and thrown off into the surrounding
atmosphere. Besides this, Sequin found that 18 grains of organized matter
were thrown off per minute from the body in the form of insensible
perspiration,--7 grains by the lungs, and 11 grains by the skin. Hence we
may form some idea of the rapid corruption of the air in this stockade,
where 30,000 men were breathing at one time. The foul and heavy vapors
could not rise above the palisades unless a strong breeze prevailed; and
even then they became so offensive as almost to extinguish life, like the
deadly air of the Grotta del Cane. The exhalations from putrescent animal
surfaces are always specifically heavier than the upper warm strata in the
confined spaces where men are crowded together, such as the wards of
hospitals. We find, according to Professor Graham, the vitiated air to be
composed somewhat as follows: Phosphoretted hydrogen, sulphuretted
hydrogen, carbonic acid, carburetted hydrogen, cyanogen with its
compounds. The first gas is always recognized where the diseases of the
internal organs are present, especially affections of the liver, stomach,
bowels, and in fever and dysentery; and we observe the blackening of the
lead plaster, &c., when the second is present. Stupor, headache, and
sleepiness betray the presence of the other three gases. The diffusion of
each gas is always inversely as the square root of the density of such
gases.
The density is thus, air being regarded as 1000:--
Phosphuretted hydrogen, 1240
Sulphuretted " 1170
Carburetted " 559
Carbonic acid, 1524
Cyanogen, 1806
IX.
The report of the British Parliament Commission gives the following data
in this important question: "The amount of carbonic acid in the air is
about 1/2000 or .0005; the amount expired is about 1/12, or .083. Respired
air contains 1/10 or 1 of carbonic acid, and this must be diluted ten
times to make the air safe. Thus, 1/10 / 10/1 = 1/100, or .01; and this
again divided by 10, or 1/100 / 10/1 = 1/1000 or .001, gives the amount of
ventilation needed to reduce the air to that state of purity that only
1/1000 more of carbonic acid should be added to the air, when it would be
represented by .0015 instead of .0005."
Observing this rule, and taking 300 cubic feet as the air respired for the
24 hours, to dilute it ten times it must be mixed with ten times the bulk,
or 3000 cubic feet--the space to be allowed for each individual; but if it
is wished to keep up a pure air, it must be mixed with ten times this bulk
again, or 30,000 cubic feet, which shows the ventilation needed to
maintain an atmosphere nearly pure; or there must be admitted into the
space of 3000 cubic feet nearly 21 cubic feet per minute of fresh air by
ventilation, if the man in it is to breathe an atmosphere which shall
contain only three times more of carbonic acid than the air he breathes
originally contained; or again, 300 cubic feet, 3000, and 30,000, mark the
requirements of one individual, in 24 hours, for respiration, space, and
ventilation. On a calm day, when there were no strong breezes to change
the air of the stockade, the entire quantity of air in the old stockade,
allowing the palisades to be on the average 20 feet high, could be
exhausted in 20 minutes by the 30,000 men respiring 300 cubic inches per
minute. This is not a proper estimate to offer; but it will give a just
idea of the rapid and fearful vitiation of the air that took place within
the enclosure.
Vierodt shows how rapidly carbonic acid increases when foul air is
breathed, and Lehman proves the rapid disengagement of the gas in moist
atmospheres.
Symptoms of uneasiness manifest themselves when the air contains from
6/1000 to 7/1000 carbonic acid, and when the proportion amounts to ten
parts to 100 of air, death ensues. "This effect is visible upon vegetables
also, and many of them are extremely susceptible of impurities in the air,
and very slight modifications in the proportion of its constituents are
more or less prejudicial to their growth." But plants, like animals, vary
in regard to the delicacy of their constitutions, some being much more
susceptible than others.
In warm climes the respiration becomes slower, and in consequence there
is less of carbon burned and less oxygen absorbed; but on the other hand
the functions of the skin become vastly increased, the bilious secretions
become more active, and the excess of carbon is eliminated by this
channel.
That we expire more carbonic acid in a warm, moist atmosphere, and less in
a cold, dry climate, is shown by the exhilaration of our spirits on a fine
frosty morning.
No wonder that men lost their reason in this prison, for the blood no
longer reddened from the imperfect arterialization, and burdened the brain
with its effete matter, paralyzing and clogging up the delicate filaments
and the narrow channels of thought and life.
