Confederate Attack on Ft. Stedman, March 25, 1865
The
official figures given by Secretary Stanton record nearly 26,500
Southern men who died in Northern prisons, and 22,576 Northern men died
in Southern prisons. The former died amid an abundance of food and
shelter; the latter died surrounded by wretched poverty and starvation
-- many expired due to Grant’s suspension of prisoner exchanges.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Privations, Suffering and Deliberate Cruelties
“Starvation,
literal starvation, was doing its deadly work. So depleted and poisoned
was the blood of many of Lee’s men from insufficient and unsound food
that a slight wound which would probably not have been reported at the
beginning of the war would often cause blood-poison, gangrene, and
death.
Yet
the spirits of these brave men seemed to rise as their condition grew
more desperate........
........it was a harrowing but not uncommon sight to see
those hungry men gather the wasted corn from under the feet of half-fed
horses, and wash and parch and eat it to satisfy in some measure their
craving for food.”
--General John B. Gordon, “Reminiscences of the Civil
War.”
“Winter
poured down its snows and its sleets upon Lee’s shelterless men in the
trenches. Some of them burrowed into the earth. Most of them shivered
over the feeble fires kept burning along the lines. Scanty and thin were
the garments of these heroes. Most of them were clad in mere rags.
Gaunt
famine oppressed them every hour. One quarter of a pound of rancid
bacon and a little meal was the daily portion assigned to each man by
the rules of the War Department. But even this allowance failed when the
railroads broke down and left the bacon and the flour and the mean
piled up beside the track in Georgia and the Carolinas. One-sixth of
the daily ration was the allotment for a considerable time, and very
often the supply of bacon failed entirely.
At
the close of the year, Grant had one hundred and ten thousand men. Lee
had sixty-six thousand on his rolls, but this included men on detached
duty, leaving him barely forty thousand soldiers to defend the trenches
that were then stretched out forty miles in length from the Chickahominy
to Hatcher’s Run.”
--Henry Alexander White, “Life of Robert E. Lee.”
“When
their own soldiers were suffering such hardships as these in the field,
the Confederate leaders made every effort to exchange men so that
helpless prisoners of war would not suffer in anything like equal
measure, offering even to send back prisoners without requiring an
equivalent. Hence, the charges brought against the Confederate
government of intentional ill-treatment of prisoners of war are not
supported by the facts.
[In
the South] the same quantity and quality of rations were given to
prisoners and guards; but that variety in food could not be had or
transported on the broken-down railway system of a non-manufacturing
country, which system could not or did not provide sufficient clothes
and food even for the Confederate soldiers in the field.
[The]
control of the prisons in the North was turned over by Secretary
Stanton and the vindictive and partisan men (who were later responsible
also for the crimes of Reconstruction) to the lowest element of an alien
population and to Negro guards of a criminal type, and such men as
President Lincoln, Seward, McClellan, and the best people in the North
were intentionally kept in ignorance of conditions in Northern prisons
while officially furnished with stories as to “the deliberate cruelties”
practiced in the South.”
(The Women of the South in War Times, Matthew Page Andrews, Norman, Remington Company, 1920, pp. 399-406)
