Nothing Else But Murder

Elmira, The Death Camp Of The North (My Great Uncle)

Elmira POW Prison, NY ==============================

Both Edwin Stanton and US Grant were responsible for the deaths of thousands of Northern prisoners held in the South, as well as Southern prisoners maltreated in the North. Had the Lincoln administration made peace with those Americans seeking self-government, those prisons would have been empty.

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
========
Nothing Else But Murder:

“The resources of the Confederacy in the last year of the war were totally inadequate to supply the 13,000 daily rations [at Salisbury prison]. On one occasion the post commissary secured some stores that were on the train en route to the Southern army. By a Federal order medicine had been pronounced “contraband” and the sufferings of the prisoner inmates in the hospitals increased accordingly.

For a long period Secretary Edwin M. Stanton refused to permit an exchange of prisoners between the North and the South, and this order was not modified until about the middle of February, 1865. Between October, 1864, and March, 1865, more than 500 prisoners made their escape.

One of them, Junius H. Brown, who wrote a book on the Salisbury [North Carolina] prison, said: “We particularly endeavored to learn who was responsible for the murder – for it was nothing else – of thousands of our brave soldiers; and we did learn. There was but one answer to all our questions, and that was, Edwin M. Stanton, secretary of war. Although he knew the exact condition of affairs in the rebel prison, he always insisted that we could not afford to exchange captives with the South; that it was not policy.”

(North Carolina, The Old North State and the New, Archibald Henderson, Vol. II, Lewis Publishing Company, 1941, page 277)
=======
Nothing Else But Murder