We have seen that the blood is subject to incessant variations in its
precise chemical constitution; a free atmosphere, well supplied,
oxygenates and destroys the numerous impurities that tend to lurk in the
system and develop disease.
Bichat shows, in his researches on life and death, how the black and
carbonized blood disturbs the functions of the brain and acts like a
narcotic poison, causing the heart finally to cease its throbbings.
These miasms and poisons floated about the enclosure where there was not
the least sign of vegetable organism to absorb and convert them. As they
passed into the systems of the prisoners they became the cause of disease,
decrepitude, and death.
X.
Vitiated air is one of the most subtile and powerful of poisons, and it
seems to affect soldiers more than any other class of persons, and its
consequences have been commented upon by most of the military
writers,--from Xenophon among the Greeks, Vegetius among the Romans, down
to those of the present time. Cavalry horses have been observed to suffer
deterioration and death from the same cause.
Ague and fever, states Dr. Johnson, "two of the most prominent features of
the malarious influences, are as a drop of water in the ocean when
compared with the other, but less obtrusive, but more dangerous maladies
that silently disorganize the vital structure of the human fabric under
the influence of this deleterious and invisible poison."
One fourth of the sailors of the English navy are sent home invalided
every year, and one tenth of them die from the effects of foul air of
their cabins. "Two thirds of the pulmonary diseases which desolate England
are induced by this cause." Baudelocque long ago pointed out its
influences in the etiology of scrofula.
It is really the same influence observed by Magendie, and not contradicted
to the present day, that putrid blood, brain, bile, or pus, when laid on
flesh wounds, produce in animals, after a longer or shorter interval,
vomiting, languor, and death. The same results and phenomena are observed
in the inspiration of bad air; the most terrible forms of fever arise from
the overcrowding of people in confined and limited spaces. Most of the
zymotic diseases enter by the lungs, which are the principal absorbing
agents.
The breathing in of foul air, loaded with perceptible and putrid animal
and vegetable emanations, gives rise to those zymotici, the ideas of which
originated with Hippocrates, and to which the distinguished Liebig has
since given form and prominence.
Not only is animal life disturbed and destroyed, but we observe that
vegetables even are affected by the same or similar causes; that they are
extremely susceptible of impurities in the air, and that the rapidity and
vigorous appearance of their growth are affected whenever there is very
slight modification in the healthy proportions of the atmosphere. Again,
we see how seeds, when placed in elementary oxygen, germinate with extreme
rapidity, and soon decay, thus indicating how the presence of nitrogen in
the natural air restrains the force of the other element.
XI.
There was another serious defect in the management of the prison, and that
was, the neglect to provide the means for entire ablution, which, in warm
climes, becomes an imperative necessity. "Animals perspire, that they may
live;" and this function is as necessary to a healthy life as either
breathing or digestion: the skin, like the lungs, gives off carbonic acid
and absorbs oxygen. But it differs from the lungs in giving off a much
larger bulk of the former gas than it absorbs of the latter. The quantity
of carbonic acid which escapes varies with circumstances. It is sometimes
equal to one thirtieth, and sometimes amounts to only a ninetieth part of
that which is thrown off from the lungs, but generally it amounts to 100
grains daily. But exercise and hard labor increase the evolution of carbon
from the skin, as it does from the lungs. A large quantity of nitrogen
also escapes by the skin.
Hence we may infer the effect upon the prisoners, from the want of
ablution, and the means of removing the accumulating filth of their
bodies. The functions of the skin, and their influence in the practical
feeding of animals, have been carefully studied by the experimentalists,
and they have observed that the difference in washed and unwashed animals,
during the process of fattening, amounts to one fifth.
Pure air and the enforcement of daily ablutions having been introduced
into some of the English schools, the sick rate was reduced two thirds. A
general of a beleaguered city in Spain was obliged to put his soldiers on
short allowance, and compelled them to bathe daily in order to amuse them,
when he found, to his surprise, that they became in better condition than
when on full rations.
Chadwick states, in his papers on Economy, that "amongst soldiers of the
line who have only hands and face washing provided for, the death-rate is
upwards of 17 per 1000."
When sent into prisons where there is a far lower diet, sometimes
exclusively vegetable, and without beer or spirits, but where regular head
to foot ablutions and cleanliness of clothes, as well as of persons, are
enforced, their health is vastly increased, and the death-rate is reduced
to 2-1/2 per 1000.
XII.
It appears from the mortuary records of the prison that 13,000 men were
registered and buried during the year of its occupation. It also appears
from the same hospital lists that 17,873 men received medical treatment,
or were known to be sick, and their names entered in the books. Of these,
825 men were exchanged, leaving 17,048 to be accounted for; thus giving a
mortality of more than 76 per cent., or 760 men out of every thousand.
It is said, and stated with confidence, that the names of the 4000
soldiers who died in their mud-holes within the pen, and who did not
generally receive any medical treatment whatever, were placed upon the
hospital register, and their diseases diagnosed after death and removal
from the stockade. But of this the writer is not positive, although he has
seen tables of statistics of certain periods of the prison, where it is
shown that every patient who was treated for disease perished.
XIII.
To form an idea of the awful mortality which reigned here, let us review
the records of the hospital prisons, and the casualties of armies of
foreign as well as our own country. These comparisons must, however, be
received with much allowance, for the circumstances which led to death are
very different.
* * * * *
In the prisons of Switzerland, before they were improved, the mortality
was 25 to 35 per 1000. In the county jails of England it is reckoned at 10
per 1000; in the terrible hulks (Les Bagnes) of France it is 39 to 55 per
1000, including epidemics of cholera.
The average mortality of the London hospitals, where only the severer
cases of disease and accident are received and treated, is nine per cent.
In the hospitals of Dublin it is less than 5 per cent.; in the civil
hospitals of France it is from 5 to 9 per cent.; in the military hospitals
of the same country it is much less; at Val de Grace it was 4 per cent.
for a period of forty years; at Vincennes it was 2 per cent. for a long
period; at the Gros Caillou, for a term of eleven years, it was less than
3 per cent. out of 55,000 patients.
The mortality at Moyamensing Prison for many years was 1 per cent., and in
the New York Penitentiary less than that for seven years. The average
deaths in the prisons of Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, and Maryland,
was about 2 per cent. The death-rate of the rebels confined in our
military prisons was small, comparatively: at Fort Delaware it was 2 per
cent, for eleven months; at Johnson's Island it was 2 per cent., or 134
deaths out of 6000 prisoners, for the period of twenty-one months.
The loss at the rebel prison at Elmira is not known for the entire term;
but it was much less than the rebel "Vinculis" desires to make it.
His own statements make but 4 per cent. during the worst month for
instance: "Now out of less than nine thousand five hundred prisoners on
the first of September, 386 died that month."
"At Andersonville the mortality averaged 1000 per month out of 36,000
prisoners, 1/36. At Elmira it was 386 per month, out of 9500, or 1/25 of
the whole. At Elmira it was 4 per cent.; at Andersonville less than 3 per
cent.
"If the mortality at Andersonville had been as great as at Elmira, the
deaths should have been fourteen hundred and forty per month, or fifty per
cent. more than they were."
The official records of Andersonville show that Vinculis is greatly in
error; for, instead of fourteen hundred and forty, the great number he
imagines, they were even more; for the figures show two thousand six
hundred and seventy-eight for September, or more than fifteen per cent.,
and in October fifteen hundred and ninety-five, or more than twenty-seven
per cent., and in the month of August three thousand men died, and on the
twenty-third of that month one hundred and twenty-seven perished, or one
every eleven minutes out of the number present.
XIV.
In the hospitals of the allied forces, during the campaign of the Crimea,
which were established along the banks of the Bosphorus and at
Constantinople, there were admitted, during the twenty-two months of the
war, one hundred and thirty-nine thousand patients, and of these nineteen
per cent. were lost during the entire period, or at the rate of ten per
cent. per annum.
One hundred and ninety-three thousand patients were admitted into the
French hospitals during the same period, and but fourteen per cent. were
lost, or less than eight per cent. per annum.
The mortality of the military hospitals of the army of occupation of Spain
in 1824 was less than five per cent.
The extemporized and regular hospitals of Milan, says Baron Larrey,
received during the Italian campaign thirty-four thousand sick and
wounded; of whom fourteen hundred died, or four per cent., or forty men
out of every one thousand. The temporary hospitals of Nashville received
during the year 1864 sixty-five thousand sick and wounded, of whom
twenty-six hundred died, or four per cent. The numerous hospitals of
Washington treated in 1863 sixty-eight thousand patients, and lost
twenty-six hundred, or less than four per cent.; and, in 1864, the same
hospitals treated ninety-six thousand patients (forty-nine thousand sick
and forty-seven thousand wounded), and lost six thousand, or six per cent.
The department of Pennsylvania received fifty-six thousand patients in its
various hospitals, and lost but two per cent. Twenty-nine thousand nine
hundred patients were cared for in the medical and surgical wards of the
fourteen great civil hospitals of London in 1861, and but twenty-seven
hundred of these died, or nine per cent. The diary of the rebel War Clerk
says, that in the hospitals of the rebel service sixteen hundred thousand
patients were treated, with a loss of four per cent.; yet it appears from
a surreptitious copy of the quarterly report ending 1864, relating to the
prisoners in hospital at Richmond, that twenty-seven hundred patients were
treated, and thirteen hundred and ninety-six died, or fifty per cent.;
more than half of these cases were those of diarrhoea and dysentery, and
only seventy deaths from fever. It appears from the official data of the
Surgeon-General's office, published in November, 1865, that eight hundred
and seventy thousand cases of wounds and disease were treated by the
medical staff of the United States army in 1862, and but two per cent.
were lost; also, that in 1863, seventeen hundred thousand cases were cared
for, with a loss of three per cent. only.
XV.
The statistics of the great armies of Austria, Sardinia, and France during
the Italian war, when half a million of men met in conflict at Magenta and
Solferino, show, according to Boudin, that but six thousand four hundred
and ten men lost their lives--of the French, three thousand five hundred
and five; of the Sardinians, one thousand and forty-five; of the
Austrians, one thousand eight hundred and sixty. It is shown by the
records of the British army, that, out of the aggregate number of four
hundred and thirty-eight thousand British soldiers who were engaged in the
twenty-two great battles of the British empire from 1801 to 1854, but
fourteen thousand men were killed, or died of their wounds, or three per
cent. These battles embrace those of Egypt, Spain, France, Waterloo, and
the Crimea.
Contrast these blood-stained records with this one instance of rebel
cruelty at Andersonville. Of the number of the Federal soldiers who have
been held in captivity during the rebellion by the rebels, more than
thirty thousand of them are now dead. We know from official records that
twenty-three thousand are buried at Andersonville and Salisbury alone.
XVI.
Up to the month of September, 1864, forty-two thousand four hundred
prisoners had been received, and out of this number seven thousand five
hundred and eighty-seven, or eighteen per cent., had died since the
occupation of the prison--a period of about six months. During August the
manoeuvres of Sherman alarmed them so much that they thought best to
remove many of the prisoners to other stockades in Alabama and in North
and South Carolina; but yet the mortality for the remainder of the year
was for the month of September seventeen per cent. out of the number
present; October, twenty-seven per cent.; November, twenty-four per cent.;
and seven per cent. in December, when there were but five thousand
inmates. This gives nineteen per cent. average for each of those four
months, and indicates that out of the thirty-two thousand present on the
first of August, but few thousand would have been living at the close of
the year, had not Sherman compelled a reduction in the number of inmates.
Out of this number present in August, and distributed afterwards, I
believe that but few thousand survived the system of treatment at the
other prisons, and ever lived to reach home. Of these few thousand men who
were finally exchanged, a great many have since perished; which statement
will be admitted by all who have watched the phases of disease since the
termination of the war.
XVII.
The records state that eight thousand died from diarrhoea and scurvy, and
that three thousand more died from dysentery and unknown causes. Two
hundred and fifteen thousand cases of diarrhoea were treated in the United
States army in 1862, and but one thousand one hundred died; and of
thirty-seven thousand cases of dysentery, but three hundred and
forty-seven died; and but one death from scurvy per thirty-five thousand
of mean strength. In 1863, according to the official records by Surgeon
Woodward, five hundred thousand cases of diarrhoea and dysentery were
treated, and but two per cent. died. According to the same authority there
were but eight thousand six hundred cases of scurvy during the first two
years of the war, and but one per cent. of these died. Fever was almost
unknown, although the foul atmospheres and malarial miasms are generally
so eager in their attacks, and so rapid in their effects; the autopsies of
the dead men revealed to the astonished pathologist the utter absence of
all the usual lesions of these diseases.
Boudin, of the French army, in 1843, in his "Essai de Geographie
Medicale," observes that phthisis and typhoid fever are very rare in the
marshy districts where intermittent fevers of a certain gravity prevail.
It does not appear that either of these diseases declared itself to any
perceptible degree.
The effect of starvation was so strong that miasmatic disease could not
gain a lodgment in the system, although every other condition was
favorable to its production. Scurvy seems to be prominent in the alleged
diseases. The combined influence of all the vicious conditions could
readily have produced this form of malady in its worst shape; but it is
one of those diseases which are clearly within the control of man, and for
the existence of which, in this case, there is no excuse whatever. They
required the treatment, practised with success in India, for those fluxes
which are marked by a scorbutic state of the system--potatoes and lime
juice.
The neighboring plantations produced the potatoes in great quantities. In
the everglades of Florida the lime tree, which furnishes a positive
antidote, grows in wild luxuriance; and the woods everywhere, the corn and
potatoes of their fields, furnish vinegar by distillation. If the
plantations failed in their supplies of vegetables, the forests furnished,
with trifling labor, an excellent substitute.
Vinegar, in the early history of war, was the chief and the sure reliance
against the attacks of scurvy and malaria. To this drink chiefly, Marshal
Saxe ascribes the amazing success of the Roman campaigns in the varied
climates of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Scientific men, from Dioscorides to
Orfila, have extolled its virtues in this respect. It is idle to say that
they did not know how to make it, for the merest tyro in chemistry
understands the method of fermentation and distillation.
XVIII.
It has been stated that the mortality was caused by epidemics; by
dysentery or camp distempers; but the testimony of nature, as revealed by
the scalpel of the dissector, does not admit of such statement. There was
neither epidemic nor pestilence. There was starvation instead.
That a vast amount of this mortality was caused by the unfavorable, the
needless, the cruel circumstances in which the prisoners were placed, no
one acquainted with the phenomena of life and death will deny.
But as to how much more than the normal rate, no man has sufficient
generosity and impartiality to determine.
This we know, however, that it is an axiom with all hygienists and
military men, that the health of the soldier is always in direct ratio of
the care taken of him. To give a just estimate of the normal degree of the
mortality that was caused by diarrhoea, will indeed form a complex
problem, since it is not only the last stage of starvation, but it is
often produced by the decomposition of the blood by the dyscrasia peculiar
to camp life. We observe it in all armies during the summer months, and
that it seems to result from manifold causes. Although the predisposing
cause is the dyscrasiac condition of the soldier, the determining cause is
most always the quality of the food consumed, and the purity of the water
used for potable purposes. Surface water mixed with confervoids and
decomposed vegetable matter, and the deeper currents of water which pass
through the rotten limestones, are, during the summer, the fruitful
sources of intestinal disorders.
Those who have observed the influence of atmospheric changes upon disease,
will comprehend why the diarrhoea curve followed the line of high
temperature, and how it progressed in consequence of heat, even when
unassisted by inanition.
XIX.
It has been maintained by the rebels that many of the deaths were caused
by nostalgia, or home-sickness. The truth of this remark we do not
consider of sufficient importance to discuss in the extenuation of the
crime, although we will admit that this disorder, which impairs the
intellectual faculties and enfeebles the digestive functions, is often the
cause of death among the French armies in Algeria, and the English in
India, and that it can even become epidemic and lead to suicide. But the
disease is clearly within the control of man.
We can find a more ready reason for the explanation of the derangement of
the mind and nervous system in the dietary. The statistics of insanity
show how sad or ferocious delirium may arise from starvation; and
according to Combe, "a species of insanity, arising from defective
nourishment, is very prevalent among the Milanese, and is easily cured by
the nourishing diet provided in the hospitals to which the patients are
sent."
The survivors have explained the causes of death of their comrades. The
faces of these men told the story better than the tongue could describe.
The peculiar look of these men was common to them all: the shrunken and
pallid features--the rough and blighted skin--the vacant, wild, and
unearthly stare of the hollow and lustreless eye,--all told of the results
of starvation. This look can no more be described than forgotten, when
once seen. Wherever the returned sufferers landed, the bystanders were
struck with horror by this fearful appearance.
XX.
The impure air, the marked and rapid changes of temperature, and the foul
water, rendered the tenacity of animal life a simple problem, and when
joined to the deprivation of food, it became a matter of surprise that any
of the hapless wretches escaped with life.
The intense heat served to accelerate the destruction of the organism,
already weakened and sapped by the want of food and the putridity of the
atmosphere.
Life is always best supported at a moderate temperature, which, however,
is restricted to a certain degree, depending upon the forces of reserve in
the animal; and it is observed by experimentalists that all the vital
properties of the nervous centres, the nerves and muscles in adult as well
as in young warm-blooded animals, may be much increased by a diminution of
temperature.
This is shown by Brown-Sequard, in his illustrations of the influences of
prolonged muscular exertion on cadaveric rigidity and putrefaction.
Some few of the soldiers arriving from the army, with their systems
already saturated with paludal and animal poisons, and who were profoundly
cachectic, could rally very slowly if at all, under the combined
influences of the mephitic miasms and heat of the locality, even had there
been no fault in the alimentation. But there was a very great number of
the prisoners who were free from disease and debility, as they were direct
from their homes in the North, or from the healthy camps of instruction.
Scurvy and the vicious forms of zymotic disease, which depend upon
starvation and vitiated atmosphere, raged unchecked. The medical care
does not seem to have made any impression upon them, because of the
limitations of their materia medica, and the want of attention and
accommodations for the patients.
There does not seem to have been any sanitary regulations, nor the
simplest hygienic precautions adopted by the prison authorities. No proper
military arrangements to enforce order among the turbulent or insane, to
protect the weak from the strong in the struggle for a morsel of bread, a
bone, or a rag of clothing; no proper system of nurses to assist the
feeble within the stockade or the hospital, and administer to their wants.
Filth was deposited everywhere, because the enfeebled and dying wretches
had not sufficient strength to crawl down to the quagmire by the banks of
the stream. In the midst of these horrible circumstances, men met their
fate with singular calmness and stoicism. Nature strangely appears to
conform and temper the asperities of fate to men and animals alike.
XXI.
It is often asked why the prisoners did not revolt, and with the mighty
energy of despair wrench down the gates, and strangle with their hands the
few thousand of rebel guards. To burst through the massive timbers of the
gates and the outer lines of palisades, and then force the encircling row
of ramparts, which were bristling with troops and cannon, required
something more than courage. This gigantic strength, this desperation of
vigor, was not possible for the prisoners; for the food, and the external
impressions--whether of the heat, cold, or horror--had too much
impoverished the blood,--the blood, which imparts force to human volition.
XXII.
In the summing up of the condition to which life was exposed in this
stockade, and reviewing the vicious influences at work, we may come to
some definite conclusion as to the true causes of the results. It is
evident from the comparisons and estimates of the dietary that the want of
food alone was sufficient to cause a great number of deaths. It is also
evident from the statements relative to ratio of density, to exposure, to
deadly miasms, and exhalations from decomposing animal matter, that these
conditions were alone sufficient to cause excessive mortality, even if the
alimentation had been generous and proper.
This terrible mortality, without the influence of epidemics, is without
parallel, and is without excuse, save on the principle that war is for
mutual destruction, that the captor has the right of disposal, and that
the captives must be put to death. The philanthropist may console himself
with the idea that climate, with its unseen but powerful agencies, has
been the author of the destruction of this army of men; but the surgeon
and man of science will recognize the true causes, and express their
opinion in but one word, and that word is MURDER: that it was deliberate
destruction; but whether with the conscience of the Tartar, or with
premeditated free-will, it matters little,--the result is the same.
BOOK SEVENTH.
"Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto."--_Terence._
"Since no man has a natural right over his fellow-creature, and since
force produces no right, conventions then remain as the base for all
legitimate authority among men."--_Rousseau._
I.
"War," exclaims the author of the "Social Contract," "is not exactly a
relation of man to man, but a relation of state to state, in which the
individuals are enemies only by accident, and not as men, neither even as
citizens, but as soldiers,--not exactly as members of the country, but as
its defenders. In fine, every state can have as enemies only other states,
and not men, on account of the interference of things of diverse natures,
which cannot fix any true relation.
"This principle is even conformed to maxims established in all times, and
to the constant practice of all civilized people. The declarations of war
are more as warnings to the powers than to their subjects. The
stranger--either king, or individual, or people--who seizes, kills, or
detains the subjects, without declaring the war to the ruler, is not an
enemy, he is a brigand.
"Even in open war, a just ruler seizes property in an enemy's country,
all that which belongs to the public; but he respects the person
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